New "Mac Studio" from Apple

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

but screws up on Thunderbolt 4 having a single lane issue.

What do you mean by that, Darryl? I've not been following any single lane issues.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

What do you mean by that, Darryl? I've not been following any single lane issues.

Lots of useful explanations in the article, but the "issue" in the article that seems to claim that Thunderbolt 4 storage degrades down to single PCIe lane is kinda overbown.. that's might happen if you run it the other side of a hub, depends on the hub internal PCIe topology. Nobody is going to put their high performance NVMe SSD downstream of a hub... especially on a Mac Studio where there are so many Thunderbolt 4 ports, just connect your Thunderbolt storage up to a port and are done. It does not matter that the Mac is Thunderbolt 4 and any NVMe storage Thunderbolt 3 (today) and maybe we'll see Thunderbolt 4 in future. (and you largely avoid trying to chain NVMe SSD Thunderbolt storage.. It's so fast if you have enough ports then put one box per Thunderbolt bus).

The article maybe could have also pointed out some USB storage devices are NVMe based (the Samsung T7 is an rare example example, think of NVMe as just the storage command language that talk to the device, very well optimized for SSDs... actually originally developed by Intel for what became Optane persistent memory... not exactly a success... but thanks for the NVMe Intel).

[Eric Lambert]

Ah, yes, that's not likely to be an issue for those who put some basic thought into their configuration. Though, hub retailers do often advertise their products in a way that could make people think that *anything* can be attached to the hub without performance degradation.

This is just one of the countless ways that can bog down a studio, and lead to a difficult-to-solve post on this forum. Is "PT System Designer" a thing? Are there people getting paid to create, refine and troubleshoot ProTools rigs? People who spot things like USB drives too far downstream, or buggy keyboard extension cables, or (pick from 1,000 other things)?

[Michael Carnes]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

Ah, yes, that's not likely to be an issue for those who put some basic thought into their configuration. Though, hub retailers do often advertise their products in a way that could make people think that *anything* can be attached to the hub without performance degradation.

This is just one of the countless ways that can bog down a studio, and lead to a difficult-to-solve post on this forum. Is "PT System Designer" a thing? Are there people getting paid to create, refine and troubleshoot ProTools rigs? People who spot things like USB drives too far downstream, or buggy keyboard extension cables, or (pick from 1,000 other things)?

Good points, Eric. I suspect we'll converge on some general wisdom on system configuration over time. Right now, it's the bleeding edge and the more analytical among us will step in the potholes until we get it right.

Quick change of topic. My acquisition of the M1Max laptop turns out to be fortuitous. I managed to bust my foot, so I'm stuck in my chair for a while with the M1 in my lap. I did a session yesterday of about two hours on battery alone. A lot of RX and some Pro Tools. Used only about 20% of the battery and the computer was barely warm (completely comfortable in my lap). Didn't hear the fans. My old i9 would have been drained in half an hour, hot to the touch, and whooshing like a turbojet. Given that the main part of this laptop is exactly the same as the Studio Max, this promises much lower power bills, reduced heat, and the opportunity to have the computer right there in the control room.

[Carl Lie]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Ugh I just saw that. It's mostly a good article but screws up on Thunderbolt 4 having a single lane issue. That just won't affect folks in practice here, at best it should be a minor footnote. You think they would provide a link to contact/email the author.

Thanks. I found the article helpful but I got a bit confused about T4.

C

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Michael Carnes

Good points, Eric. I suspect we'll converge on some general wisdom on system configuration over time. Right now, it's the bleeding edge and the more analytical among us will step in the potholes until we get it right.

Quick change of topic. My acquisition of the M1Max laptop turns out to be fortuitous. I managed to bust my foot, so I'm stuck in my chair for a while with the M1 in my lap. I did a session yesterday of about two hours on battery alone. A lot of RX and some Pro Tools. Used only about 20% of the battery and the computer was barely warm (completely comfortable in my lap). Didn't hear the fans. My old i9 would have been drained in half an hour, hot to the touch, and whooshing like a turbojet. Given that the main part of this laptop is exactly the same as the Studio Max, this promises much lower power bills, reduced heat, and the opportunity to have the computer right there in the control room.

Glad to hear about the laptop. Sorry to hear about the foot!

[glasswing]

4 May 22 Mac Studio Ultra (MSU) report - yesterday was the first day of hard labor for the MSU. 148 tracks using Elastic Audio/tempo change. What was stunning was the difference between MSU and my old 5.1's. MSU rendered changes and analyzed all the tracks quicker than I could see it. Where there were progress bars and greyed out tracks for a few minutes (go make coffee for big sessions!) in the past it was all done instantly. Strange!

I didn't look at the Activity Monitor but, again, there was barely any sign of life on the wretched Pro Tools System Usage monitor.

There was only one virtual instrument track - Ivory via Vienna Ensemble Pro. When first instantiated I saw a flash of yellow bars in the System Usage monitor which vanished quickly.

MSU never got warm. Not a peep out of any of the fans that I could hear. Sonnet Echo Dual NVMes were a bit warmer than air temperature.

I'm still on 2021.12. So far so very good!

[Michael Carnes]

I just learned that simply having an application ported to M1 Native is not a guarantee of improved performance. It depends on how the application is ported. I just took a shot at a video transcode using Handbrake (I'm sure many of you know it). It dragged on, taking forever for a simple SD video. The fans started to spin up and were quite audible.

I launched Activity Monitor to see what was going on. The activity was entirely in the CPU cores. None of the 32 GPUs was touched, despite the fact that there's specific graphics encode/decode logic built into the GPUs. This port was clearly a quick-and-dirty port with no use of the Apple Metal framework (or even openGL, which is still there).

Although this is a graphics application, there are some pretty nice graphics in a lot of DAWs and plugins. Are they using the Metal framework? I think this underscores the fact that simply porting isn't enough (in the case of Handbrake it was even worse). M1 provides a lot of resources and a good port must take advantage of everything there.

Moving fully to this new world is going to take a while.

[mattrixx]

Mmm, I have used Handbrake on my MS Ultra to transcode a few videos for use in ProToolUlti. Absolutely ripped though the processes like I've never seen before. No fans etc etc.
I am certainly not on a tech level like yourself Michael, just merely reporting my observations.

[Michael Carnes]

Originally Posted by mattrixx

Mmm, I have used Handbrake on my MS Ultra to transcode a few videos for use in ProToolUlti. Absolutely ripped though the processes like I've never seen before. No fans etc etc.
I am certainly not on a tech level like yourself Michael, just merely reporting my observations.

Very interesting. Must have been the specific format.