The peppy Air has come a long way from its birthday, when it crawled out of the Apple womb scrawny and anemic. Now it’s got serious processing muscle — but not enough to edit insanely high-res video, right? Wrong!
Now, to be fair, this particular MBA is cheating — sort of. The rig is using an external graphics card hooked up via Thunderbolt, imbuing the Air with superpowers that can’t yet be crammed into its thin chassis. It chews through uncompressed 4k video that would make a normal MBA crawl on its knees.
This is really, really cool. Now of course, tethering your superskinny laptop to a bulky external graphics drive negates the point of having said superskinny laptop to begin with. But for times when you’re going to be parked at a desk for some time — say, for a gaming or video editing marathon, who cares? Put it behind your display and forget about it. The ability to stick a Thunderbolt syringe into your Air whenever you want is like having a second computer entirely.
The setup above is running on Windows — presumably for compatibility reasons — but if you don’t mind using Boot Camp or waiting for more OS X drivers, Thunderbolt is handing us the potential to upgrade forever through a straw. [9to5Mac]
Peter Aikins
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 6:54 PMI found this at Magma’s site regarding a limitation on Mac OS X for external graphics cards:
External Graphics
There is an interoperability issue with MacOS using graphics (GPU) cards externally through Thunderbolt. Unfortunately, external graphics solutions for MacOS X do not work and we do not expect a resolution from Apple in the short term. We realize that external graphics support is a feature that many users want so we’ll let you know if this changes. For the time being our recommendation may be to run Windows using Boot Camp, but this is not yet confirmed as a working solution.
If external graphics is an important feature for you, please let us know by joining our interest list so we can keep you informed of developments.
source: http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp
MotorMouth
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:43 AMI imagine it would be much cheaper to just buy a Vaio Z Series and use that, as it already has all that Light Peak goodness built-in. At any rate, the application would be displaying the footage at about on-eighth res, so it wouldn’t be too hard unless it was also hooked up to a broadcast monitor or something.
Anu
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 1:36 PMCool video but…..
I fail to see what is so amazing about this setup. Offloading/GPU processing has been there for a long time now. I work in a hedge fund and using Nvidia CUDA to perform embarrassingly parallel computations in Matlab is an everyday technique. Nvidia even make blades called Tesla for this purpose which connect with PCI Express.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/preconfigured-clusters.html
CSIRO’s has also been using such setups for a while now.
http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Publications/Brochures–Fact-Sheets/GPU-cluster.aspx