New macs - pci express - What will this mean?

[samsc]

Short term though the PCI express leaves me with redundant SATA and Blackmagic cards.
Toby

and redudant scsi.

pci-express is totally different from pci-x or pci.

not any kindof compatibility.
it would have been less confusing to have given it a new name.

we are told atto with have a pci-express ul5d in november.

the apple hardware technote is at

http://images.apple.com/powermac/pdf...erMacG5_TO.pdf

[samsc]

i believe we have information from blackmagic that versions of all their cards will be available with pci-express shortly.
And miglia is a possibility too. though not confirmed

[Spam Butterfly]

Atto will release a new PCIe SCSI card in early November - the UL5D. This is a dual channel card. Decklink have already released the Extreme as a PCIe card, with the others to follow.
Aurora and Miglia have got back to me but haven't given specific release dates on products.

Hugh

[Spam Butterfly]

Atto will also release the first PCIe Fibre Channel card.

The big thing, guys, is multiple graphics cards. The PCIe architecture will support multiple nVidia cards - two FX4500's or 7800's and four 6600's.

SDI is a double-edged sword. It would be cool to have the option of outputing to SDI/ HD SDI without having to go through a scan converter.

Richard and I will report our findings when we get our new Macs.

Hugh

[Jan Opseth]

If anyone is intrested:

http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#_141


Jan

[samsc]

performance in catalyst will depend on things people havent tested yet.

it will depend on whether quicktime can spread the codec image decoding effectively across multiple cpus, and whether they have got disc access to be multi-threaded.

up to now disc access across the entire system has been single threaded - which means only one discs is ever accessed at a time.
so having 2 or more discs doesnt make things any quicker - it still seemed to have to wait for the slowest one...

Catalyst can take advantage of multi-cpus, it is multi-threaded.
but everything important depends on what apple has done.

[jgoldenberg]

Richard,

So we are waiting till the next xserves come out, hopefully they will have an AGP slot. If they dont, then we cant use them for catalysts? What if blackmagic makes an sdi card that fits in there? Do you still need the video card to do work for the software? We can always convert from sdi to rgbhv, right?

G5 towers are so big, and when you have 6 or 10 on a showsite, its a lot of cases to manage.

Also, do you know any good utilities to keep content on a bunch of machines syncronized? I plan on having a gigibit switch on hand to make transfers easy. I dont want it to update all the time, just when I run the "utility". I would use automator, but its only supported in the newer os x.

Jason