8-Core Mac Pro Benchmarks

[MacRumors]

Barefeats has published performance benchmarks for Apple's latest 8-Core Mac Pro.

The initial report compares the 8-Core to the Quad-Core Mac Pro in Cinebench, GeekBench, Photoshop CS3, Aperture 1.5 and Quicktime 7.1.5 Exports.

A second report compares gaming frame rates between the two machines. They tested Doom 3, Quake 4, Halo, UT2004, World of Warcraft and Prey.

The 8-Core Mac Pro came out up to 40-55% faster on some tasks, such as Cinebench 9.5, GeekBench, and Quicktime Export speeds, but provided little advantage in the limited Photoshop CS3 and Aperture testing. The 8-Core also proved to be no faster across the board in the Gaming tests.

Barefeats speculates that the 8-Core Mac Pro maybe bottlenecked by the memory bus and also considers the possibility that Mac OS X Tiger may not be well optimized for the 8-Core Mac Pros.

[awesomebase]

How about performance per $? That would be more useful since the 8-core Macs are way more expensive than the 4-cores...

[iSee]

Originally Posted by awesomebase

How about performance per $? That would be more useful since the 8-core Macs are way more expensive than the 4-cores...

Actually, the price per core of an 8-core Mac Pro as compared to a 4-core is pretty decent. The 8-core Mac Pro 3.0GHz costs only $699 more than the 4-core 3.0GHz version. That's only about $175 per additional 3GHz core!

Originally Posted by scottlinux

Folding @ Home? Calculate Pi to a ka-zillion digits? LAME compression? Blender rendering? Come on, I want some real benchmarks...

Ha, that's the problem with an 8-core system--not a lot of general use software will really take advantage of it. Still, don't most of us run more software at the same time than we used to?

[johnee]

Obviously they unveiled the 8 core for NAB, they wanted to highlight "all 8 cores running at 100%" which gave them a 3x speed up.

[dantehicks42]

It seems like this is another rushed release from Apple. It had been a while since the Mac Pro saw an update, the 8 core was sort of out and they released it to be ahead of the competition.

Something tells me we'll see a lot of these types of releases by Apple in the near future. The main focus right now is on the electronic gadgets side of things. Unfortunetly, this is where there's a lot of money to be made. Mass consumers electronics. Apple TV, iPhone. The delays for Leopard is one example. They need to create some sense of expectation. Keep the favorable rumors going.

We'll see product updates in minor ways and the excuse software wise will be the pending release of Leopard. The coming months will be critical for Apple and with the looks of things they are focusing where there's money to be made and that's not computers.

[SMM]

Originally Posted by dantehicks42

It seems like this is another rushed release from Apple. It had been a while since the Mac Pro saw an update, the 8 core was sort of out and they released it to be ahead of the competition.

Something tells me we'll see a lot of these types of releases by Apple in the near future. The main focus right now is on the electronic gadgets side of things. Unfortunetly, this is where there's a lot of money to be made. Mass consumers electronics. Apple TV, iPhone. The delays for Leopard is one example. They need to create some sense of expectation. Keep the favorable rumors going.

We'll see product updates in minor ways and the excuse software wise will be the pending release of Leopard. The coming months will be critical for Apple and with the looks of things they are focusing where there's money to be made and that's not computers.

And where do you come by this profound wisdom, and ability to see the future? If Apple does not release it, people like you will be screaming rape for them not being responsive to the 'latest and greatest'. When they do release it, they get hammered because it does not live up to someone's unfounded fantasy of what it should be.

The Clovertowns were widely discussed on this site, long before they were ready for production. It was generally agreed the current architecture would not be sufficient to take advantage of the doubling of the processors. Or, more precisely, the advantages would be negligible. So, no one should be surprised when that is what happens.

As for where Apple is focusing their effort, unless you sit in their strategic planning sessions, your credibility is no better than your attitude.

[ChrisA]

Originally Posted by SMM

As for where Apple is focusing their effort, unless you sit in their strategic planning sessions, your credibility is no better than your attitude.

We don't need to sit in their strategic planning sessions. We already know

1. They removed "computers" from their corporate name
2. The key note speech at Mac World did not even talk about Macs
3. They took key people off the Leopard project so they could work on a phone

Taken together we can see what's going on.

[SMM]

Originally Posted by ChrisA

We don't need to sit in their strategic planning sessions. We already know

1. They removed "computers" from their corporate name
2. The key note speech at Mac World did not even talk about Macs
3. They took key people off the Leopard project so they could work on a phone

Taken together we can see what's going on.

You are drawing conclusions from insufficient data. You are also weighting it questionably. You are also taking a small snapshot of time and attempting to use that as forecast point of reference. There is nothing even remotely conclusive in this.

