- Hey it's me Destin, welcome back to SmarterEveryDay.
It's coming up on 1 a.m.
I have a problem in my life.
Keeps me up at night, keeps me away from my family,
which that's the one that really bothers me.
It's rendering, look at this.
This particular file that I've been working
on right now, nine and a half hours
worth of rendering on this thing.
And I've still got an hour to go.
What do you do man?
I love 4k 60 frames per second footage, I love it.
Prince Rupert, look at me.
The rule of Prince Rupert.
(meowing)
This is a Panasonic GH5, it shoots fantastic imagery,
but the problem is, the camera hardware
is outpacing the computer rendering hardware.
You put that stuff through that computer right there,
it's crunching, like the computer's pegged out, right?
And I'm still spending hours and hours of render time.
I need a better solution.
So I flew to Seattle, there's a guy
named Jon about to pick me up.
He owns a company called Puget Systems,
and they make specialty computers for certain applications.
We're gonna go meet with him.
How's it goin' - Hey how are you?
- Throw stuff in the back?
- Yes. - Awesome.
This is is Jon, he owns a company called Puget Systems,
and you're basically the answer
to everyone's computer problems, right?
- Well, not all the problems.
(laughing)
We don't really ask what hardware do you want.
We ask what are trying to do?
And then we can tell you, what hardware do you want?
- Oh my gosh.
And so you start from there and then
build the hardware based on what they say.
- Right, right.
- What?
Why is that so revolutionary?
- I don't know, it shouldn't be.
- It should be!
You're kinda tucked away here.
It's kind of a nice little area.
- Yeah, we like it.
- [Destin] So do you guys personally believe this?
Is that the deal?
- Personally believe what?
- [Destin] This thing that's on the wall behind you.
- Oh, well I mean we have tattoos of it, so --
- [Destin] You have tattoos of it?
(laughing)
Jon took me into the lab, which is where they test stuff.
His brother Matt and their co-worker William
spend the bulk of their time testing
different combinations of hardware in this room.
What I found hilarious is that when
I would ask a very specific yes or no question
about performance or hardware to buy,
it became very clear that every answer
I received was going to come with a caveat.
- Sometimes, depends if it's right.
- If it's set up right, in supported applications.
- Yeah, for that very specific task.
- Depends on exactly what you are doing,
and the balance between everything.
- [Destin] The caveat there answers because
they've actually collected the data.
They perform a suite of benchmark tests
which are a standardized task you can use
to see how fast or efficient a hardware configuration is.
Over and over they'll run a software test,
swap out a component and do it all over again.
Here you can see Matt's computer is automatically
running an Adobe Lightroom benchmark in the background,
thousands of files are being manipulated automatically.
They'll do this for hours, then they'll change out one
component, in this case a processor,
and they'll do it all over again.
The results of these tests are a graph like this.
In this very specific case, you can see,
testing Photoshop, the data shows
that this intel I9, whatever,
however you say this 8 core processor
is the best you can currently buy.
Which is strange, because it's nearly
a quarter of the price of the most
expensive processor they sell.
So the question is how can an eight core processor
run fast than a 12 core processor?
Because I always thought that more cores
meant it's gonna be faster.
First of all, what does a core mean, in a CPU.
- It's the computer unit that can
execute tasks within your operating system.
And so back before 2005, it was all single core.
And in order to make your computer faster,
you just make that chip faster.
But in around 2005, we were getting
to the point where Moore's Law
was starting to taper off,
and we had to find other ways to make computers faster.
And so now we're more under this new thing, Amdahl's Law.
That talks about, okay, if you have multiple
cores, multiple processors, that all
have to work together, it's measurement of
the efficiency of your software in being able to do that.
- [Destin] What John is saying here,
is that even if you have more cores in your processor,
it only makes your computer faster if the program
you're running is more parallelizable.
That's a word, I looked it up.
- One size fits all computing, those days are over.
It's tailored hardware for the application.
- In the interest of not making this feel
like a commercial for your company,
who else is doing this in the space?
'Cause I asked you if I could come talk about
all this stuff, and you agreed to build a computer for me.
So let's just be clear about that.
There's an exchange happening here.
