Apple Gets Nehalem Early, h264 and VMWare Performance Boosts

[MacRumors]

The release of the new Mac Pro on Tuesday marked the first use of Intel's Nehalem processor in Apple's products. As in the past, Intel has allowed Apple to get early access to their newest processors ahead of the competition. These Nehalem Xeon processors used in the high end Mac Pros have not even been officially announced by Intel yet.

Apple details the technical improvements of these new Nehalem processors on their product pages for the Mac Pro. While the descriptions and benchmarks are primarily marketing materials, they do offer simple explanations of some of the new technologies found in Nehalem. Some highlights include:

- Single die 64-bit architecture with fast access to cache data
- Integrated memory controller with significantly more memory bandwidth
- Turbo Boost: "If you’re using an application that doesn’t need every core, Turbo Boost shuts off the idle cores while simultaneously increasing the speed of the active ones, up to 3.33GHz on a 2.93GHz Mac Pro."

While Apple's tests show large improvements in memory bandwidth and floating point performance, many customers are awaiting 3rd party benchmarks to make a final purchasing decision. Notably, however, specific tasks or applications could see significantly higher performance boosts with Nehalem than might otherwise be expected.

An x264 developer has reported that Nehalem SSE changes are extremely beneficial to x264 performance and "have led to an enormous overall performance increase[s]" over Penryn processors. As this processor support trickles out, it should speed up the time to encode h264 video substantially.

Meanwhile, VMWare customers may also see significant improvements in running VMWare Fusion on the new Nehalem Mac Pros. According to a forum post by VMWare's Ben Gertzfield, VMWare 2.02 already supports a new feature called "Extended Page Tables" which should result in "a pretty significant performance boost on the new Nehalem CPUs when running Fusion virtual machines."

This is a huge benefit to virtualization software: without EPT, a big chunk of the heavy lifting that a virtual machine has to do is emulating the "map virtual memory address X to physical memory address Y" work that a traditional MMU does.

The first of the Nehalem Mac Pros are expected to ship early next week.

Article Link: Apple Gets Nehalem Early, h264 and VMWare Performance Boosts

[cmendill]

Has anyone confirmed if the new Mac Pros have a Turbo button?

[kresh]

Originally Posted by cmendill

Has anyone confirmed if the new Mac Pros have a Turbo button?

A similar image popped into my head when reading this article as well. hehe You would think they would have used something other than "Turbo". Welcome to the 80's

[Wiska]

Ah, those days of my 12Mhz 386 PC with the turbo button that increased speeds to 16Mhz!! Those were the days.

[Rhalliwell1]

When will we see Nehalem XServes? One would presume fairly soon.

[SactoGuy18]

Originally Posted by Wiska

Ah, those days of my 12Mhz 386 PC with the turbo button that increased speeds to 16Mhz!! Those were the days.

You meant a 286 system. Intel never produced a 12 MHz 386 CPU officially--the first 80386 CPU started at 16 MHz.

And now, my home computer's Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 runs at 2,200 MHz.

[talkingfuture]

Sounds like a regular speed machine.

[sittnick]

Originally Posted by SactoGuy18

You meant a 286 system. Intel never produced a 12 MHz 386 CPU officially--the first 80386 CPU started at 16 MHz.

And now, my home computer's Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 runs at 2,200 MHz.

Intel did make a 12Mhz 80386, even though the first chip they introduced was the 16Mhz version.

I remember it being used in Zenith laptop computers.

Here is a link:

http://www.x86-guide.com/en/cpu/Inte...pu-no1327.html

Here is a picture:

[Trip.Tucker]

Originally Posted by SactoGuy18

You meant a 286 system. Intel never produced a 12 MHz 386 CPU officially--the first 80386 CPU started at 16 MHz.

And now, my home computer's Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 runs at 2,200 MHz.

Incorrect. There was actually a 9 Mhz system. Just because you never saw it doesn't mean it didn't exist.

[commander.data]

I don't doubt 2 x 2.93Hz Nehalem will beat 2 x 3.2GHz Harpertown.

