8-Core Mac Pro (Clovertown)

[plinden]

The folks over at Anandtech have dropped engineering samples of the quad core cloverton into a Mac Pro - http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

and it worked ... all eight cores were recognised.

The rest of the article was interesting too.

[iGary]

Originally Posted by plinden

The folks over at Anandtech have dropped engineering samples of the quad core cloverton into a Mac Pro - http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

and it worked ... all eight cores were recognised.

The rest of the article was interesting too.

This willl probably be the update I purchase next year - if it makes it into the Mac Pro - thanks for the link.

[spicyapple]

I was going to buy the quad-core Mac Pro 3.0 GHz when it hit the mid-price point, but I think I'll wait out for the dual quad-core (8 core) Mac Pro, instead. Hopefully by then, FB-DIMM will be cheap enough to buy 8 GB worth of RAM without breaking the bank.

[relimw]

Very cool. Now to find apps (os10.5 direct blind support?) that can make use of all those cores.

[thworple]

Its good to know that you will be able to drop in the new processors into an exisiting Mac Pro.

Expensive.... but good to know.

[FleurDuMal]

A bit pointless given that no software utilises the extra cores yet. But nice to know, I guess.

I'm still getting used to having two cores in my laptop!

[stapler]

This development isn't surprising, but reassuring nontheless that Apple didn't cripple the expandability of these machines.

[spicyapple]

I could do with multiple cores. I render HDV in the background, render projects in After Effects, compress videos in Compressor for DVDs, burn Toast images, download with BitTorrent, while surfing the web and watching 1080i H.264 material. Those extra cores would come in real handy.

[relimw]

Originally Posted by spicyapple

I could do with multiple cores. I render HDV in the background, render projects in After Effects, compress videos in Compressor for DVDs, burn Toast images, download with BitTorrent, while surfing the web and watching 1080i H.264 material. Those extra cores would come in real handy.

It would be nice if 10.5 would allow a more 'blind' method to utilize these cores, versus having programmers specificly program for multi-core. Now that would be extremely helpful and allow a more simultanous workflow.

[generik]

Seems like someone in Anantech has managed to do just that with the upcoming Clovertown chips.

It is like the iMac/Mac Mini -> Merom all over again!

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif

AnandTech took a Mac Pro, which comes with two Dual-Core Xeon (Woodcrest) processors and replaced them with samples of two Quad-Core Xeon (Clovertown) processors.

We grabbed a pair of 2.4GHz Clovertown samples and tossed them in the system, and to our pleasure, they worked just fine. Our samples used a 1066MHz FSB, although we're expecting the final chip to use a 1333MHz FSB, but the most important part of the test is that all 8 cores were detected and functional.

The Mac Pro appeared to run fine with the Quad-Core processors, effectively givem them a 8-Core machine. While they are unable to give performance numbers due to non-disclosure agreements, the machine was reportedly stable. It also gives hope for current Mac Pro owners that they will be able to later upgrade the processors on their machine in the future. Clovertown Quad-core processors are expected to be available in late 2006.

[Patch^]

cool!! They should hopefully increase speed

I like the fact that you can upgrade the processors now, but Xeons are pretty expensive.

[Alexsaru]

I was interested to see that they were unable to max out CPU utilization on all 8 cores in the system. I hope it's due to the software these days not being ready to fully utilize more than one or two cores and not due to OSX's ability to scale to larger core counts. Since that's obviously where we're heading. Does anyone know about the potential for scalability of OSX to large numbers of CPU's/cores? I know some *nix varieties and BSD varieties do this really well, but one wonders if they were thinking this far in the future when they developed OSX. It'll be interesting to see...

[MIDI_EVIL]

Is there a possibility to assign single cores, or even pairs of cores to certain jobs?

For example, have two cores rendering, two cores encoding, two cores processing regular actions, and two cores making breakfast?

Does my PowerBook G4 have 8 Cores? What is an 8-Core?

Rich.

[milo]

Originally Posted by FleurDuMal

A bit pointless given that no software utilises the extra cores yet.

Not true, according to the article. They said it wasn't easy, but they were able to max out all 8 cores. You can see the Activity Monitor graph all filled up.