Removing 'computer' from their name means nothing. It is marketing. Think about it. They now have iPhone, iPod and iTV. Those are not normally associated with computers. Just because they are diversifying their products, does not mean they are dropping other ones. Why go through the cost and headaches of moving to the Intel processor, if they were going to move out of computers?

I expect Apple will be doing a major overhaul of their Mini's and iMacs soon. There is another thread going where Apple is getting hammered for just doing an incremental upgrade to the Mac Pro's. If they were to do a minor upgrade to the other machines, they would get hammered for that. To do something exceptional, they have to wait for some advances from other vendors. The bottomline is, far too many people are acting like spoiled kids. No matter what they do, someone whines.

Now, there are professional whiners, of the MS disinformation/propaganda ilk. This board is just crawling with them. Those can be discounted. They have the collective IQ of an ameba and no sense of honor. However, many people here set themselves up for disappointment. They create fantasies of what they want, then cry when the reality falls short.

[EagerDragon]

Sounds like all new computers will need 2 inch thick Lead enclosures to gain sufficient bus and memory speed.

[brooker]

Originally Posted by Macrumors

The 8-Core Mac Pro came out up to 40-55% faster on some tasks, such as Cinebench 9.5, GeekBench, and Quicktime Export speeds, but provided little advantage in the limited Photoshop CS3 and Aperture testing. The 8-Core also proved to be no faster across the board in the Gaming tests.

the links seem to be down, but...

1st off, aren't most games GPU dependent? Would those games run just as fast if the machine was doing some video transcoding in the background?

Where are the benchmarks for parallel workflow? Could the Ocho provide the same Aperture performance while also matching Quicktime export numbers? or would core-affinity issues prevent this?

more real-world tests needed. Doesn't anyone else with benchmarking apps have an 8xMP yet?

[PinkyMacGodess]

I visited someone at Arecibo last year and noted that they had a mac server there and asked what they were using it for. I was surprised to see it in a rack of Sun and custom machines...

They were trying to get the server to cruch numbers but were having problems with the speed through the server. He said that they were surprised at how slow the crunching was when compared to unix based boxes with slower processors... They were working with 'someone at Apple' to find out what the issues were but firmly believed that it was in the software, not the hardware...

It makes me wonder now if Apple will pay a price for delaying Leopard in favor of the 'toy' iphone... I for one was ready to buy a new MBP with Leopard on it but now will wait... It makes no sense to buy a MBP and turn around and have to buy Leopard in a few months...

[mklos]

Originally Posted by PinkyMacGodess

It makes me wonder now if Apple will pay a price for delaying Leopard in favor of the 'toy' iphone... I for one was ready to buy a new MBP with Leopard on it but now will wait... It makes no sense to buy a MBP and turn around and have to buy Leopard in a few months...

And you absolutely need Leopard because? Why does everyone think they absolutely need the latest and greatest all the time? You don't even know whats going to be included in Leopard, yet you still want it. I myself would rather buy my own retail copy. Then its my copy and its not attached to the computer it came with, but I guess thats just a smart mans thinking! :sighs:

What would really hurt Apple's creditibility is if they delayed the iPhone which is going to 100x more hype than Leopard will.

[milo]

Originally Posted by mklos

And you absolutely need Leopard because???? Why does everyone think they absolutely need the latest and greatest all the time????

I need leopard for the 64 bit support.

I run logic with huge orchestral sample libraries. Current OSX/Logic only allows about 3 gigs of samples loaded up, with 64 bit support the limit is moved much higher. The AU plugin has been ported to 64 bit support, so at this point the weak link is OSX and Logic.

So yes, I am currently being held back by the limitations of 10.4, and the workaround is to run multiple computers (or get a Vista machine).

Does that answer your question?

[gugy]

Originally Posted by mklos

Ok, since when was I talking to you? Was your name in the quoted text above?

hahahaha,
That's funny!

[Hattig]

The poor scaling probably stems from a combination of factors.

1) Intel's x86 line scales poorly past 4 cores in a system compared to AMD's Opteron processors because Intel still rely on the ancient FSB architecture that is quite restricting(*). 4 cores on a 1333MHz bus gives each core 333MHz of bus bandwidth, aside from cache coherency traffic. That sucks for a 3GHz core - the original P4 had 400MHz and that was limiting past 2GHz even with no coherency traffic.

Intel's CPUs are a better design (currently) than AMD's simply because they're quite a lot newer, so are a good choice for 1 and 2 core machines, and 4 core machines are still good. I don't need to mention that AMD will bring the situation back on par with their next core due out soon, and that Intel will remove the FSB in some future products.

2) FB-DIMMs are also an issue. Yet Another Intel Memory Messup.

3) Mac OS X might also have issues scaling nicely to 8 cores. It's not so hot with massive threading either (as per AnandTech's tests) but it shouldn't be an issue at this level.

4) Of course the application support for 8 cores is the major issue, but can't fix the above issues once done.