The question is will 1 x 2.66GHz Nehalem, with only 4 cores, beat 2 x 2.80GHz Harpertown with 8 cores? In multithreaded applications or multitasking that can actually use 8 cores I doubt it. Which is why Apple doesn't should that comparison in it's benchmarks. Nehalem is fast, and HT maybe worth 20% increase on average, but it's hard to see it overcoming a 2 times core count advantage. I'd love to see the third-party benchmarks one way or another.

[iMacmatician]

Originally Posted by commander.data

I don't doubt 2 x 2.93Hz Nehalem will beat 2 x 3.2GHz Harpertown.

The question is will 1 x 2.66GHz Nehalem, with only 4 cores, beat 2 x 2.80GHz Harpertown with 8 cores? In multithreaded applications or multitasking that can actually use 8 cores I doubt it. Which is why Apple doesn't should that comparison in it's benchmarks. Nehalem is fast, and HT maybe worth 20% increase on average, but it's hard to see it overcoming a 2 times core count advantage. I'd love to see the third-party benchmarks one way or another.

Even Apple's own benchmarks, which likely favor Gainestown, do not show ≥2x the performance of Harpertown in most cases (assuming the tasks are multithreaded/multitasking).

Originally Posted by the vj

When I hear Apple talking about "speed improvement" for me that is a an amount of crap the size of jupiter.

Don't you mean Uranus?

[milo]

Originally Posted by commander.data

I don't doubt 2 x 2.93Hz Nehalem will beat 2 x 3.2GHz Harpertown.

The question is will 1 x 2.66GHz Nehalem, with only 4 cores, beat 2 x 2.80GHz Harpertown with 8 cores? In multithreaded applications or multitasking that can actually use 8 cores I doubt it. Which is why Apple doesn't should that comparison in it's benchmarks. Nehalem is fast, and HT maybe worth 20% increase on average, but it's hard to see it overcoming a 2 times core count advantage. I'd love to see the third-party benchmarks one way or another.

That's the million dollar question. In a nutshell, is the new base model an upgrade or a downgrade from the previous base model? And if the two are around the same price, which to buy?

[Digital Skunk]

Originally Posted by commander.data

I don't doubt 2 x 2.93Hz Nehalem will beat 2 x 3.2GHz Harpertown.

The question is will 1 x 2.66GHz Nehalem, with only 4 cores, beat 2 x 2.80GHz Harpertown with 8 cores? In multithreaded applications or multitasking that can actually use 8 cores I doubt it. Which is why Apple doesn't should that comparison in it's benchmarks. Nehalem is fast, and HT maybe worth 20% increase on average, but it's hard to see it overcoming a 2 times core count advantage. I'd love to see the third-party benchmarks one way or another.

Very true and why I want to see the 3rd party benchies for that as well. But IMHO the new base model is just a no go with an 8GB RAM cap. For me, the Mac Pro starts at $3300.

[thoshino]

Originally Posted by kresh

A similar image popped into my head when reading this article as well. hehe You would think they would have used something other than "Turbo". Welcome to the 80's

All we need now is a two character RED_LED-display and we're full circle. Although I guess it would have to have room for three digits.

Please, someone make a mockup!

[powers74]

Originally Posted by kresh

You would think they would have used something other than "Turbo".

Acceleration? Supercharge? They could have strained their brains a little to come up with something better than turbo.

[fleshman03]

Originally Posted by cmendill

Has anyone confirmed if the new Mac Pros have a Turbo button?

What did those actually do? I was too young to actually remember using one of those for a period of time. Any why would someone choose to run a desktop is a slower, non-turbo mode?

Oh and give me a 2.66ghz Nehalem + 4/8gb Ram + 1tb HD in a MBP and then I will be happy. (Any chance that happening in 09?)

[diamond.g]

Originally Posted by fleshman03

What did those actually do? I was too young to actually remember using one of those for a period of time. Any why would someone choose to run a desktop is a slower, non-turbo mode?

Oh and give me a 2.66ghz Nehalem + 4/8gb Ram + 1tb HD in a MBP and then I will be happy. (Any chance that happening in 09?)

If I remember correctly the turbo button runs the CPU at it's normal speed, and when deactivated runs the computer at a slower speed.

[Chaszmyr]

Other than accepting ECC RAM, has it been established how these extremely expensive Nehalem Xeon processors compare (in terms of both performance and features) to the much cheaper Nehalem Core i7 desktop processors? You know, the ones Apple should have put in the new iMacs and didn't.

