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by Exuma
3385 days ago
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I would guess because of costs. At one point I was going to do a video processing app and after doing some calculations the costs were insane, and the savings with actual hardware were tremendous. I imagine image processing is a lot less than video, but maybe the same deal. Then again... they did rack mac pros so who the heck knows what they're thinking. |
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The main reasons are twofold:
A) cost. I haven't done the math yet in 2017, but my recollection of the difference circa 2015-2016 between GPU instances on AWS and our solution is a COGS that's about 3x higher on AWS. GPU instance prices have come down a bit since then, but they're still very expensive and somewhat supply constrained as well.
B) Technical frameworks. We'll reach an inflection point this year or next where we've added or changed so much of the rendering pipeline that we've basically written it from scratch, but until then we're still reaping the benefit of building on top of CoreImage. It really benefitted us early on in getting a MVP faster, and it's continued to pay (slightly reduced) dividends over the course of the company's life. At some point the dividends will stop, and then we'll move on.
I understand the skepticism around Mac Pros. There are challenges there -- it isn't my most favorite solution of all time. It is a practical solution for us though. I have no room for computer religion or deciding to do things because they're cool or shiny or new. Anyone that's ever spoken to me for a few minutes in person about technology stuff can attest to that.
The Macs don't have IPMI, for example. That sucks but we do have power outlet control and a network installer as a way to back into "out of band management" for them. They're largely stateless, so it's a tolerable solution.
They do run a Unix-like OS (thank god), and they do represent a good price / point ratio for image rendering hardware. We could do a little bit better with Linux servers and GPUs -- but the upside is only around 10-20%, and there's still engineering work to do there. It's on our roadmap to explore this more fully and maybe start taking more concrete steps in that direction. For now, OSX still gives us more than it takes in terms of cost.