Apple are only a factor in one of the above list, given that they're using Intel for the processors exclusively. There's probably not a lot they can do here though.


(*) you can use specialist chipsets instead of Intel's standard chipsets to improve the situation a lot however. Of course these would increase the cost vastly, and probably not be suited for a workstation.

[guzhogi]

Originally Posted by Hattig

The poor scaling probably stems from a combination of factors.

1) Intel's x86 line scales poorly past 4 cores in a system compared to AMD's Opteron processors because Intel still rely on the ancient FSB architecture that is quite restricting(*). 4 cores on a 1333MHz bus gives each core 333MHz of bus bandwidth, aside from cache coherency traffic. That sucks for a 3GHz core - the original P4 had 400MHz and that was limiting past 2GHz even with no coherency traffic.

Intel's CPUs are a better design (currently) than AMD's simply because they're quite a lot newer, so are a good choice for 1 and 2 core machines, and 4 core machines are still good. I don't need to mention that AMD will bring the situation back on par with their next core due out soon, and that Intel will remove the FSB in some future products.

(*) you can use specialist chipsets instead of Intel's standard chipsets to improve the situation a lot however. Of course these would increase the cost vastly, and probably not be suited for a workstation.

What does AMD use instead of a FSB? I don't follow AMD that much.

Originally Posted by kalisphoenix

The problem that I see (even though I agree with you completely) is that technology (and business) are developing at so fast a pace that the man-hours spent creating a completely new OS would only create a vaporware spiral.

A tortoise and a hare are having a race. The tortoise gets a 100-yard headstart, and then the hare takes off. However, in the time that the hare takes to cross those 100 yards, the turtle has gone another 25 yards. Then the hare has 25 yards more to run before he can catch up with the turtle -- and when he gets to the 125-yard mark, the turtle has gone another 6 yards or so... and so on.

It'd be like that, except the hare would get the head start and the turtle couldn't even dream of catching up

We got a lot of the fundamentals of software done while technology was advancing fairly slowly. At this point, it's just basically impossible.

I know. Just curious to see how much a bottleneck the OS and other software is, you know?

Something else I'd like to see is how fast OS 7 would be if they made it run on a Mac Pro. I kinda miss the days of OS 7. The games & simplicity of the OS itself. I know, not many features, but I liked how the only thing you needed to boot up the computer was the Finder and System suitcase in the same folder at the root of your hard drive. W/ Mac OS X, you need 1000s of files all over the place. Oh well.

[Hattig]

Originally Posted by AidenShaw

Two FSB at 1333 MHz, and two dual-channel 1333MHz memory busses.

That's for 8 cores, 2 CPUs with 4 cores each, each CPU having its own bus for its 4 cores, which are on two dies. My point is entirely accurate.

[jpsalvesen]

The 8-core is not as fast as expected/hoped because of three things combined:

1. Tiger is suboptimal when it comes to parallel execution.
2. The memory bus is a slowing factor.
3. The software isn't parallelized enough to benefit from 8 cores.

Agreed?

[Amdahl]

Originally Posted by jpsalvesen

The 8-core is not as fast as expected/hoped because of three things combined:

1. Tiger is suboptimal when it comes to parallel execution.
2. The memory bus is a slowing factor.
3. The software isn't parallelized enough to benefit from 8 cores.

Agreed?

#3 is only true in some cases, like games. Even when the software is parallelized for 8-core, it is still running slow because of #1 & #2. It depends on the data access & computation patterns.

[dontmatter]

Dissapointing to see that the long awaited photoshop CS3 isn't able to really take advantage of more cores. It'll be a long time till the next version of photoshop.

[TheFuzz]

Originally Posted by dontmatter

Dissapointing to see that the long awaited photoshop CS3 isn't able to really take advantage of more cores. It'll be a long time till the next version of photoshop.

~18 months, like usual.

[centauratlas]

I'd like to see some mysql benchmarks. In my experience mysql uses threads pretty well, so I'm hoping it is a big improvement.

[iMikeT]

All this power in the 8-core Mac Pro and not that much software to take advantage of it...

[milo]

Originally Posted by iMikeT

All this power in the 8-core Mac Pro and not that much software to take advantage of it...

It's always a chicken/egg problem. You can't really expect software companies to release versions optimized for eight cores before the hardware is released.

At least Apple is going to have at least some apps that take advantage when FCS2 ships next month. Hopefully Adobe will update soon (if not have 8 core in time for release, it's not final yet, is it?).

[SeaFox]

Originally Posted by milo

It's always a chicken/egg problem. You can't really expect software companies to release versions optimized for eight cores before the hardware is released.

Huh? There's nothing to say the hardware has to be in existence before the software is optimized for it. There's plenty of mathematics/genetics software made to scale up to 64 or 128 processors.

Also, remember that the original Cloverton upgrade was performed months ago. So it's not like it would be impossible to have built an 8-core Mac Pro before so you have something to test on.