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Is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more compute from the cloud?

by hooloovoo_zoo 7y ago

oflannabhra 7y ago
Yes, many media workflows. No one rents cloud servers to edit 8k video.
- stevewodil 7y ago
  They may not rent in the cloud, but I guess I'm surprised they aren't using machines or servers running in a data center with a high performance display protocol to view the output
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    In 8K? How do you recommend transfering raw footage to the data center? When we need to transfer raw video footage between offices, we still ship drives by mail most of the time.
  - macawfish 7y ago
    A couple thoughts: (1) A lot of independent video people spend their time getting better at video stuff rather than learning the sysops stuff they'd need to set up or maintain something like that. (2) Latency!
  - effie 7y ago
    For comfortable work with gui applications, 60 fps and low response time (sub 16ms) are the minimum agreeable specs. For 4K uncompressed stream, that is 3.8GiB per second and the datacenter must not be behind too many routers. The bitrate would be substantially less with lossy compression (video streaming works), however text and gui elements look bad with that, so only lossless compression is reasonable. Still, I think very few places have a strong enough network connection to a datacenter to use remote server in this way. The idea isn't bad, especially with GPU prices skyrocketing last few years, but the network quality will have to go up order of magnitude to make it realistic.
aaronarduino 7y ago
In industries where latency matters, there absolutely is a market.
pjmlp 7y ago
You mean placing critical data in someone's else computer? No, many businesses are a bit more clever than that.
Kye 7y ago
How am I going to run 1000 Serum instances live in the cloud? Latency is killer.
macawfish 7y ago
My question would be: is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more by building the machine yourself? Yes, because a lot of media people are scared away from the thought of putting together their own machine (and a lot of them also depend on Mac OS)
- collsni 7y ago
  I'd just build it myself and still install Mac OS... Ha, if that was a factor.

Is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more compute from the cloud?

oflannabhra 7y ago

Yes, many media workflows. No one rents cloud servers to edit 8k video.

stevewodil 7y ago
They may not rent in the cloud, but I guess I'm surprised they aren't using machines or servers running in a data center with a high performance display protocol to view the output
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  In 8K? How do you recommend transfering raw footage to the data center? When we need to transfer raw video footage between offices, we still ship drives by mail most of the time.
- macawfish 7y ago
  A couple thoughts: (1) A lot of independent video people spend their time getting better at video stuff rather than learning the sysops stuff they'd need to set up or maintain something like that. (2) Latency!
- effie 7y ago
  For comfortable work with gui applications, 60 fps and low response time (sub 16ms) are the minimum agreeable specs. For 4K uncompressed stream, that is 3.8GiB per second and the datacenter must not be behind too many routers. The bitrate would be substantially less with lossy compression (video streaming works), however text and gui elements look bad with that, so only lossless compression is reasonable. Still, I think very few places have a strong enough network connection to a datacenter to use remote server in this way. The idea isn't bad, especially with GPU prices skyrocketing last few years, but the network quality will have to go up order of magnitude to make it realistic.

aaronarduino 7y ago

In industries where latency matters, there absolutely is a market.

pjmlp 7y ago

You mean placing critical data in someone's else computer? No, many businesses are a bit more clever than that.

Kye 7y ago

How am I going to run 1000 Serum instances live in the cloud? Latency is killer.

macawfish 7y ago

My question would be: is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more by building the machine yourself? Yes, because a lot of media people are scared away from the thought of putting together their own machine (and a lot of them also depend on Mac OS)

collsni 7y ago
I'd just build it myself and still install Mac OS... Ha, if that was a factor.