Charlie StrossAnd now for the world's silliest laptop: weighs 25kg, has up to six 24" screens, 192 CPU cores, 6Tb of RAM, and two GPU cards: the a-X2P mobile media workstation! https://www.mediaworkstations.net/systems/portable-amd-workstations/a-x2p/
Quixoticgeek@cstross I'm kinda scared to meet the human who's lap this could sit atop...
The Manchurian Idiot
Anne
ex or current IDF unwelcome@cstross I remember the Osborne CPM portable. It was referred to as luggable
@JohnLoader6 I owned a Victor Vicki back in the day. MS-DOS but not PC-compatible luggable, about the size and weight of a sewing machine. At the time I loved it but today my bones and sinews would not think of it fondly …
@cstross my latest pc is the size of a square small book and clips onto the bracket lugs on the back of the vdu
@stevewfolds@JohnLoader6 @cstross The 4 MHz Z80 powered 1984 KayPro was 13 kg. The marketing guys would lug it down the stairs and had a hand truck for the horizontal.
Imagine one in an overhead bin …
Imagine one in an overhead bin …
@stevewfolds @cstross everything is portable as you find when you leave the door I
Unlocked and the alarm off
Unlocked and the alarm off
Angus McIntyre@cstross Become the undisputed master of the coffee shop with this new powerhouse portable. Crush the rest of those MacBook Air-toting losers and assert your dominance.
Peter Herndon
Pete Keen@cstross eh, kinda makes sense? The core of a UHD live broadcast studio in a single pelican case seems like it'd be compelling for at least a few niches.
@cstross that plus a couple RED cameras and a Starlink transceiver could all fit in checked baggage and would mean you don't have to depend on rentals when you get wherever you're going.
FeralRobots@cstross
2 questions immediately spring to mind:
Is the "AI" placement/branding a retrofit to cash in on #AIHype?
Or is there an actual application for generative video "in the field" - & if so, WHO'S THE MARKET?!
[if I turn off my capitalist-apocalypes brain for a moment I think of it as an animation-studio-in-a-box, but that still leaves open the 'who?!']
Tiago Hackbarth@FeralRobots @cstross
Yes.
And yes.
The market are YouTubers and small media. The processing power of these things opens up some new possibiliea for v-tubers and other virtual media entities to live stream from real world locations.
Yes.
And yes.
The market are YouTubers and small media. The processing power of these things opens up some new possibiliea for v-tubers and other virtual media entities to live stream from real world locations.
Jan Wildeboer 😷
@cstross I can see that being quite useful when constructing a flight case for mobile live-streaming/dailies editing in film and broadcasting (which I guess is the target audience for this, picture source: https://www.videolink.ca/videolink-cases.html )
RobCorneliusI used to work for Quantel back when they existed. They were working on something like this about 8 or 9 years ago.
Well when I say "working on" I mean "someone with an impressive job title wandered into a lab and reappeared months later with the basics of something like this and it was then forgotten about". That's how they operated.
@robcornelius @jwildeboer I used to work for the engineer who designed the PLUTO card and the graphics engine in the Quantel Paintbox. Set up his own company. In 1990 they were selling an ISA-bus graphics card with four i860 cores and 16Mb of VRAM for a cool £16,000. (Call it £25,000 in today's money.) Matrox and Nvidia caught up with the performance in the consumer under-£500 sector about 8 years later ...
It cost more than its weight in silver.
I probably worked with people who worked with him then.
They were a truly terrible company to work for. I should have walked out on Day 1 when the manager who hired me said "We were so glad to see a white guy apply". No shit. An IT company of ~400 people in the UK and not one black or brown face.
In their day they had a licence to print money but blew it suing Adobe. Eventually they got taken over, then that company was bought out. Its all gone now. Good riddance.
Greg Wellman@jwildeboer @cstross Yes, the advertising copy mentions scientific data processing in the field, but media applications are no doubt the larger market. I wonder if it could be good for geotechnical engineering if one has a big sensor array or something like that. Anyway, a "luggable", not a laptop.
Thom Zane@cstross Generator not included.
Dwight Williams (💉 x9)+😷🇨🇦@cstross And I could think of people who will make productive use of this device. Easily.
Allen but one of the good ones@cstross hahaha, at the gaslift struts under the top monitor 😂
Cadbury Moose@cstross The 25kg is probably imposed by the H&S "maximum unaided single person lift" limit. Is the aircon provided in a separate case? (Also, UPS and backup generator.)
Janne Moren@cstross
Notice how they wisely tell you neither the price nor the power consumption. Either one will prevent the vast majority from even considering this ridiculous thing.
Not that it will prevent some of our users from asking for one...
@jannem Given its target market I'd be astonished if the price STARTS below £20,000; most likely a full-spec model would be closer to £100K.
@cstross
I work in HPC - I wouldn't be surprised. Of course, we pay nothing like that for the same hardware in bulk :)
I work in HPC - I wouldn't be surprised. Of course, we pay nothing like that for the same hardware in bulk :)
LisPi@lispi314 @cstross
1.8-3KW faceplate power draw depending on things such as how much memory and what GPU - 6TB memory would draw up to 1.8KW by itself.