But, who else is doing this?
Or is this just you.
- Well I mean, I can't say that there's nobody else
doing this, but the reason that we focus so hard on this,
is that we see, there's such a void.
You'll see a lot of places, that'll do gaming machines
and consumer machines, but this world of work stations
is like where server meets consumer,
and it's kinda this blend in the middle,
and we don't see a lot of people going after it,
and that's why we are.
I could take you out the warehouse and you could see
like how we actually put things together,
do quality control and image computers and what not.
- So this is the actual box, I spec-ed out with William,
being built right now.
- Yeah.
- Okay, and so this is the housing.
- Nice little dolly you got going on here.
Anyone can assemble a computer.
Just like Legos, the hardware is built
to click together so you can do it yourself.
But there's a huge difference in assembling a computer,
and integrating a well running system.
According to system's engineers,
all physical components in the world
interact with four different interfaces.
These four interfaces are spatial,
material, information, and energy.
A spatial interaction is how they physically
connect together, like Legos clicking together,
or like with screws or something.
A material interface would be some type
of mass that's being moved back and forth
between different sub-components, like moving hot air,
or fluid through a system.
They interact with information by well,
I mean this is obvious, it's a computer,
data, moving around, right?
One of the more interesting interfaces in
a computer system is energy.
You have electricity and heat transfer
you have to deal with.
I just realized that that's what you are.
You're computer systems engineers.
Obviously, you're name says systems,
but systems engineering is about
integrating all these different components
and seeing how they work together.
And if you change one thing, it effects everything else --
- Oh yeah, oh yeah.
- Are familiar with the fied of systems engeineering?
- Well, I mean I'm empathizing with
what you're saying right now.
Like some example of that,
almost all modern computer hardware
does thermal throttling.
So you're probably not gonna break something
if you don't cool it adequately.
But you're not gonna get the full performance out of it.
And so it isn't enough just for us to see
is this computer stable, because it might be stable
but not running at full speed.
So that's why it's so important
that we actually understand what
the computer's gonna be used for.
And that we benchmark it, and we know
that it's providing the performance as expected.
- [Destin] Oh, so that's why the benchmarks
last six hours, because you have to hit steady state.
- [Jon] We have to let it all heat up, and yeah.
- [Destin] Oh, so it's not just like processor
steady state, power draw, it's thermal steady state.
If you wanna check out how they test these interactions,
go see the behind the scenes video on the second channel.
What's going on here?
- This is our --
- [Destin] You have a laser engraver.
- Yeah, we have a couple.
This one we use for etching logos onto things.
- [Destin] What the heck dude?
Are you about to do mine?
- [Jon] Yep.
- [Destin] Really?
- Uh-huh.
- [Destin] So you planned all this.
- Yes, this was planned.
- [Destin] This was planned.
Look at you, being all fancy schmancy.
In summary, I have personally fallen
into the trap a time or two where I went to a website,
and bought the most expensive machine
I could afford at the time, thinking
that that would buy me time.
Do not do this.
In my case, I need to edit, and I wanna sleep.
(whimsical music)
Can you put this in the...
- Ooh.
- So does this mean you're gonna get
to eat dinner with us a lot more?
- Heh, yeah.
You have the honor, who's gonna do it?
- [Boy] What?
- [Destin] Who's gonna hit the button?
I can't even hear it, can you?
That's the license agreement.
You're supposed to read that entire thing.
- C'mon, I don't have time.
- We're getting everything ready for you Dad.
- I just like lookin' at the back, there's just
so many boards.
(laughing)
- Okay, we have now optimized a computer
for rendering capabilities, I'll tell
you the benchmark numbers here in a second.
So you heard my son talk about dinner earlier.
I'm not gonna lie, that kinda hurt.
So I'm very happy to say,
that after doing this little benchmark,
that 11 hour render is now down to two and a half hours.
Now I know that's an old computer,
this is a newer computer, but still.
That is a lot of my life back,
and I'm very happy about that.
Just get robes and wizard hats and be done with this.
Wizard hat, just put a wizard hat on top of your head,
wear robes in here, and like,
have a dragon statue or something.
Oh dude, golly that feels good.