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Afterburner card is a $2,000 add-on for the Mac Pro, and wheels are $400

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The Afterburner card, an optional add-on for the Mac Pro that helps improve the video-editing experience, is priced at $2,000 when ordered preinstalled in the new modular Mac workstation. And, then, there's the $400 wheels.

Found in the just-launched ordering process for the new Mac Pro, the section to add an Apple Afterburner card gives customers the option to add the card to their configuration. Selecting to include the Afterburner in the Mac Pro is a $2,000 add-on, making it an expensive addition with a relatively limited feature set.

An Apple Store page reveals it will be available to purchase separately, at the same $2,000 cost.

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The Afterburner card was revealed at the launch of the new Mac Pro as a way to make the workstation even better for video editing. Technically a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or a programmable Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), the card is made to run one task at a very high performance, in this case by effectively performing a transcoding process.

The Afterburner revealed on-stage at WWDC 2019's keynote The Afterburner revealed on-stage at WWDC 2019's keynote

Apple's Afterburner includes over a million logic cells, allowing it process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. It is designed to handle the encoding and decoding of ProRes and ProRes RAW codecs for Final Cut Pro X and QuickTime Player X, along with some third-party applications, and are typically used only in video production.

According to the ordering page, the Afterburner will be preinstalled in PCI Express slot 5 (x16) "to enable maximum performance."

The limited abilities of the card means it also has a fairly small audience involved in video production, making it a tough buy for industries that don't use video. However there is also the possibility Apple could offer to make changes to the card to allow it to be used for other specific tasks in the future, as it already has the opportunity to improve the card's performance for video tasks via firmware updates.

Mac Pro wheels

While $2000 appears to be a lot of money for an add-on card, at least it adds productivity to the computer. If you want Apple's promised frame with wheels to move the workstation from one desk to another, that retails for an additional $400.

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15 Comments

godofbiscuits 11 Years · 249 comments

A field-programmable gate array is literally that: field programmable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array?wprov=sfti1

Customers should be able to push custom firmware down to the hardware on the card to do different tasks of the same class of tasks, like processing Red RAW video instead of ProRes.  Or perhaps other new types of things.  Hopefully Apple will release tools and SDK sooner rather than later, tho probably not til WWDC in June. 

2 Likes · 0 Dislikes
godofbiscuits 11 Years · 249 comments

I meant to add that $2000 is not a lot of money for this class of hardware. Not at all.  Especially in light of how much time it will save video editors.  There are AUDIO (ONLY) cards that cost more than twice this. 

5 Likes · 0 Dislikes
gadgetfreak-apple 16 Years · 85 comments

can you order the wheels separately?  I've always wished Apple would release inline skates, so thinking I could make my own.

3 Likes · 0 Dislikes
cy_starkman 17 Years · 653 comments

A field-programmable gate array is literally that: field programmable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array?wprov=sfti1
Customers should be able to push custom firmware down to the hardware on the card to do different tasks of the same class of tasks, like processing Red RAW video instead of ProRes.  Or perhaps other new types of things.  Hopefully Apple will release tools and SDK sooner rather than later, tho probably not til WWDC in June. 

the article says FPGA and then ASIC, which is it? because yeah, like you say, if it is FPGA then why wouldn’t it be super useful for all manner of industries.

Design a reconfigure and it becomes an image analyser or something designed for massive database searches.

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
Mike Wuerthele 9 Years · 6907 comments

A field-programmable gate array is literally that: field programmable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array?wprov=sfti1
Customers should be able to push custom firmware down to the hardware on the card to do different tasks of the same class of tasks, like processing Red RAW video instead of ProRes.  Or perhaps other new types of things.  Hopefully Apple will release tools and SDK sooner rather than later, tho probably not til WWDC in June. 
the article says FPGA and then ASIC, which is it? because yeah, like you say, if it is FPGA then why wouldn’t it be super useful for all manner of industries.

Design a reconfigure and it becomes an image analyser or something designed for massive database searches.

You'll have to talk to Apple specifically about what this means. They're the ones calling it both.

1 Like · 0 Dislikes