Apple M1 MacBook vs. PC Desktop Workstation for Adobe Creative Cloud
pugetsystems.com
pugetsystems.com
If by "likely not fully optimized yet" they mean "running under x86 emulation"
Personally if I was going to be procuring machines for adobe/nuke/other creative apps, I'd go with a second hand workstation from HP, and give it loads of ram and a new GPU.
it'd be the same price as a new macbook, with less single threaded performance, but much great GPU ram and number of threads.
When it comes to portability though, thats a different issue...
There are solutions, but they are not overly compelling from a cost perspective (yet)
For a g4dn.8xlarge (32 cpus, 128 gigs of ram) plus one GPU its $1000 a month (or $355 if you're only doing 12 hours a day 5 days a week, no over night renders source: https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator)
Thats still $4k a year.
seeing as you need a remove viewing solution too, so you need a machine to host the Keyboard Video and Mouse, its still not great.
Compared to a hp z640 with 48 threads(E5-2673 V3), 128 gigs of ram plus nvidia 3070 is about $2200 - $2900 (https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/hp-z840-tower-a-configure-...)
Where the cloud is useful is if you are hiring someone for a 3 month contract, or you need to render something fast, as 100 hours on one machine costs the same as 1 hour on a 100 machines.
Its interesting, there was a VFX company that was called Atomic Fiction, that worked on Looper, Sully and a few other big budget films. They were entirely cloud based.
in about 2014 it did look like everything was going to the cloud. Upgrading a render farm takes mega bucks($1-4 million for a large company) so converting that to a pay-and-go solution looked interesting financially.
A lot of high end "live" editing/colour correcting is done remotely, because the machines are too noisy to have in the same room. (obviously 10ms lag is trivial compared to 45 plus loss)
I think the thing that stopped the cloud rollout was how revisions are made. A scene in a film typically will be priced based on the number of people hours the company thinks it'll take +x%. However a film _producer_ will demand n number of revisions to change things. Those are normally not charged for.
So if you have your own compute, it only costs you staff and power. _but_ if you are pay and go, it also costs you CPU rental as well.
I think you are right, I suspect that at some point either Amazon, or more likely google are going to start giving away software with CPU time. (something like https://www.zyncrender.com/)
And yes... it looks far more like a native ad than an actual "test".
It's clear that M1 is a winner from independent authorities like Anandtech.
This article should not be upvoted.
It also doesn't mention if it's running the beta ARM version of Photoshop, so you have to assume it's running in the x86 version in emulation.
They didn't even bother to compare it to the only desktop in the M1 lineup. Or using software which is built for the M1.
If we hold two hands behind their back, we can beat them in a fair fight!