That Mac Pro update can't be too far away
DDR2-800 FBDIMMs instead of DDR2-667 FBDIMMs sounds promising, although I would hate to see the increased cost of those memory chips.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
2007 Harpertown Stoakley-Seaburg Motherboard With New Graphics Cards 8-Core Mac Pro
- Thread starter Multimedia
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
That Mac Pro update can't be too far away
DDR2-800 FBDIMMs instead of DDR2-667 FBDIMMs sounds promising, although I would hate to see the increased cost of those memory chips.
Would a machine with this in it allow me to "surf" the web and play itunes simultaneously — both running at the same time?
That Mac Pro update can't be too far away
DDR2-800 FBDIMMs instead of DDR2-667 FBDIMMs sounds promising, although I would hate to see the increased cost of those memory chips.
I wonder if Apple would use that Extreme version to take it to 4Ghz?
I wonder if Apple would use that Extreme version to take it to 4Ghz?
I doubt it, they will not sacrifice speed for stability. Although, if they did, it would be one bad ass machine!
Well some reports say they are overclocking the 2.6Ghz Merom to 2.8Ghz in the iMac... Thought if that was true it wouldn't be such a crazy possibility. And yes, it would be a bad ass machine.
So... if this September event is true. New Mac Pros?
I believe they had access to the X7900 before it was official announced but the iMac is a consumer part where system stability is not as critical as the workstation market.
You know that is what I said. I figured it would have an X7900. But in the iMac thread they are claiming an X7800. Oh well.
Stability is mostly derived from heat. As long as Intel delivered chips that could do 4Ghz, and Apple cooled them right. It would be stable.
Harpertown Stoakley Seaburg almost ready!!!
According to The Inquirer, Stoakley/Seaburg/Harpertown are just about ready to be released.
The 3.2Ghz Harpertown is expected to have a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump.
Here is the article from The Inquirer:
Intel Skulltrail to break dual-socket performance barrier
100+ real GFLOPs on a desktop, anyone?
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Thursday 23 August 2007, 08:38
INTEL IS pretty much ready with the Harpertown 'cream of the crop' of initial Penryns, and the boards with the new Seaburg chipset, aka Stoakley platform, are about there by the likes of Tyan, Asus, Supermicro and of course Intel itself.
I've myself seen the dual-socket workstations and servers running 3.2 GHz X5482 FSB1600 Harpertown DP on the new chipset ever since Beijing April IDF - even then they were running stable on branded vendor boxes. The recent run at Intel labs handled even overnight non stop benchmark runs with 100.0% per-core on all cores CPU usage fine - not bad for pre-production units. The new boards, by the way, have full copper, fanned, heatsinks on the chipset north bridge, finally - these are hot babies running DUAL FSB1600 at the same time, so more decent heat dissipation is a must.
According to the industry sources in high performance computing, the larger 12 MB caches on these parts, compared to vastly increased net memory bandwidth obtainable on the Seaburg chipset and DDR2-800 CL5 FB-DIMMs, give far higher benchmark results in some cases than the current dual Xeon batch.
For instance, STREAM-type memory bandwidth benchmarks are expected to be between 40% and 60% faster, and you could get around 80 GFLOPs double precision net (Rmax) 40Kx40K Linpack performance out of 102 GFLOPs peak, with the current (not yet fully optimised) code.
This is a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump - and before further tuning that may incorporate some opcodes from SSE, like dot product.
Based on the sources who saw dual-socket Barcelona running, with the most optimised new PGI compilers for the platforms, and after a good round of tuning, it should give up to 55 GFLOPs Rmax out of 64 GFLOPs peak, at 2 GHz. Now, it shows Barcelona is a bit more efficient per clock than the Harpertown, but it also has a 60% clock disadvantage that more than destroys its competitive position at the dual-socket system level. Even if AMD manages to ship a 2.2 GHz bin in October, when Intel is supposed to have X5482-based platforms on the way to the customers already, it still doesn't nearly make up.
Yeah, Linpack is of course a useless benchmark, but unfortunately many workstation or supercomputer tenders all over the world include it as a critical measure - the Top 500 ranking is still based on it.
This is just the beginning, though. Intel's "Skulltrail" high-end dual socket media & gaming platform will use this same Xeon, just in an unlocked Extreme version, and the same Seaburg chipset, but in an optimised lower latency, higher bandwidth configuration with selected FB-DIMMs running upward of DDR2-1000 speed and lower latency like CL4.
The board has FOUR PCI-E x16 GPU slots and, of course, strong power/VRM config with overclockable Dual FSB config on top of the unlocked multipliers. All the chipset and VRM heat sinks are easy to replace for optional water block/freeze block cooling.
Knowing the 4++ GHz air cooling overclock headroom on these 45 nm parts, and even higher liquid or cryo cooling potential, and coupled with fast FSB & memory - I thought "Fast FB-DIMM" was an oxymoron - we could be in for some record results when the monster E-ATX board shows up in the market in the next few months.
After all, an extra 20 - 30% speed boost on CPU, and additional 30+ memory throughput due to optimised FSB latency coupled with both higher bandwidth and lower latency by those upcoming FB-DIMMs, should give a very decent application performance increase, not to mention ability to feed, say, four Nvidia G92 GPUs simultaneously?
One of these records will surely be the above mentioned Linpack - Dual water-cooled 4+ GHz Extreme Harpertown Xeons on a Skulltrail board will be the first ever dual-socket PC / workstation / server to break the 100 GFLOPs net - Rmax - Linpack performance barrier.
Now, just think what wonders will that machine do for gaming physics or, as our Theo reported from Leipzig, real time ray tracing.
