Quad Proc Macs Out - New PowerBooks - Photo Software

[mr. sparkle]

New pro stuff out now at Apple. We've got screamin' G5's, New PowerBooks with brighter screens and a bit more horsepower. And one of the more interesting develpments, A pro photo tool called, Aperture.

Cool. The G5 won't get much better than this. I don't think even Intel has a quad proc chip, do they? I'm fairly certain AMD has one. FCP and AE renders are gonna scream! Like nearly 70% faster in AE than on the latest G5 dual 2.7. You've also got PCI Express slots to support the modern graphics cards, meaning Motion is gonna REALLY fly. And you can drive 2 30" displays to totally melt your brain. Holds up to 16GB of RAM. YES.

A bit underwhelmed about the new PowerBooks. Still single procs and not much new. I'll have to check out the new screens to make a judgement on that. Prices have come down a bit/batt life is up and that's cool.

Aperture looks cool though. You can definitely see the value in this product. A companion to Photoshop or are they going for Adobe's throat? Very slick interface. You can definitely see where FCP is going now.

[Charles]

Yeah, I've been saving up for a quad G5, but I wonder about that top-end $1650 nVidia card option. Is it really going to give enough bang for the buck? Because that's a hell of a lot of bucks. The card alone is almost as expensive as the low end configuration dualcore 2ghz G5 CPU.

I don't see Aperture as going after Adobe at all. It's positioned against products like Capture One Pro and Adobe Bridge. I'm sure that Adobe doesn't care if you use Aperture instead of Bridge. But I suspect Capture One is a bit irked.
I want to get Aperture, I noticed it supports my Canon Powershot S50, which is odd because Image Capture doesn't support it. Canon's software is absolute crap, it's a lousy Windows port with a hideous GUI and performance is terrible (doesn't even support 2 processors). Aperture would be a huge improvement.

[hellosalaryman]

And you can drive 2 30" displays to totally melt your brain.

actually i think i read that it was up to 4, FOUR, 30" displays. which is completely insane, also i read that u could get 1tb of storage. this puts my g5 to shame, i only have the dual 2.5 and one 30" screen.

[Charles]

And you can drive 2 30" displays to totally melt your brain.

actually i think i read that it was up to 4, FOUR, 30" displays. which is completely insane, also i read that u could get 1tb of storage. this puts my g5 to shame, i only have the dual 2.5 and one 30" screen.

Well, if you read closely, the expensive nVidia card can run 2 screens, and you can install 2 cards for a total of 4 screens.
The cool thing about the nVidia FX 4500 is that it has two screen buffers, you don't have to use them to run 2 LCDs, you can use it to run two buffers to one screen for stereographic displays using LCD shutter glasses. You should see a display like this, the effect is incredibly vivid.

[cstaylor]

Cool. The G5 won't get much better than this. I don't think even Intel has a quad proc chip, do they?

Yes, Intel has dual-core Xeon processors (although the chipsets aren't optimized yet... Opteron kicked their rears in a recent performance test posted on /.), which is what this is. Its still only dual CPU in terms of form factor, but each processor has a dual core, so you get four locations to run threads at the exact same time.