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When 20% of your company's website traffic and nearly half of your new product sales are coming from users of Apple's OS X, you know you've got a product which greatly appeals to a sizable market niche.

How can I say this? Well, considering Apple owns 5% of the worldwide Operating System market, a website audience segment of OS X users consisting of a significantly greater percentage than 5%, plus nearly 50% of Cubix GPU-Xpander sales revenue to date from this same group would lead most people to believe that something about GPU-Xpander is striking a chord with Mac Pro and MacBook Pro users.

What would influence Apple OS X customers to purchase GPU-Xpander products? I have a few ideas on the subject based on conversations with customers:

1. Professional users + professional applications = demand for a professional approach to upgrading or adding to the customer's Apple products. Mac Pro and MacBook Pro users tend to be professionals requiring reliable, professionally-built hardware which is well-supported by a company with a rock-solid manufacturing history. Not many hardware tinkerers in this bunch - they just want to add a component and get back to work.

2. Limited I/O expansion capabilities within both Apple products. As GPGPU hardware and software technologies proliferate, Cubix Visual's GPU-Xpander products can help fulfill a vital role for PCI Express-based I/O expansion which helps keep the OS-X customer up to speed with other platforms.

3. Refractive Software's Octane Render, and other GPU-accelerated applications. Even though it's still in beta, the multi-GPU hardware acceleration features of Octane Render have attracted a sizable audience of laptop PC and MacBook Pro users who are fortunate enough to own mobile workstations featuring an ExpressCard 34/54 port. This single-lane PCIe 1.1 port provides ample bandwidth and improved Octane Render performance potential when connected to GPU-Xpander with ExpressCard, and 1-2 NVIDIA GeForce or Quadro FX for Mac products. It won't be quite the same I/O performance as having all 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 available for use, but it's a big step up in rendering performance and graphics response when compared to the number of CUDA cores you get in a mobile GPU chipset.

For all of the Mac Pro OS-X customers eagerly awaiting the inevitable release of an NVIDIA Fermi-based product or two, keep in mind you're going to need an external device with a big enough power supply, as well as good ventilation and cooling features, when adding 1 or more of these new NVIDIA GPU rockets to your already well-populated Apple/Intel-based product. Don't forget about everything else you've already got in your workstation: I/O capture devices, fiber HBA, RAID controller, etc.- they can't use more than 300w total power per Apple's very own technical specs.

Keep Cubix's GPU-Xpander solutions in mind as you research and budget for these new GPU Compute-based hardware and software products. You'll be thanking me after you install it and connect it with your Apple Mac Pro or MacBook Pro workstation!

Eric Fiegehen
Director, Visual & GPU Compute Solutions
Cubix Corporation
ericc@cubix.com
ph# +1(775)888-1000 

"Does GPU-Xpander work with..."

A lot of people have asked me, "Does vendor X's PCIe card work in the GPU-Xpander?". Simple enough question, but there are several factors which can affect product compatibility and performance.

My typical answer is, without getting technical, "If it works in your own PC, then it should work in the GPU-Xpander which is attached to your PC." If this answer doesn't suffice, or I get dead silence over the phone, I know that a detailed explanation is required.

What are you trying to do with vendor X's adapter? What applications are you running which interact with vendor X's I/O card? What drivers does vendor X provide for these applications, and for which operating systems? All of these are valid questions, and the answers provided help me to prequalify a GPU-Xpander product for use with vendor X's PCIe adapter.
What I'm trying to figure out, before we get too far into the conversation, is:

-Does vendor X's product conform to industry standards
-What application-specific drivers does vendor X provide with their products
-What is the approximate PCI Express bandwidth required for the applications this card will interact with

If the applications don't require a lot of PCIe bandwidth, and the product's drivers are compatible with the PC and OS they'll be loaded into, then the detailed answer to the caller's question will be "probably yes".

Not a good enough answer? Okay then, if you haven't tried vendor X's product in your own PC, how about shipping the product to me for testing, and then I can provide you with a better answer? Keep in mind that we still don't know what the caller's PC will do once the drivers are loaded and vendor X's card installed, whether in the GPU-Xpander or directly into their PC.

My point is that your PC or Mac is the best determination of what is compatible with GPU-Xpander. Cubix can test vendor X's graphics cards, I/O capture cards, fiber HBA, etc., until the cows come home - on a dozen different PC systems. However, you really won't know if your workstation or laptop computer works with vendor X's card until you try it on your own system.

Then load it into a GPU-Xpander product (check installation procedures first) , attach to an open PCIe slot with the included data cable and PCIe adapter, and then add some more adapters!

Eric Fiegehen, sales@cubix.com
 

Acceleware's CTO Ryan Schneider introducing our Oil and Gas solutions and it's impact on seismic imaging and reservoir simulations. 

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