when they get here, how much of a performance difference should i expect between the top model and the next best processor? i keep reading that clock speed won't matter as much as architecture in the next generation of models, but i don't know if that means we should expect a lot more bang-per-Hz
for a wee bit o' background, i'm thinking that i'd like the capability to work in uncompressed HD, which means i'll need at least one SAS drive, which will mean i'll need the raid card. the combined cost of these items means two things for me... not much additional RAM at the time of the purchase (probably only 6 or less), and opting for the second best processor option.
then again... i suppose that i could just stick a thousand bucks worth of high speed drive stuff on my credit card if the need ever actually arises to work in 4:4:4 uncompressed 10-bit HD at home. by then i'll either be making decent money or the drives will be cheaper.
... no matter what i'll be able to work in uncompressed SD and ProRes HD, but without fast drives uncompressed 10-bit is not a possibility, let alone 2k or 4k three or four years down the road (for which i'd need way more RAM anyway, not to mention that extra processor power i'm potentially turning down now)
I'm a bit late to this party, and I'm no expert in NLE but I can possibly help you understand where some of the bottlenecks will be...
SAS and SATA both refer to the transfer interface technology which currently supports up to 3Gb/s transfer speeds (6Gb/s is on the way).
The physical hard drive itself is usually the limiting factor and their max sustained data transfer rate (STR) is dependent on platter RPM, and cache size. A 15k RPM drive will max out around 135MB/s (1Gb/s) while a typical 7200 RPM desktop drive will max out around 70MB/s. As you can see, the bottleneck in your storage system is not the interface but the physical media.
The latest solid state disks are starting to advertise speeds well above physical disks now... even 15k RPM disks.
To get amazing read performance from your HD's you really need RAID0 or RAID 10 which provides parallelism... With RAID0, STR scales with the number of disks.
Cache makes an enormous difference as well (particularly on write operations). Cache can be implemented at three levels and the more you have of each the better... 1) On the drive itself... 2) on the RAID card... and 3) Using system memory (only used for read-ahead cache and managed by the OS - I'm not sure if OSX uses main memory for this purpose)
Based on a quick search, it seems like uncompressed HD is about 400MB/s...
This is going to require a monster system with as much HD throughput, RAM, and CPU as you can afford. Even then, I'm not sure you will be pleased with the performance when working on such material.
I think that these days, with CPU power being relatively abundant and cheap relative to solid state disk and high performance memory, you are better off getting the fastest storage system you can afford... 8 solid state disks in RAID 10 would be nirvana or two arrays of 4 disks each for different tasks might be even better depending on the application... but even a pair of SSD's in RAID0 would be better than spending money on more CPU. Then I would buy as much RAM as I could possibly justify... the less swapping to disk you need to do, obviously the better. At 400MB/s you need a Gig of RAM to store just a couple of seconds of video!
I'm curious what kinds of systems are used to edit uncompressed HD video!
