OK, this is a brief post that I will flesh out later but… Apple should not make a new Mac Pro. Instead they should give me the ability to gang together 4 or 8 Mac Minis, using Thundertube technologh along side Grand Central Dispatch. Take a close look at this quote from “The Book of Knowledge”.
“Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a technology developed by Apple Inc. to optimize application support for systems with multi-core processors and other symmetric multiprocessing systems.”
See that, “And other symmetric multiprocessing systems”… that, to me, sounds like it doesn’t have to be all in ONE box. So what if I could take a really hard render and distribute it across 8 Mac Minis. Remember, those little guys are quad core now. So you could have 32 cores on the same AE render, managed at the system level.
Maybe its some sort of hardware thing for an additional $1000 that has 8 Thundertube Ports that I can plug in all my Mac Minis that I would buy as I can afford them. Just a thought… and I wanted to post this first.
UPDATE 1: Brian Mulligan makes a really good point. Most of what we do is more dependent on GPU than CPU… but then again, maybe there is a way to put a few GPU cards in a box on this Thundertube Squid idea I want Apple to build.
UPDATE 2: Check out this product by Sonnet
UPDATE 3: Why not put it all in one box? Because scalability would be awesome, for $800 or $1000 I could add 4 more cores to my project, and imagine what it would be like if you could upgrade slowly? Or, how about this, I travel a lot, I could take just as much power with me as I felt I need.
UPDATE 4: As of 3PM today, (June 5) 9to5 Mac has announced that they believe Apple WILL announce new Mac Pros next week at WWDC. So, I guess they are going to wimp out and NOT put my BRILLIANT plan into effect this weekend, I’m sure they could hack something together to make my Mac Mini ThunderTube Enabled Render Farm a reality by Monday morning… I guess they feel like taking the weekend off.