Ye Macce Threade

[Hopstretch]

There doesn't seem to be one specifically for general chitchat that I could see? Doubtless will be heavily shoveled-upon if in error in this matter.

Anyway, nice update of the 13" Macbook -- now Pro -- today I thought. $100 price cut and FireWire makes a comeback, adds LED backlit display, support for 8GB of RAM, and the new uber-permabattery (OK, not unmixed blessing).

Also thought $30 for Snow Leopard upgrade was pretty fair. Leaner, faster and (allegedly) fixed fucking finder would be well worth that to me.

[Dusty Chalk]

Don't like the unchangeable battery, but other than that...yeah. Is this where they add the 9600M/9800M, or did they do that already? I was seriously considering the 17" MacBookPro option, but decided to hold out. Firewire is nice (Duet). Not sure about the price -- did it used to be US$2K or am I just imagining things?

[tyrion]

They made a big deal about the longer battery life and that it would last the average person something like 4 or 5 years. I think I would rather have the ability to change the battery and stick with the battery life I have on my 13" MB. I do like the return of FW (didn't realize that until your post). I also like the addition of the SD card slot. We are adding at least one and possibly two attorney's which means I need to buy at least one and possibly two new notebooks. I think the battery would be the only thing holding me back. It has a faster processor, 4 gb or ram and a 250 gb hard driver for $1500. I love my MB but could pass it down to an associate. I have a few months to think about it.

[Hopstretch]

The 13" only have the 9400M. But you can add 8GB RAM for $1,100 if you like.

- $1199. 13" MacBook Pro. 2.26GHz. 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400. 160GB HD. Firewire
- $1499. 13" MacBook Pro. 2.53GHz. 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400. 250GB HD. Firewire

The 15" and 17" models both got $300 price cuts.

[aardvark baguette]

I know I'm a mac noob, but its worth mentioning I have some issues with my Apogee Duet w/ my mac mini (latest version, several months old).

Sounds fine, but occasionally turns to ear piercing digital noise.

Resetting connections via the software doesnt do anything, the only way to fix it is to close itunes, open the midi settings (whatever its called) and click off of 44.1khz, to something else, and then back.

I'm thinking this is because I'm going from the firewire 400 to a firewire 800 adapter, but idk.

I can live with it, but I thought I'd mention it.

I have a drobo 2.0 connected via USB 2.0, which has all the music. I suppose I should move some music onto the internal HD and see if it changes, but the lost connection is sporadic.

[EdipisReks]

have you contacted apogee about it?

[penger]

I think the idea behind a fixed battery is that it would outlive the life cycle of the computer. At least from a computing standpoint, the life cycle of computers is usually 3-4 years. Granted, being able to switch batteries may be important for those who travel and need extended battery life.

Edit: The one thing I wish they did for the entire line is add the anti-glare option for the screen. I have a 15" and wish it was available as an option when I purchased mine. As it stands, the option is only available on the 17". (Correct me if I'm wrong here)

[aardvark baguette]

have you contacted apogee about it?

Nope.

[Hopstretch]

Then suffer.

Bit of a disappointment here finding my 2008 iMac won't be able to take advantage of GPU acceleration in Snow Leopard. Even for Apple, the list of supported cards is pretty fucking short and the disqualified systems of startlingly recent vintage!

Feature-specific requirements

OpenCL

NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.
ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

[GPH]

Anyone knows what exactly OpenCL does? I was sad to see that my 1 year old MacBook doesn't support it, though it's not completely surprising considering the cheapo integrated X3100 graphic card.

And yay for the 29$ Snow Leopard upgrade. I wasn't too fond of paying full price for a Leopard "upgrade" (though after reading today's keynote, I realized it's quite a big upgrade). I think Apple did a good move for the customers on that one.

[mirumu]

OpenCL relies pretty heavily on NVidia's CUDA and ATI's Stream processing. These have only really become usable in the last generation or two of GPUs. I've currently got nothing that will accelerate it myself. Quite interested in seeing what can be done with it though. If something like x264 can be made to make use for noticeable speed gains I'd be quite keen to upgrade my G5 tower.

[grawk]

OpenCL lets you offload processing to the graphics card

[feckn_eejit]

Kinda interesting how they "upgraded" the Unibody Macbooks to "Pro" status... also note new 15" Mac Pro sans fancy graphics. Did they drop the ExpressCard/34 slot from everything but the 17" now...?
Sweet to have FW800 in the 13" models.
Oh an the internal battery is TEH SICCNESS, and it's not particularly hard to do the replacement anyway...

On the fence about the 3G "S". 32gb would be nice but I just bought elnero's 5G 60gb with the intention of throwing a 240gb HD in it and going totally lossless... other than a doubling in capacity it seems like just a speed bump... hard to justify...

Wonder what the quietest OpenCL card I can throw in my hackintosh would be... my goal with this box was to be quieter and run cooler than a real Mac Pro (we have 30 at work and they COOK HDs and ram!!), without sacrificing much speed...

