Which is faster? new 2.66Ghz 4(!!!) Core or old 2008 2.8ghz 8(!!!) Core

[leechlife]

What do people think so far?

are the old 2.8 ghz 8 cores faster then the current 2.66 ghz 4 cores.

I know a new single 4 core processer would outperform the old 3ghz 4 core, but would it outperform 2 of the old ones?
I know the mem throughpout is higher, but even if you look at the apple benmarks for app performance (not for mem throughput) the new 8 core (not the base 4 core) model is not that much faster than the older version.

So considering the price diff, (and here in australia the price due to currency exchange rate drop exploded), is the old 2.8 ghz not a much much better deal than a new 4 core model, which - I think - is 500$ more expensive and maybe even slower, due to the single processor config.

ps: I' m very happy i got 2.8 -8 core refurb with ilife 09 (so very recent refurb) for 3000$ AU, ... very happy

[DoFoT9]

what would you be using it for??

anything that requires faster speeds, e.g. encoding and the like- the new MP would be faster.(i believe)

anything that can utilise all 8-cores efficiently would be the older one (obviously because it has more cores).

[Gonk42]

I'm in the UK where we've had a similar price hike but I'm a student so refurbs actually cost more than student discounted new (like for like).

To respond to your question, it is very dependent on what software you'll be running (how multi-threaded, how much memory input/output how much it is disk limited etc). Also on how much software you'll be running at once. It might be worth waiting for someone independent like Barefeats to do some tests.

[DoFoT9]

also, check here (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=7209057&posted=1#post7209057) :)
well explained

[Weepul]

Basic individual apps would run faster on the Nehalem 2.66 GHz machine. With any app that can take advantage of all cores, the 2.8 GHz Mac Pro would still be faster, but not by too much, judging from benchmarks of a MR user's Core i7 2.66GHz Hackintosh (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=661173), which ought to be similar to the performance of the single CPU 2.66 GHz Mac Pro.