According to The Inquirer, Stoakley/Seaburg/Harpertown are just about ready to be released.
The 3.2Ghz Harpertown is expected to have a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump.
Here is the article from The Inquirer:
Intel Skulltrail to break dual-socket performance barrier
100+ real GFLOPs on a desktop, anyone?
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Thursday 23 August 2007, 08:38
INTEL IS pretty much ready with the Harpertown 'cream of the crop' of initial Penryns, and the boards with the new Seaburg chipset, aka Stoakley platform, are about there by the likes of Tyan, Asus, Supermicro and of course Intel itself.
I've myself seen the dual-socket workstations and servers running 3.2 GHz X5482 FSB1600 Harpertown DP on the new chipset ever since Beijing April IDF - even then they were running stable on branded vendor boxes. The recent run at Intel labs handled even overnight non stop benchmark runs with 100.0% per-core on all cores CPU usage fine - not bad for pre-production units. The new boards, by the way, have full copper, fanned, heatsinks on the chipset north bridge, finally - these are hot babies running DUAL FSB1600 at the same time, so more decent heat dissipation is a must.
According to the industry sources in high performance computing, the larger 12 MB caches on these parts, compared to vastly increased net memory bandwidth obtainable on the Seaburg chipset and DDR2-800 CL5 FB-DIMMs, give far higher benchmark results in some cases than the current dual Xeon batch.
For instance, STREAM-type memory bandwidth benchmarks are expected to be between 40% and 60% faster, and you could get around 80 GFLOPs double precision net (Rmax) 40Kx40K Linpack performance out of 102 GFLOPs peak, with the current (not yet fully optimised) code.
This is a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump - and before further tuning that may incorporate some opcodes from SSE, like dot product.
Based on the sources who saw dual-socket Barcelona running, with the most optimised new PGI compilers for the platforms, and after a good round of tuning, it should give up to 55 GFLOPs Rmax out of 64 GFLOPs peak, at 2 GHz. Now, it shows Barcelona is a bit more efficient per clock than the Harpertown, but it also has a 60% clock disadvantage that more than destroys its competitive position at the dual-socket system level. Even if AMD manages to ship a 2.2 GHz bin in October, when Intel is supposed to have X5482-based platforms on the way to the customers already, it still doesn't nearly make up.
Yeah, Linpack is of course a useless benchmark, but unfortunately many workstation or supercomputer tenders all over the world include it as a critical measure - the Top 500 ranking is still based on it.
This is just the beginning, though. Intel's "Skulltrail" high-end dual socket media & gaming platform will use this same Xeon, just in an unlocked Extreme version, and the same Seaburg chipset, but in an optimised lower latency, higher bandwidth configuration with selected FB-DIMMs running upward of DDR2-1000 speed and lower latency like CL4.
The board has FOUR PCI-E x16 GPU slots and, of course, strong power/VRM config with overclockable Dual FSB config on top of the unlocked multipliers. All the chipset and VRM heat sinks are easy to replace for optional water block/freeze block cooling.
Knowing the 4++ GHz air cooling overclock headroom on these 45 nm parts, and even higher liquid or cryo cooling potential, and coupled with fast FSB & memory - I thought "Fast FB-DIMM" was an oxymoron - we could be in for some record results when the monster E-ATX board shows up in the market in the next few months.
After all, an extra 20 - 30% speed boost on CPU, and additional 30+ memory throughput due to optimised FSB latency coupled with both higher bandwidth and lower latency by those upcoming FB-DIMMs, should give a very decent application performance increase, not to mention ability to feed, say, four Nvidia G92 GPUs simultaneously?
One of these records will surely be the above mentioned Linpack - Dual water-cooled 4+ GHz Extreme Harpertown Xeons on a Skulltrail board will be the first ever dual-socket PC / workstation / server to break the 100 GFLOPs net - Rmax - Linpack performance barrier.
Now, just think what wonders will that machine do for gaming physics or, as our Theo reported from Leipzig, real time ray tracing.
My guess (and of course that means squat) would be September event for iPods, then October for Mac Pros alongside LEOPARD. I think it just makes sense to wait and release the update when the new OS comes out. I would think they would want to show LEOPARD off on a new Mac Pro.
I was suprised you backed down from that argument, it made no sense that Apple, who have shown they can get processors early, would go to the trouble of overclocking a processor or that Intel would allow them too.
Of course Intel's version is unlikely to actually support SLI on four Nvidia G92s
. I would think Most will be waiting for Nvidia's version of this.
Yeah. ArsTechnica was reporting this. I thought it was a little far fetched. But ultimately not worth my time to argue it. The truth will come out. If it hasn't already.
Of course Intel's version is unlikely to actually support SLI on four Nvidia G92s
Neither SLI or CrossFire works in Mac OS X yet anyway. I think that is the least concern for those waiting to grab the updated Mac Pro.
So Penryn uses a new FBDIMM? Any idea on how crazy expensive these will be?
Anyone selling these things yet?
Just when the current FBDIMMs were getting affordable.
If I am wrong please correct me.
Anyone selling these things yet?
Just when the current FBDIMMs were getting affordable.
If I am wrong please correct me.
So Penryn uses a new FBDIMM? Any idea on how crazy expensive these will be?
Anyone selling these things yet?
Just when the current FBDIMMs were getting affordable.
If I am wrong please correct me.
They may be going 800Mhz. I doubt they cost a lot more. You could also stick 667Mhz DIMMs in there. I doubt it would make much of a difference.
Thanks suneohair, I was a little confused. Looks like my G5 will be getting the boot in a few months!
Thought you were on hiatus? Anyway. So are we thinking a new MacPro can show its face either this September or October? No more November? Maybe Paris will get lucky this year.
- Status