Quad Processor Macs???

[Falleron]

Take a look at :

http://macosrumors.blogspot.com/

96% chance?? Ok, I know the usual remarks about the creators of this site. What do you think??

Quad 3Ghz G5's 6 PCI etc..

 

[King Cobra]

As I said in the MacOS Rumors gone? thread...well, I don't remember exactly what I said, but: 96%, sweet.

 

[Falleron]

As I said in the MacOS Rumors gone? thread...well, I don't remember exactly what I said, but: 96%, sweet.

I know its iffy. But, 96% sure is quite high. Worth a note anyway!

 

[invaLPsion]

If they are right, I'll eat my foot...

And if they are right, and the computer is $3000 or lower, I'll eat the other one.

 

[King Cobra]

What will you do if MacOSRumors at blogspot goes back to macosrumors.com ?

 

[.a]

... well i hope for apple that they release an absolute highend machine - i even would be in business for something like 5000-6000$, though i will order a new powermac g5 dual 2.5 and a powerbook 17" tomorrow ... have to do some serious vfx business.

anyway, have a look at those cinebench charts ... well even the new (yet not released) dual 2.5 lags behind ... and number one is a quad ... xeon ... time for apple to go way beyond those xeons ...

i would be very surprised if we see something like a quad powermac this year
.a

 

[&RU]

This just in...

You can also bake bread in it.

I like the "four handles on top" myself - if it needs four handles to be lifted, should it really be lifted at all?

 

[musicpyrite]

While I doubt this rumor is true, I will bet big $$$ that if any company (Dell, HP, IBM, ect.) can make a quad processor computer first, it will be Apple.

 

[jouster]

While I doubt this rumor is true, I will bet big $$$ that if any company (Dell, HP, IBM, ect.) can make a quad processor computer first, it will be Apple.

Dell, HP and IBM already make computers with many more than four processors.

 

[Nermal]

Well, it's been a long time since that last quad-processor Mac, but that was made by Daystar, not Apple. I don't think that Apple is going to release a quad anytime soon, because the dual G5 is already ridiculously fast.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Will Apple make a quad processor powermac some day? Probably.

Is this particular rumor going to be proven true? I'd say it's got a snowball's chance in hell.

 

[jsw]

Is this particular rumor going to be proven true? I'd say it's got a snowball's chance in hell.

Perhaps more appropriately: a snowball's chance in a quad-G5.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Although it's nice to dream, I somehow think that, with MacOSRumors' poor track record (less than 50% correct), that both this rumor and the 96% certainty figure are bogus. I doubt that Apple would come out with a quad PowerMac in late 2004. That just seems unreasonable, given Apple's past history.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Perhaps more appropriately: a snowball's chance in a quad-G5.

LOL

 

[pdpfilms]

That's waaaay too soon.....They just barely announced the new G5s, there's no way they're going to throw in a computer to shadow their entire still-new G5 lineup. Talk about rumors...

 

[Sun Baked]

Perhaps more appropriately: a snowball's chance in a quad-G5.

Right, but the snowball has a chance of surviving virtually.

The Quad Mac will have two real processors (Physical) and two virtual processors (Logical).

So it is really a Dual Power5-UL with SMT.

The OS only sees 4 CPUs... And this should give us a 35-40% boost over the G5 at the same clock speed.

We also keep hearing the possibility of dual core G5s and such, but that is a reality in the Power4s and Power5s.

We should probably be seeing these around the time Tiger arrives, which is damn good news.

 

[Sol]

Quad PowerMac redundant now

Quad-CPU PowerMacs are not really needed these days. Two 2.5 GHz G5 processors provide all the power a modern application could need and for anything that requires more there are XServe Cluster Nodes and the XServe RAID.

I am not an expert in programming but I think that the resources it would take to make OS X and its applications quad-CPU aware would not be worth it. Better for Apple to keep making dual-CPU PowerMacs and XServes and push their power-hungry customers towards cluster solutions.

 

[johnnowak]

Software without support for being clustered is worthless on a cluster system.

 

[Sol]

Software without support for being clustered is worthless on a cluster system.

I do not know what it is called but Apple has a cluster software solution that is very easy for developers to implement into their applications. The first application to utilise this is Motion and I think Shake might be using it too. Basically your workstation seeks out compatible computers on your network and distributes the workload to them. Adobe utilises a similar system for After Effects and 3D rendering applications have used solutions like this for years.

 

[Falleron]

Could something like a quad powermac be the "XStation" - Apple's high end Server?? Therefore, not overshadowing the PowerMacs? It would address a different market. Those people building supercomputers would love it!

 

[ddtlm]

I really don't expect Apple to have four separate processors in any machine any time soon but IBM is eventually gona make a dual core G5 decendant. Everyone seems to be planning dual cores on high-end desktops, including Apple's competition in PC land.

Quad G5's as they stand now would be prohibitively expensive because of the need for 4 FSB's and the RAM to feed them, all linked into a single connection point (or series of interconnected connection points). Xeons and Itaniums have 2-4 processors per FSB, AMD doesn't have to worry about FSB's these days.

 

[xiola]

They say the housing is a stretched cube. Reminds me of the SGI Terzo http://www.sgi.com/workstations/tezro/ Why make it look like that when you have liquid cooling?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I really don't expect Apple to have four separate processors in any machine any time soon but IBM is eventually gona make a dual core G5 decendant. Everyone seems to be planning dual cores on high-end desktops, including Apple's competition in PC land.

Quad G5's as they stand now would be prohibitively expensive because of the need for 4 FSB's and the RAM to feed them, all linked into a single connection point (or series of interconnected connection points). Xeons and Itaniums have 2-4 processors per FSB, AMD doesn't have to worry about FSB's these days.

I was just thinking - why not swing for the fences with an 8 CPU design? Here's how this one would work: the Mac would have two dual-core CPUs (that's 4 right there), plus SMT to create 8 effective CPUs. This way, Apple wouldn't need 4 or 8 system buses, and would still get most of the performance benefits from the additional processors. (BTW, if Mac OS X is dual-CPU aware, that automatically makes it n-CPU aware.)

 

[Chip NoVaMac]

Given the G5 farms of late the Quad G5 is not that far fetched.

Also were there not those that thought pictures from AppleInside prior the G5 rev. B update indicated a quad design possible?

 

[ddtlm]

wrldwzrd89:

was just thinking - why not swing for the fences with an 8 CPU design? Here's how this one would work: the Mac would have two dual-core CPUs (that's 4 right there), plus SMT to create 8 effective CPUs.

That's certainly possible, but its still really just a 4 CPU machine. SMT does not make one CPU perform like two.

Chip NoVaMac:

Given the G5 farms of late the Quad G5 is not that far fetched.

You need to check on prices of quads. Quad Opterons are about the least expensive quads out there and they start at $10k, for between 50% and 100% more expensive than the same hardware divided between two dual-CPU machines. Unless there is something that really benefits from the shared memory, its not worth it.

Now of course Apple could come in and try to lower that price, but they can't do that till they get away from these current 970's with their FSB's because the monolithic system controller would be one heck of a complex chunk of electronics. With a CPU-CPU interconnect and on-die memory controllers they could do a quad for twice the cost of a dual, if IBM allows it.