Originally Posted by relimw

It would be nice if 10.5 would allow a more 'blind' method to utilize these cores, versus having programmers specificly program for multi-core. Now that would be extremely helpful and allow a more simultanous workflow.

That's how it is now, at least with multiple apps. I bet it's possible to program for an unspecified number of multiple cores, and there may be apps doing it already.

Originally Posted by Alexsaru

I was interested to see that they were unable to max out CPU utilization on all 8 cores in the system. I hope it's due to the software these days not being ready to fully utilize more than one or two cores and not due to OSX's ability to scale to larger core counts. Since that's obviously where we're heading. Does anyone know about the potential for scalability of OSX to large numbers of CPU's/cores? I know some *nix varieties and BSD varieties do this really well, but one wonders if they were thinking this far in the future when they developed OSX. It'll be interesting to see...

Read the article again, they WERE able to max them out, just not easily. Based on that, OSX seems to be able to scale already. Developers just need to start writing apps that are more MP friendly.

[prady16]

thats a killer system!
Kinda like supercomputers for small businesses!

[dornoforpyros]

DAMN

so 2-3 years from now are people going to be asking "do I need a quad core or an 8 core macbook? oh yeah I'll mostly be surfing the web and maybe editing a photo once and a while"

[savar]

Originally Posted by FleurDuMal

A bit pointless given that no software utilises the extra cores yet. But nice to know, I guess.

I'm still getting used to having two cores in my laptop!

Man, I don't know why people keep saying this. On OS X, *all software utilizes the extra cores*. The only way it wouldn't is if you have less than 8 processes running, which I guarantee you that you don't. (System alone requires 20-30 processes to run.)

Granted, 8 cores won't make Mail open up faster, but there are still plenty of ways to use those cores, and that's only going to increase as apps are re-written to be more heavily multi-threaded.

[iGary]

Originally Posted by dornoforpyros

DAMN

so 2-3 years from now are people going to be asking "do I need a quad core or an 8 core macbook? oh yeah I'll mostly be surfing the web and maybe editing a photo once and a while"

*waits for software to catch up*

[savar]

Originally Posted by Alexsaru

I was interested to see that they were unable to max out CPU utilization on all 8 cores in the system. I hope it's due to the software these days not being ready to fully utilize more than one or two cores and not due to OSX's ability to scale to larger core counts. Since that's obviously where we're heading. Does anyone know about the potential for scalability of OSX to large numbers of CPU's/cores? I know some *nix varieties and BSD varieties do this really well, but one wonders if they were thinking this far in the future when they developed OSX. It'll be interesting to see...

Older versions of OS X had severe limitations due to kernel re-entrancy...or lack thereof. There were only two locks for the entire kernel (also known as "funnels")...but Apple has revised the kernel for 10.5 and will be implementing much more granular locks, which should alleviate the re-entrancy problem.

[whooleytoo]

Originally Posted by savar

Man, I don't know why people keep saying this. On OS X, *all software utilizes the extra cores*. The only way it wouldn't is if you have less than 8 processes running, which I guarantee you that you don't. (System alone requires 20-30 processes to run.)

Actually, it's even less than 8 - as a process can have several threads each of which can be moved to idle processors. Safari alone on my Mac currently has 23 threads at the moment, my system overall 277.

[Platform]

WOW...I have one core....now 8 cores...

[Brandon Sharitt]

While Clovertown and Kenstfield ar interesting as probably going to be the first consumer quad core CPUs, they are currently much like Intels initial stabs at Dual Core, which were largely two Pentium chips jammed together. What will be interesting to see is the second generation Intel quad cores and (probably) first generation AMD quad core CPUs, which should be to Kenstfield and Clovertown as the Core Duo family is to the dual core Pentium 4s, though maybe not quite the same performance jump.

[hob]

That's a joke! Incredible. Shame they couldn't say much about the performance though...

For the performance of Clovertown you'll have to wait a bit longer as we're not allowed to disclose it just yet

[whooleytoo]

What I couldn't understand - I couldn't see it explained in the article - why is the dual core Mac Pro (i.e. with current Mac Pro with 2 cores disabled) faster in so many tests than the 4 core Mac Pro.