That lower figure is already more than domestic power outlets can deliver where I live (15A/100V per circuit, but 12A per plug max).
Even if you have the power, you're now sitting in front of a 1.8KW space heater noisily blasting hot air into the room you're sitting in.
@lispi314 @cstross
Note that you probably have a higher power limit than me (it's notably low where I live).
And you can of course spec this lower than the max - a single smaller GPU and just a few hundred GB of RAM will use less power - but why consider this thing unless you want a high spec?
The threadripper variant on that page makes at least a bit more sense than this server CPU one.
@lispi314 @cstross
Honestly, this is why I don't really get the "portable" part of it. If you have to have something like this, don't get a "portable" one.
You're going to basically permanently keep it plugged into a single site. Most homes and offices won't be able to accommodate it - for noise and heat if nothing else - so instead get something you can rack mount out of sight in an adjacent closet or instrument rack.
Cheaper, better cooling, less noise for the humans.
@jannem @cstross This is more mobile in the sense of mobile command center than really portable, since you basically have to bring your own infrastructure with you.
That being said, I'd still want a (brief|pelican)case computer as they're very useful in a lot of ways (even just building one supporting proper #ECC memory unlike most laptops), just one more conservatively spec'd.
Hal CanaryBack around ~2012, my thesis advisor wanted a laptop with a discrete GPU for mobile CUDA (general-purpose computing on GPU) development. He bought a monster. I think it had an NVidia Quadro. The fans were very loud, so he couldn't use it in meetings because it would drown out our voices.
He bought a Macbook Air just to have something quiet to take notes on in meetings. When he added the Air to his bag with the giant laptop, the difference in weight was negligible.
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@cstross if you're an LD, lugging that plus a GrandMA node is probably less weight and bulk than shipping a GrandMA full-size lighting console in a flight case. possibly even costs less too. and you can run additional stuff like ELM / Madrix for LED walls on the same physical system.
@gsuberland @cstross
Dual Epyc 9654 CPUs would mean 192 cores - but clocked relatively slowly (boost clock is 3.55Ghz).
They're great CPUs for HPC or running lots of VMs in a data center. I'm not sure this is the configuration of choice for any kind of media, though; fewer but faster cores with more memory bandwidth per core should be a much better fit?
@jannem @cstross exactly the opposite. video stuff is inherently chunkable, hence why GPUs (thousands of "cores", clocked slow) are so good at it. I run dual Xeon 8276L on my workstation for 3D renders and video rendering work. for LD stuff, solving pattern and effect parameters to channel outputs is easily parallelisable, and the same goes for pixelmapper stuff.
@jannem @cstross the core count is massive overkill for something like MA OnPC or MagicQ, but realtime VJ and pixelmapping is very demanding. using this as an all-in-one station would let you do all that and live broadcast transcodes in a single compute node, which is extremely useful if you're a live production contractor.
@gsuberland @cstross
I was mostly thinking that video is inherently I/O intensive - few OPS per memory access - so you won't be able to keep the caches filled for all those cores. Your threads will end up stalling waiting for memory.
I was mostly thinking that video is inherently I/O intensive - few OPS per memory access - so you won't be able to keep the caches filled for all those cores. Your threads will end up stalling waiting for memory.
@jannem @cstross mostly irrelevant because you wouldn't need all those cores just for video processing, and even if you did it wouldn't need to fully saturate the IMC, but with 12 memory channels per chip populated with DDR5 4800, and assuming a (fairly high) all-core clock of 2.5GHz, *and* somehow literally zero of the dcache lines being hits, you'll still pull in 2 bytes per clock tick per core. so in practice it's not really a limitation.
@jannem @cstross ultimately the huge core count is overkill for any of the tasks individually, but if you're being paid big money to run a live show you don't want a single unexpected background task hitting a core or two to cause instability, especially if you're using it as a turnkey solution for a range of tasks (light show, laser show, pixelmapping, VJing, livestreaming) all at once.
SirDiesALotOk, it has some problems, but if one appeared on your doorstep, you'd probably have some fun with it.
@Benhm3 No! My flat is 64 steps up from the front door. I'd die before I got it up the stairs.
BreadintheBone@cstross Oooo, the modern day Osborne!
militant_dilettante@cstross what kind of power consumption does this THING have!? I would suggest investing in a proper generator (diesel, probably), but other commenters above had already said that.
Brad Ackerman@cstross That computer would be fantastic for going to an overtolerant coffee shop and PvPing in EVE or Bloomberg — at least until another customer succumbed to the temptation to launch a deauth attack.
@cstross Oh goodness, it's commercially available.
I want it.
Kit Bashir@cstross for when you need to stabilize a dimensional portal big enough for Air Force One?
@cstross I kinda want it
MacBalance@cstross looks like some sort of light box I’d expect to see in a photography shop or medical office.
@cstross "Portable", in the sense that a Ford Transit is portable.