Reminds me of a tube amp.
Racking Mac Pros
11–20 of 331 posts
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#12Building on OSX seems like it must add a ton of complexity to your workflow, despite getting access to some of Apple's GPU-optimized image code. Then again, it's often cheaper to throw silicon at problems than people. If you have in-house expertise in Apple's graphics libraries, that might be cheaper than hiring someone who could write the whole thing to run under a lower-cost Linux solution. Alternatively, OS X migh…
>>it's often cheaper to throw silicon at problems than people
Except they needed to build and maintain that silicon.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#13Three possible reasons I can think of for doing this over using PCs or Linux servers:
1. Using the same operating system as the developers of the software, plus access to Apple's fantastic imaging libraries.
2. The Mac Pro, whilst expensive, is good value for money. The dual graphics cards inside it are not cheap at all. As servers with GPUs are fairly niche, this might actually be a cheaper solution.
3. The form factor. Even if you could create PCs that are cheaper with the same spec, they'll use more power, possibly require more cooling (Mac Pro has a great cooling architecture) and will take up a lot more space.
I'd be very interested in hearing how they manage updates and provisioning, however. I can't imagine that'd be much fun on OS X but perhaps there's a way of doing it with OS X Server.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#14Building on OSX seems like it must add a ton of complexity to your workflow, despite getting access to some of Apple's GPU-optimized image code. Then again, it's often cheaper to throw silicon at problems than people. If you have in-house expertise in Apple's graphics libraries, that might be cheaper than hiring someone who could write the whole thing to run under a lower-cost Linux solution. Alternatively, OS X migh…
In some cases, you have no choice.
One project I worked on was where we needed to use proprietary software that only worked on OSX that would take a video, perform waveform analysis on the audio, and the output would be a properly timed closed captioned master with the text having been provided separately.
This was of course a small project, and only had a few Mac Minis rack mounted for the task, but I can easily see situations similar where you're tied to the platform for one reason or another.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#15Some previous discussion here about using OS X, mounting Mac Minis, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138791
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#16Apparently you can fit a round peg in a square hole and achieve high efficiency density while you're at it.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#17It is hard not to think that a great deal of time an money would have been saved by removing those "Parts of our technology are built using OS X’s graphics frameworks, which offer high quality output and excellent performance."
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#18This is a joke right?
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#19Three possible reasons I can think of for doing this over using PCs or Linux servers: 1. Using the same operating system as the developers of the software, plus access to Apple's fantastic imaging libraries. 2. The Mac Pro, whilst expensive, is good value for money. The dual graphics cards inside it are not cheap at all. As servers with GPUs are fairly niche, this might actually be a cheaper solution. 3. The form fac…
The Mac Pro isn't a great value in the datacenter space. It's a single socket server that's limited to 64 GB of RAM. It's not unusual anymore to throw GPUs in rack mount systems; most of them already have the PCIe bandwidth necessary to support 4 big GPUs so it's often just a matter of getting the right riser cards.
Compare a Mac Pro to an HP DL360 that can hold 4 8-core Xeons (32 cores total) and over 200GB of RAM along with a few FirePro or Titan GPGPUs, and the HP will give you far greater density (though a rack mount system with 4 8-core Xeons and 4 GTX Titans would be a power and cooling nightmare!). That said, the Mac Pro isn't as far behind as I would have expected.
But OS X also kicks ass at multithreading, especially if you use Apple's graphics libraries. It's entirely possible they get much greater performance from OS X than a Linux or Windows based solution could provide.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#20Isnt this ridiculously expensive? Couldn't you achieve the same thing using cheaper PCs?
At this scale people do all sorts of ridiculously expensive things, like purchase six+ figure software licenses, or buy hardware from OEMs that charge an arm and a leg for "server" quality when it's no different from those charging 33% less.
So that's to say, that if there's an actual use for OS X at this scale, it's far less financially crazy than a lot of things that go on in data centers.