[Eidorian]

Nothing terribly new since Nehalem has been out for some time just not on a Mac.

[milo]

Originally Posted by Chaszmyr

Other than accepting ECC RAM, has it been established how these extremely expensive Nehalem Xeon processors compare (in terms of both performance and features) to the much cheaper Nehalem Core i7 desktop processors? You know, the ones Apple should have put in the new iMacs and didn't.

In terms of features, they are pretty much identical to the xeon in the quad. Only difference is ECC and lower power consumption.

Again, this looks like Apple sacrificing function for form in the iMac.

[iMacmatician]

Originally Posted by Chaszmyr

Nehalem Core i7 desktop processors? You know, the ones Apple should have put in the new iMacs and didn't.

Core i7 is much too hot for the iMac.

Originally Posted by 128k

Just another formulaic, lame interim upgrade to suck in buyers until the next true generation update- The fractional, imperceptible performance gain and need to buy two graphics cards to support existing multiple cinema displays is non negotiable for existing customers. Mini Display adapters and glossy crappy displays are for imacs and laptops not desktops...

We'll see 6 cores with Westmere and Westmere clocks have been said to be not too different from Nehalem ones.

[gmcalpin]

The article has a typo in it:

While Apple's tests show large improvements in memory bandwidth and floating point performance, many customers have been bitching loudly, incessantly, and often without having their facts straight, but will probably quiet down after 3rd party benchmarks show that these processors are indeed a small but significant improvement over their Penryn predecessors, despite the marginally lower clock speeds.

Also: some of you guys have been joking about a turbo button, but have you noticed this? (from Apple's Mac Pro page)

Turbo Boost: a dynamic performance technology that automatically boosts the processor clock speed based on workload. If you’re using an application that doesn’t need every core, Turbo Boost shuts off the idle cores while simultaneously increasing the speed of the active ones, up to 3.33GHz on a 2.93GHz Mac Pro.

The turbo button is automagical.

Considering most applications don't (yet?) take advantage of multiple cores, on an eight-core Nehalem, this could make a big difference in performance.

Originally Posted by fleshman03

ntel is saying Mobile Nehalem is slated for production 3Q 2009. Could we see an updated spec MacBook Pro @ WWDC / sometime after, but before the start of the 2009/2010 school year? It would open the door for a iMac update too, since they use the same crop of processors.

I think that's a relatively safe bet, actually.

[drlunanerd]

Originally Posted by Chaszmyr

Other than accepting ECC RAM, has it been established how these extremely expensive Nehalem Xeon processors compare (in terms of both performance and features) to the much cheaper Nehalem Core i7 desktop processors? You know, the ones Apple should have put in the new iMacs and didn't.

+1.
Hey Apple - we don't care how thin you can make the iMac whilst fatally compromising its processor compatibility

[OrganMusic]

Originally Posted by fleshman03

What did those actually do? I was too young to actually remember using one of those for a period of time. Any why would someone choose to run a desktop is a slower, non-t

As I understand it the reason was that the speed of a lot of early games wasn't governed very well because they didn't think there were going to be far faster processors in the near future. So if you ran a game that was designed on a 4.77 mhz 8088 on a nice 16 mhz 386 it would be far too fast to play. Thus if you turn off the "turbo" it would slow the machine down to a reasonable speed.

This was all back in DOS days when you could only do one thing at a time anyway.

[spatlese44]

Originally Posted by OrganMusic

As I understand it the reason was that the speed of a lot of early games wasn't governed very well because they didn't think there were going to be far faster processors in the near future. So if you ran a game that was designed on a 4.77 mhz 8088 on a nice 16 mhz 386 it would be far too fast to play. Thus if you turn off the "turbo" it would slow the machine down to a reasonable speed.

This was all back in DOS days when you could only do one thing at a time anyway.

You beat me to this post. I kind of remember loading some Pacman knockoff and every time you hit start, the next thing you saw was the ghosts on top of you. Not fun.

As for the new Pro's specs, I'm impressed, but it's not going to make me wait another year to buy the next Mini. I'll take the current one. That said, where's the "Nehalem Mac Mini soon?" thread????