Wow that is an expensive card. What do you do on your workstation with it? Always curious.
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Nvidia Quadro 4000 appears on Apple Online Store (USA) [EDIT 3 Nov 12: Pulled again!]
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Wow that is an expensive card. What do you do on your workstation with it? Always curious.
i want one in a bad way, but i'm nervous to try any new hardware with Maya 2011....and Autodesk takes so long to approve hardware & software. when you receive the Quadro 4000 I'd really like to know how it plays with Maya, and how it compares to the 5870 in relation to Maya, please
It is infuriating to see another poster insulted in this way when the problem is your own lack of knowledge, or perhaps narrowness of it. From the point of view of scientific computation, the Fermi class is outstanding. Even the GTX 480, which has been crippled for double precision computation, runs my DP code **MORE THAN TWICE AS FAST** as the GTX 285. The TESLA and Quadro have, for a given no of cores at the same clock speed, FOUR TIMES the DPcapability of the GTX400 series. 2050 TESLA is 2-3 times faster than 480 for example allowing for clock etc. I will report on the 4000 DP numbers when I get one, but the raw data suggests a massive hike in DP perf over the 285 for the use of only one 6 pin power source. So the DP/Watt will be even better.
I would like to see the source of that.
Even if nVidia is loosing money in it's high volume low performance chips ATi certainly aint.
Whatever the recent financial statements of the GPU creators say high volume low performance chips ARE where is the money is.
Simple as that.
It is where the revenue is, it is not where the profit comes from.
This is for Nvidia:
AMD's last four quarters (most recent first) for their graphics business were (revenue/profit): $390m/$1m; $440m/$33m; $409m/$47m; $421m/$50m.
The money is in GPU computing, hence Nvidia's huge push towards it. Intel will damage the market more with Sandy Bridge.
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This is very good news.
Hopefully Apple will offer the complete range of Quadros
like all other computer companies do. The Fermi based Quadros
offer a huge increase in speed for Adobe's Mercury graphics engine.
Hopefully Apple will offer the complete range of Quadros
like all other computer companies do. The Fermi based Quadros
offer a huge increase in speed for Adobe's Mercury graphics engine.
Yeah.... Bubba mentioned the Mercury engine, which is a video editing engine... Nothing to do with servers...
Keep learning.
Quadros aren't used in Xserves, they're used in Mac Pros.
Sorry if I didn't made myself clear.
The simple move of discontinuing the xserver showed that apple doesn't care about the pro market. If they did, they wouldn't have stopped supplying workstation grade graphics cards when they launched the 2009 (the 2008 rev had the quadro fx5600) as CTO and even now we have been waiting 2 months already for the hd5870.
Surely putting more 2x6 pins connectors or better, 8 pins connectors wouldn't hurt, but I just can't see it happening, even less, tesla cards drivers for osX. Should I mention how well the quadro cards perform in osX compared to windows?
Errrrr....
Look. I think cutting the XServe was one of Apple's dumbest decisions ever. I think there are a lot of markets this is going to hurt Apple in. I've worked with XServe and it is great hardware for Mac based institutions.
That said, I really don't see this as having anything to do with the Pro market.
Ok, ok, xserver killed, now what will be of final cut server, qmaster, xgrid, xsan? So now are the people that use xserver or were holding on for refresh replace them with mac pros? I don't think so and this move clearly showed their ready to axe or dumb down the pro apps.
On topic, selling a workstation without a workstation grade graphics card as CTO is just plain madness, even if now Nvidia is supplying them on their own, drivers are awful (just read arstechnica review on the fx 4800) and the quadro fx4000 that at moment only shows as unavailable at the US apple store is way more expensive than the pc counterpart, which retails at $779 and no word yet on the hd5870.
I was going to link you the Ars article that showed them being a pointless waste of money on OS X since AMD and Nvidia won't get their #$&^ together, but you claim to have already read it. Minis make great XGrid controllers, and Apple always seemed to be billing it more for clustering spare lab machines than anything else. Not many places have the need or funds for an XServe cluster. FC Server? Looks like it would run great on a Mini. Qmaster? What about that made an Xserve necessary? Compressor jobs can be done in one night on a single Mac Pro for the most part, you don't need a compression farm these days. For anything other than Compressor jobs, there are better, cross-platform render managers that will make your Mac Pros and Linux render mules play great together with all kinds of apps. Besides, who the hell is using managed clusters in Qmaster anyway? It's just a queue manager for Compressor at this point. (Did you know it was Shake's netrender tool originally?)
