Uh huh. And those encoded tracks that the benchmark is picking up - where exactly are they being written to?
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27-Inch iMac Core i7 With SSD Is Fastest Mac Ever
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Uh huh. And those encoded tracks that the benchmark is picking up - where exactly are they being written to?
But it's not. It's the fastest mac they've TESTED. Do they make that claim in their article? No. Do they even mention the 12 core MP, which likely trounces the top iMac on this benchmark? Again, no.
its the fastest mac ever? by standard configuration or how do they judge that?
12-Core Mac Pro with SSD 16-32gb of memory?
It's not even by standard config since they tested the iMac with SSD.
Based on what? Their graph and the article itself clearly say 6 core repeatedly with no mention of the 12 core.
What is iTunes supposed to prove? iTunes is horribly encoded and only uses one core to do anything. Get a real audio/video rendering app that uses all cores and you'll see a big difference.
Actually no, turns out he was the first one to figure out that apple ships a 12 core and MR is making the "fastest mac ever" assumption based on a comparison to a 6 core. Re-read his post again.
Again, all of their tests were based on applications that don't use all 12 cores. In that case, a 3.33 GHz 6-core will beat a 2.93 GHz 12-core in tasks like iTunes encoding, which as you said, only uses 1 core.
But I agree. Its a dumb claim.
So in conclusion the article was a total waste of time and space. It really said nothing other than that the latest xxx is faster than the previous xxx. Now that's a shocker!
For something that tries to pass itself off as a publication, wouldn't it make the most sense to compare both?
Or run a properly multi-threaded task on it like rendering in almost any current day 3D application and the Mac Pro will run circles around the iMac.
It's nice to see the iMacs are doing so well overall, but let's not kid ourselves here. The Mac Pro still reigns supreme when it comes to raw performance potential.
I have a 2.53 GHz i5 MBP with 4GB of RAM... why is it that doing the exact same test on mine is like *16* times slower? I wouldn't expect it to quite compete, but I figured it might be half as fast, even a quarter as fast...
I think I have some kind of human-to-computer communicable virus that makes every machine I own rapidly deteriorate in performance.
I think I have some kind of human-to-computer communicable virus that makes every machine I own rapidly deteriorate in performance.
Funny, that when you have a 30" Apple Cinema Display, 27" seems small.
Yes:
1. 27 is WAY too big.
2. Which is awesome! Get one!
I'm glad everyone seems to be on the same page. The new X is faster than the old X. This was a pointless article intended for views and really stirred us up. First time I posted on Mac Rumors...just fueled my hatred toward the notion that the Mac Pro is dead.
Its awesome to see an all in one computer to have this speed, but computer component manufactures are putting out new components every 4-6 months making computers faster while Apple updates their products every 8-12 months.
So in short this is the fastest Mac ever, for a few months. Good job everyone at Apple!
So in short this is the fastest Mac ever, for a few months. Good job everyone at Apple!
Nothing new. Macworld's tests as long as I can recall have always been heavily skewed towards hard-drive performance.
Thats my immediate thought concerning speed. Throughput. How many uncompressed HD streams can I run. Lol. The iTunes audio encoding threw me!
I still find the move from the 30 to the 27 heartbreaking. I don't understand what was gained there.
Well, I knew that SSDs were faster given other videos out there, but seeing this was just WOW!
Me, i'm not concerned if it's the fastest mac ever b/c i'm not delusional enough to realize the next iMac rendition will be faster etc..etc.
BUT, as someone who has been hedging on removing my main internal sata drive for an SSD Drive. I'm not sold. I have a 2009 MPro and it's slower on opening files. To be honest, SSDs are still more expensive / GB, but if I can launch apps that much faster, it means I start work faster. Sure, it may be seconds, but over time, that adds up.
Add speed to the new features of Lion and my work productivity will go up.
I'm sold now.
Me, i'm not concerned if it's the fastest mac ever b/c i'm not delusional enough to realize the next iMac rendition will be faster etc..etc.
BUT, as someone who has been hedging on removing my main internal sata drive for an SSD Drive. I'm not sold. I have a 2009 MPro and it's slower on opening files. To be honest, SSDs are still more expensive / GB, but if I can launch apps that much faster, it means I start work faster. Sure, it may be seconds, but over time, that adds up.
Add speed to the new features of Lion and my work productivity will go up.
I'm sold now.
Not a whole lot of applications use 12 cores, much less 4. It's not a dumb claim, it's just pointless. Wow, a new cpu architecture with a higher clockspeed is faster than an older architecture at a lower clock speed in some tests? I never would have guessed.
For those rare "properly threaded" tasks.
The problem is that "properly threaded" somewhat implies that it's the skill of the programmers. Some applications have serial dependencies in their data which makes arbitrary multi-threading impossible.
A "properly threaded" application could be a video encoder. Many (most?/all?) video codecs have the concept of "keyframes" - a complete frame without any dependencies. These typically are placed every few handfuls of seconds in the stream. From one keyframe to the next, temporal compression is used to reduce the data rate.
Such a data flow is easy to parallelize to an arbitrary number of cores. You break the input into chunks based on the keyframe interval (if you have keyframes every 5 seconds, a one hour video is 720 chunks). You then start 720 threads to encode, and combine the results. (Realistically, you'll schedule the 720 threads a small number at a time, based on the number of cores that your have.)
Other applications are very serial. If you have a spreadsheet cell that uses the standard deviation of a set of cells as an input - regardless of how many cores you have you must wait for the standard deviation to be computed before you can start the next set.
Sometimes a "properly threaded" application is a "single core serial" application, because each bit of the application depends on an earlier calculation - and it cannot be sped up by adding cores. (Or, a huge amount of programming complexity can be added that produces a barely noticeable improvement in the overal speed.)
I'm pretty sure a pointless claim is pretty dumb. But I'm pretty sure its also incorrect. Even a MP with a westmere processor with a couple of striped vertex 3s will beat a sandy bridge imac. Its pointless to compare an SSD equipped imac with a MP that only has a regular HD. Especially using a benchmark that relies heavily on drive speed.
Anyone want to see a faster iMac? I have a 3.4 i7 with an OWC Mercury Extreme PRO SSD in it. SATA III and over 500MB Sec Reads and Writes! will have 16GB RAM Next week. I know an aftermarket job but it is all possible
