Another way to do chassis's....thunderbolt!

[bashville]

http://www.sonnettech.com/news/nab2011/index.html

Halfway down the page. The "EchoExpress" system.

Discuss.

[CME]

Very cool. Now if they made a model that holds more than one card. Guess it would work well for an HD Native set up.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bashville]

Or if you were running a desktop Mac with single pci-e card from Magma going into a PCI-X chassis. Now just plug the same unit into a MacPro with the Sonnet box.

[nightjar]

Here's what I await:

A Thunderbolt Magma chassis with 3 PCI slots for my older PTHD3 rig...

A new i7 iMac with Thunderbolt

This combo (if it comes to be) will let me get a lot more life out of my old cards that now reside in a G5.

Please come true.

[CME]

Originally Posted by nightjar

Here's what I await:

A Thunderbolt Magma chassis with 3 PCI slots for my older PTHD3 rig...

A new i7 iMac with Thunderbolt

This combo (if it comes to be) will let me get a lot more life out of my old cards that now reside in a G5.

Please come true.

I'd love to see a Mac mini with an i7 and thunderbolt just for a killer mini system. not necessarily for pthd but it would be nice to have that option.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Paul Turpin]

The Sonnet Tech page suggests that you could daisy-chain multiple units.
Not sure how HD3 would like that - but it may possibly work. Just put each process card in its own box and chain as many or few as you need. Obviously this would suck if the sonnet box costs an arm and a leg. It would also be kind of clumsy - yet flexible.

[Craig F]

Originally Posted by Paul Turpin

The Sonnet Tech page suggests that you could daisy-chain multiple units.
Not sure how HD3 would like that - but it may possibly work. Just put each process card in its own box and chain as many or few as you need. Obviously this would suck if the sonnet box costs an arm and a leg. It would also be kind of clumsy - yet flexible.

your forgetting the TDM Flex Cable

[Drew Mazurek]

And of course Avid has to support it.

[tigas]

I'm hoping that Magma adopts TBolt. All they have to do is replace the "interface" card that sits on top of the card backplane inside the enclosure. Since this interface currently converts from PCIe to Magma's "link" and back, I'm also betting that TBolt, where the specific Intel chips do all the translation, will be a lot cheaper for Magma to build. I'm also betting that it will be more reliable.

[bashville]

I don't think you're going to get away with not having your card set in the same box. That's why I think it would be the Magma PCI-e host card inside a one slot Sonnet.

The tech guy at Magma basically said as long as your computer recognizes the cards, and they pass Digitest, you should be good to go. EXCEPT that even with the protocol agreement on earlier MacBook Pros, there was a throughput bottleneck using the expansion card slot.

Maybe there won't be a bottleneck with the Thunderbolt connection. Now if you can run a reasonable amount of VI's on the MacBook, you could have a pretty nice non-desktop solution. But the Thunderbolt throughput and the VI performance are the big questions.

Knock wood, I've been running a 4-slot Pericom-chip PCI-X chassis with a host card in my 4-core Intel for quite a while now with no chassis problems, even though it's unsupported. Maybe I could take the same host card and move it into the Sonnet.