Your statement seems completely illogical to me. The simple move of discontinuing the xserve showed that apple doesn't care about XSERVE.
In fact, I would think some percentage of the xserve market will move to the pro market, increasing the pro market's size.
Illogical how?
Can the mac pro provide you with LOM, rack mount ability, redundant psu's and the ability to get them without sending the whole machine back to apple?
One word: No.
Relying on the mac pro server and mac mini server is simply a big NO if you're dealing with mission critical and large volumes of data.
Quadros are not for XServes... keep trying.
What I really want to see are those temperatures and power consumption levels. Fermi based cards are the worst thing to happen to the tech world. Over volted, inefficient and overhyped pieces of *****. True nVidia has those gains with the card, but after having cooked the card for over a year and half and still be late, they had to give people something to make them believe. Saying a GPU isn't a GPU because it doesn't consume 300W and has idles of 70*C is absurd; which is what nVidia is promoting. House fires.
Learn to read,
who told the quadros were for xservers?
The fermi architecture is the best you get for GPGPU, period.
Now, go troll elsewhere.
This may come as a shock to you... you might want to sit down before you read this...
There was a time, when Apple sold Macs only to professionals, really. Consumers didn't even buy the things.
Apple sold a bunch of professional apps, like Final Cut, a hung on only because professionals were keeping them alive.
Now, here is the truly shocking part... They did this all without a 1U server. I know, crazy right? People used these things called towers. And no one complained. People even built clusters to run things like XGrid with these towers!
The XServe was introduced for enterprise customers who wanted a 1U server. THAT'S why I'm pissed, I know lot's of Mac based enterprises who use XServes as their backbone.
I don't know of any pros using XServes. Not one. I know there are some clusters out there, but they aren't running anything that doesn't also run on Windows or Linux.
Apple discontinuing the XServe has absolutely nothing to do with pro users. To suggest otherwise is just nonsense.
Is it a giant middle finger to enterprise? Most definitely.
Edit: Look! Somehow the Mac cluster market has survived being tower only!
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...uilding-supercomputer-out-of-324-mac-pros.ars
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Yeah I know about virginia tech, they pulled the same stunt back in 2003 with the G5. Still a pain in case of a psu failure.
It's more than a middle finger at the enterprise, broadcasters and production studios also use xserver, now, and the huge middle finger came from announcing it just out of thin air and not even providing a roadmap for osX server. Will there even be an osX 10.7 server?
We don't have to go back to the "dark times" back again, do we? Surely those were crazy years, me with a sgi octane 2 (...) nostalgia...
Hopefully the next rev of the mac pro could be rack friendly, like some APC ups's that can be used both on the floor or on the rack or allow osX to be installed on nom apple hardware. Or, unify both server and desktop versions on 10.7. With no specified roadmap it's impossible to know.
I've been trying to decide if this will indeed be worth it, judging by my uses (3d visualization/CAD), and osx performance (historically) of quadro cards, I'm now leaning toward just saving money by getting the 5870 (now that I can actually order one, 'bout time 
).
For those interested cgarchitect did a good review of consumer vs pro cards not to long ago, it doesn't have the 4000 in it but does have the 5870 the gtx480, gtx285, quadro 4800 and 3800 (the 4000 replaces the 3800 while using fermi) in the review so we can get an idea of windows performance. Based on what they say the only thing I lose is the ability to use iray (which you have to buy anyway) and some performance here and there (although the 5870 does excel at some pro tasks, it generally matches the firepro cards) and 1gb of vram. BUT I save over 700$ that is a lot of ram these days..... and enough to buy a pc quadro 4000 card... (maybe flashable?)
). For those interested cgarchitect did a good review of consumer vs pro cards not to long ago, it doesn't have the 4000 in it but does have the 5870 the gtx480, gtx285, quadro 4800 and 3800 (the 4000 replaces the 3800 while using fermi) in the review so we can get an idea of windows performance. Based on what they say the only thing I lose is the ability to use iray (which you have to buy anyway) and some performance here and there (although the 5870 does excel at some pro tasks, it generally matches the firepro cards) and 1gb of vram. BUT I save over 700$ that is a lot of ram these days..... and enough to buy a pc quadro 4000 card... (maybe flashable?)