Adobe White Paper on Optimizing Hardware for CC

[richard_george_herrmann]

http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/creativesuite/production/cs6/pdfs/adobe-hardware-performance-whitepaper.pdf

 

Did not see it on photo.net, so I opened a thread to get comments from the community.

[richard_george_herrmann]

The white paper is full of the good stuff for those that really care about system performance with current Adobe Creative Cloud offerings.

 

Especially if you go with a custom build either from the recommended HP and Mac offerings mentioned in the paper, other big box makers, boutique third party assemblers, or the DIY route.

 

Apple OS and Windows PC requirements are covered in great detail.

 

Especially what actions benefit from the hardware assist via OpenCL versus just raw CPU like encoding conversions.

 

It is worth a read!

[richard_george_herrmann]

How much is an HP Z820 with 512GB RAM spread across 16 DIMM's with a max'ed out core Xenon CPU?

 

Remember the RAM is also the more expensive ECC type because its a WS grade MB paired with Xenon family processor. Plus 32GB per DIMM!

 

The water cooled triple GPU kit from Evga seems like a good match for the above box.

 

Or just go nuts with the WS grade GPU's like the Quadro family in a multi-GPU setup.

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Wow! All that horsepower and yet we have tiny little digital cameras that can rattle off a succession of processed Raw or jpeg files within seconds using tiny batteries, very little RAM and a CF card as a hard drive.</p>

<p>Just offering a perspective on why we have to optimize our systems with this much specificity, hassle and overkill horsepower. One would think it would've gotten a lot easier by now with all this advancement in technology.</p>

[david_r._edan]

<p>Right? I mean all we're talking about are some stupid 2D images. Not 3D worlds and not even 'ancient' 1080p video! It's 2015 and processing still pictures is still such a PITA. Maybe that's why they call them 'stills'. Because it <strong>still </strong>sucks.<br /> Ridiculous...</p>

[danmarchant]

<blockquote>

<p><em>Wow! All that horsepower and yet we have tiny little digital cameras that can rattle off a succession of processed Raw or jpeg files within seconds using tiny batteries, very little RAM and a CF card as a hard drive.</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p><em><br /></em>Wish my camera was as powerful as yours and could do content aware fill, multiple layers, process multiple images at the same time and all the many many other features that PP software has that your camera can't do.... <br>

Just offering a perspective on reality. </p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<blockquote>

<p>Wish my camera was as powerful as yours and could do content aware fill, multiple layers, process multiple images at the same time and all the many many other features that PP software has that your camera can't do.... <br /> Just offering a perspective on reality.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Yeah, but can anyone gauge accurately when and if enough is enough before plunking down more money to see whether it was worth it when the buyer still has to consider further hoops to jump through outlined in that Adobe "optimization" white paper.</p>

<p>We're left scratching our heads wondering whether we REALLY KNOW where the bottleneck lies in the processing pipeline. It just becomes too complex to sort out which is why I mentioned how much a digital camera's incamera processing can accomplish so much, so fast by comparison. And there are some cameras that allow editing of Raw captures incamera.</p>

[PaulCoen]

<p>There's a big difference between purpose-built processors and other hardware and general-purpose devices. You can improve performance for the specific, required tasks at the expense of other operations that you don't need if you know exactly what the device is going to be doing at all times. And it's the same with the software in the camera - the maker has customized firmware handling everything. It's not a comparably large operating system that has to be able to do a ton of different operations. And the camera maker doesn't have to worry about you doing editing while you're also taking pictures. Your computer is always doing more than one thing at a time, even when you're not really trying to.<br>

And in-camera editing doesn't generally include things like multiple levels of undo, layers, etc. as far as I know. Even the smaller display saves on the required horsepower. </p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<blockquote>

<p>You can improve performance for the specific, required tasks at the expense of other operations that you don't need if you know exactly what the device is going to be doing at all times.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Which is why I suggest or wish the camera manufacturers created their own digital imaging computer that was designed to function specifically the same as their incamera processing with a little more tools.</p>

<p>Seeing we have all these small, low powered electronic devices like smartphones and tablets that seem to grow on trees and do everything under the sun as long as you have an app for that like video, still photography, internet surfing, locating and unlocking a car etc. I don't see why that should be a great hurdle or whether there would be a lack of demand.</p>

<p>I mean how hard would it be to include a proprietary small computer as an editing workstation to go along with their proprietary high end DSLR camera rather than rely on third party software/hardware who can't seem to get on the same page when it comes to performance or doesn't require a white paper to function optimally?</p>

[richard_george_herrmann]

Sounds like a business opportunity for enterprising boutique custom builders to target the emerging small ITX format

 

MB: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8H77I/

 

GPU: http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/GTX970DCMOC4GD5/

 

Select LGA 1155 processor, DDR3 memory and some SSD drives

 

Install into mobile chassis with handle: http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-tu100/

 

Would this be small enough?

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>It's not the small size I was emphasizing.</p>

<p>It appears the way cameras operate as computers that can output quite a bit at decent speeds with very few resources compared to desktops that there must be some proprietary OS that runs these cameras to allow this to happen. </p>

<p>So if those small computers you linked to can run that proprietary OS meant specifically just for post processing images as fast as their camera then that would be a nice setup, but I bet it wouldn't require that much Ram and processing power. </p>

<p>Can they run on batteries? Cameras accomplish quite a lot with them, so a desktop shouldn't have a problem.</p>

<p> </p>

[richard_george_herrmann]

What you are asking for is a SOC custom made for image processing like Nikon's family of a System On a Chip for all in-camera operations.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeed

 

Its very low power but does little more than simple image processing including some simple sharpening, resizing, and file format conversions from .RAW to .JPG.

 

All in hardware, all really fast, and at hopefully low enough power so battery life is good enough.

 

Not sure who fabricates them, but it is not Nikon in house. They specify features and requirements, possibly do the design in house, or just pass it off to the fabricators to do it all.

 

SOC's need massive scale to earn back the R&D to bring to market. Do any camera companies see a market for a specialized machine?

 

Maybe an AC power adapter, external monitor hooked up to the camera itself, and the next generation of in camera SOC. Ask for support some off camera UI and Tools suited for your needs.

 

The new Raspberry Pi 2 could be used if one wanted to take the business risk and build a specialized image editing box.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-2-launches-35,28485.html

 

This looks do-able from off the shelf software wise. It lacks the image specific hardware assist you can get from mini-ITX + PCIex16 GPU.