Re: Pretty amazing Thunderbolt demo.

[Walter Soyka] "You wouldn't have needed serious computing hardware to do this a year ago. The RAID and the Red Rocket are doing most of the work here. You could have used any cheap Core i7 desktop with a couple PCIe slots. As a bonus, you could have also added a proper NVIDIA card for CUDA acceleration in Premiere Pro. Reading files from disk and passing data to an expansion card has not been exclusively a part of the sizzle core value proposition for several years now.

Really, if you replaced all the references in this demo to the MacBook Air with references to a Costco minitower and all references to Thunderbolt to PCIe, what would change?

Even with a MacBook Air, you still need a cart or desk to hold the RAID and the Sonnet chassis, and you still need power, so it's not like this is a completely portable solution.

Whether you've got a minitower or an Air with external doodads, a minivan is not required -- although since a DIT would probably have this in a nice wheeled case, it might be a good idea."

I guess when I say serious, I mean larger, not necessarily CPU cycles. What would change is that I could get a mobile 4k playback rig in a carry-on. This is huge, I wouldn't consider myself a DIT, but I can hold my own. A realtime capture (read, proxy) creator with red raw playback with minimal gear is of huge interest.

With laptops, you could have had something like the mobile rocket and some sort of SAS storage all hamstrung over 1x Express/34. This nullifies capture/broadcast playback. This is a big deal to me, and makes things, first of all more capable when traveling, and second, more convenient. This setup you see here doesn't require CUDA. I know, it's not a big deal Walter and the Sizzle Core's, but it is to me. I'm not locked to a CUDA GPU. I can use any thunderbolt laptop, Mac or eventually PC, and not have to worry too much about the specs. Bring along the trusty Kartmaster, and I'm pretty golden.

Now, back to fantasy land, I wish there we're a generic Red Rocket card. A video accelerator that was format agnostic, and not a traditional GPU, but perhaps using GPU technology. AJA's "Riker" preview seemed kinda like it, but not. It was PCIe 2 at nab 2011.

[Walter Soyka] "I just think that some balance to the Thunderbolt hype is important. Let's acknowledge what Thunderbolt is good for, but let's not set expectations for it too high. It moves PCIe devices that have existed and worked for years out of the computer case. No more, no less."

And all that comes with that. Not CPU, but capability, which I will trade for less CPU.

My first personal system I bought was a Ti PowerBook. I edited dvcprohd over FireWire. I was happy and the rig offered me many opportunities that wasn't possible before. Eventually, the G5 came to compliment it.

In a way, this rig represents the same capability to me.

Jeremy