RED Gives up on Apple, Teams up with Adobe, NVIDIA and HP

While Apple is a powerhouse in eyes of consumers, the company decided to give a silent treatment to its core audience, designers and content creators. The company was legendary in Hollywood – but not anymore. After another NAB passed by without the announcement of new professional grade from hardware, as well as controlled leaks from Apple – that they aren’t going to release future tower cases, even the biggest fans are deciding the time has come to throw away that bitten apple into the recycle bin. Adobe and Blackmagic are just some of the names that replaced screenshots in their manuals from a OSX to a Windows 7 one, as well as shifted their recommended systems from one platform to another. RED Digital Cinema was one of companies that was vendor agnostic, but even the creators of 4K and 5K cameras cannot keep their users in the dark anymore.

HP Z820 RED Edition Workstation – more RED elements, please.

RED announced that the company teamed up with Adobe, Hewlett Packard and NVIDIA to release the “uber liquid cooled HP RED Z820 workstations.” That’s right, a Windows 7 based workstation. To add a worm to the bitten apple fans pride, the systems will be sold through “HP professional resellers such as ProMax and TEKSERVE.” These names may not mean a lot to the standard Windows user, but the announcement left remaining Apple fans in a state of shock, since these “HP professional resellers” were previously known as premium Apple solution vendors.

Thus, if the system is intended to replace a Mac Pro, what are you getting exactly? Since this is a Z800 series workstation, the tower case features two Intel Xeon E5-2687 (Sandy Bridge-E, 8 cores, 16 threads) operating at 3.21GHz (a 110MHz OC) and Turbo mode of up to 3.91GHz. These 16 monsters are paired with 32GB of DDR3-1600 memory (16GB per CPU) and of course, NVIDIA Quadro 5000. There’s also a RED Rocket card, which in my professional opinion should be pointless (ASSIMILATE proved that with real-time debayering on Quadro 6000 card on SCRATCH), as its nothing more than a glorified Philips Line Dancer card. The highlight of the system, something Apple defined for years, is a custom double REDMAG reader paired with a Blu-ray recorder. That’s right – you can actually record Blu-ray media from your DCC/VFX workstation.

The system comes with tweaked Windows 7 and Creative Suite 6, with the price starting at $10,000. You can follow the developments around this announcement on REDUser.net forums.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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