Oh and the '09 Mac Pros piss me off... have to go for two procs to have >8gb ram...

Either way can't wait for Snow Leopard and Adobe CS5 to put on our graphic designer's desks, gonna change their lives!!

[mirumu]

Anyone knows what exactly OpenCL does? I was sad to see that my 1 year old MacBook doesn't support it, though it's not completely surprising considering the cheapo integrated X3100 graphic card.

OpenCL is designed to provide an abstracted view of the hardware and a way of specifying tasks that maximizes parallelism and portability. The idea is that OpenCL can deal with the problem of hardware optimization and hand off the tasks to the units that will execute them the fastest or most efficiently be they CPUs, GPUs or whatever.

If we take Blu-ray decoding for example the picture is actually split into four quadrants each of which can be decoded independently in parallel. OpenCL may for example hand off say three of these decode tasks to your GPU and one to your CPU. If you have a weaker GPU and a faster CPU it may do the opposite. Essentially it makes better use of the hardware available and avoids compute resources sitting idle when there's work they could be doing.

[Hopstretch]

If we take Blu-ray decoding for example the picture is actually split into four quadrants each of which can be decoded independently in parallel. OpenCL may for example hand off say three of these decode tasks to your GPU and one to your CPU. If you have a weaker GPU and a faster CPU it may do the opposite. Essentially it makes better use of the hardware available and avoids compute resources sitting idle when there's work they could be doing.

Assuming OS X actually supported Blu-ray decoding.

[mirumu]

Assuming OS X actually supported Blu-ray decoding.

Oh that's right.
I wonder how long they plan to drag it out for? I don't know about anyone else but I'm barely buying DVDs any more.

[Dusty Chalk]

Are there any commercial products that actually utilize OpenCL yet? I thought it was just an API at this point.

And just a minor correction: OpenCL does not "depend" on Cuda, I believe they're more like competition (I.E. they do the same thing in different ways [or possibly the same way, in Nvidia's case, since Nvidia hopped on the OpenCL bandwagon, it's just a matter of exposing a different API]).

[mirumu]

Are there any commercial products that actually utilize OpenCL yet? I thought it was just an API at this point.

Yes, there's no implementations of OpenCL available yet to my understanding. I looked into getting a dev kit or something from Khronos Group a while back, but nothing was available.

And just a minor correction: OpenCL does not "depend" on Cuda, I believe they're more like competition (I.E. they do the same thing in different ways [or possibly the same way, in Nvidia's case, since Nvidia hopped on the OpenCL bandwagon, it's just a matter of exposing a different API]).

I know what you mean, but it's not quite that clear cut. CUDA refers to the GPGPU hardware in modern NVidia GPUs and it is exposed to developers via the "C for CUDA" API. OpenCL does indeed compete with the CUDA API, but it still sits on top of the CUDA hardware.

[Dusty Chalk]

Well, there is no such thing as "Cuda hardware" -- accessing the GPU's in a video card can be done for any video card. It's just...a lot harder without the API.

I think. Feel free to correct me.

[mirumu]

From NVidia's descriptions CUDA is neither software or hardware, but an "architecture" which is some fuzzy combination of the two. This is the closest I've seen to an official description of how OpenCL works with NVidia GPUs.

Manju Hegde, the General Manager of CUDA at NVIDIA, explained to AppleInsider that supporting OpenCL on a GPU requires certain hardware capabilities such as scatter write, as well as certain generality of control flow. Both have already been implemented in NVIDIA's CUDA architecture.

NVIDIA's CUDA ISA and hardware compute engine "were designed to support multiple entry points into the compute power of the GPU including standard computing languages (such as C, Fortran, etc) as well as API style interfaces like OpenCL," Hegde wrote in an email interview.

Rather than being competing technologies, Hegde noted that "OpenCL is a layer on top of the CUDA driver interface. As such, OpenCL is one avenue to GPU computing through CUDA, C for CUDA is another."

OpenCL vs CUDA?

When asked how NVIDIA's CUDA compares with OpenCL, and if NVIDIA is planning to support both in its future products, Hegde explained, "This is probably better put by saying how does C for CUDA compare with OpenCL – this is a language to language comparison."

Hegde added, "The answer is that the two share very similar constructs for defining data parallelism, which is generally the major task, so the code will be very similar and the porting efforts will be minor.

"As OpenCL is another method of accessing the GPU, we wholeheartedly support it. Its sits seamlessly on top of our CUDA architecture and as such, developers using NVIDA hardware have a choice of language and programming environment.

"With regards to product support, we plan to have OpenCL supported on the CUDA architecture which means that any NVIDIA GPU built upon the CUDA architecture will support OpenCL. This means every GPU (including GeForce, Tesla and Quadro lines) from the GeForce 8 series onwards will support OpenCL. This gives OpenCL developers an installed base of more than 100 million GPUs."