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]

Work on Price

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

 

[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.

 

[P-Worm]

It makes sense to me that the gaming results are no different. Are there many games that even utilize multiple cores?

P-Worm

 

[johnee]

It makes sense to me that the gaming results are no different. Are there many games that even utilize multiple cores?

P-Worm

I guess a pro machine shouldn't be used for games

 

[andiwm2003]

has anybody tested the new fc pro? one would expect that that uses the newest machine to its fullest.

 

[brad.c]

While the gaming benchmarks are interesting in themselves, I gotta wonder who would consider this as a serious part of the purchase decision.

Then again, if you ARE buying this for gaming, you'd be a girly-man for getting less than two 30" monitors.

 

[Darkroom]

i'd be curious to see benchmarks for Adobe CS3 when it's released... Photoshop CS3 Beta is alot better on my Intel iMac than the crashtastic CS2 programs, but it's still a bit sketchy, and therefore not something worth benchmarking (IMHO).

 

[twoodcc]

yeah, i bet the new fcs will take advantage of the 8-cores.....or at least i sure hope so

 

[P-Worm]

I'm guessing that one of the best benchmarks for something like the 8 core would be a render test using some 3D app like Blender or Maya. Rendering CG is supposed to be purely CPU and the graphics card and memory has little to do with it. Am I right on this?

P-Worm

 

[tuartboy]

It's worth it to note that gains in Quicktime exporting were nonexistent for single exports. The recorded gains were when performing 6 simultaneous exports. Unless you are forced to export 6 things at once, I would not chock this up as a win for the ocho.

 

[840quadra]

The memory bandwidth per core is really not too good (really poor actually). I would have expect much more performance jump out of an 8 core system, but it seems to be choked by poor memory bandwidth!

We did run the "test-compute-speed" with digLloydTools (DLT) on the 8 core. Its aggregate rate was 1204MB/sec (versus the 4 core's 601MB/s). That says that if the task is pure CPU, the 8 core is twice as fast as the 4 core. But if your task has to do a lot of interaction with memory, the advantage drops almost to nothing -- as we saw with Photoshop CS3 and Aperture.

I wouldn't expect anything big from FCP due to this fact, as that is also memory and disk intensive.

 

[ddubbo]

OS X Delay

I suppose it may contribute a significant part to Leopard delay - optimizing it to Quad - core processors

 

[commander.data]

There is a problem with the chipset. A 1333MHz FSB should provide plenty of bandwidth for a quad core chip even if it is dual die, but FB-DIMMs seem incredibly inefficient and the first generation memory controller probably isn't well optimized either. I thought Anandtech found that a dual channel DDR2 800 setup with Conroe and 1066MHz FSBs actually gets more raw bandwidth than a quad channel Woodcrest setup with 1333MHz FSBs. Intel's upcoming Stoakley platform should correct some of this with a 2nd generation memory controller and a snoop filter optimized for quad cores rather than dual cores. I believe Intel was claiming 5% improvement with the same chips at CeBit using the new chipsets.

 

[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.

 

[kalisphoenix]

*yawn* What I want to see is a comprehensive benchmark suite that would show me precisely how fast I could convert 16,000 FLACs to ALAC.

 

[scottlinux]

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

 

[guzhogi]

I wonder how much of the bottleneck is b/c of hardware and how much b/c of software.

Something I'd be interested in seeing (but probably will never see) is someone building a whole new OS from the ground up. No use of any pre-existing code library, nothing. I'm sure a lot of the libraries today haven't changed much since the 1980's. Back then, we didn't have quad-core procs, 64-bit procs, graphics cards in SLI mode, nothing like that. I know, I know this will take years and lots of money to do, but would be interesting to see nonetheless. And please, don't say things like "There'd be a lot of regressions" or $h!t like that b/c I know.

 

[kalisphoenix]

I wonder how much of the bottleneck is b/c of hardware and how much b/c of software.

Something I'd be interested in seeing (but probably will never see) is someone building a whole new OS from the ground up. No use of any pre-existing code library, nothing. I'm sure a lot of the libraries today haven't changed much since the 1980's. Back then, we didn't have quad-core procs, 64-bit procs, graphics cards in SLI mode, nothing like that. I know, I know this will take years and lots of money to do, but would be interesting to see nonetheless. And please, don't say things like "There'd be a lot of regressions" or $h!t like that b/c I know.

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.

The next major "clean" OS will be written by computers.

 

[Redneck1089]

It makes sense to me that the gaming results are no different. Are there many games that even utilize multiple cores?

P-Worm

By the end of the year, yes, there will be games that utilize multiple cores. For example, Crysis will...

 

[Redneck1089]

When I try to click on the links to take me to the benchmarks it tells me it's not available. Is the site down right now, or something?

 

[iSee]

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!

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?

 

[clintob]

It's been said on here 100 times (and I too have been guilty of the hoopla) but we need to stop obsessing over processors. The truth of the matter is that 99% of us never even come close to 100% usage. I use "pro" apps all day long and it just never happens.

You'll be MUCH better served to load up on extra RAM than to spend the money on extra processors. My Dual G5 is equal to my Intel Quad in virtually every test I've done (except for video encoding, which does use multi-core processors effectively). Moving a Quad Xeon from 2GB of RAM to 4GB will give you a much more tangible everyday speed increase than going from Quad Zeon to 8-core.

The sole exception to this is major encoding / transcoding of video, so unless you're doing that save yourself the money and resist the urge to pony up for more processor power that you'll never touch. RAM and bus speed are WAY more important.

Sorry, lecture over.

 

[milo]

Any Logic pro benchmarks anywhere?

 

[KindredMAC]

I can't believe the people that are shocked and upset by the lackluster performance of the Octo-Core Mac Pro....

Look at the numbers of the Mac Pro versus the Dual Core G5 PM's... The Dual Core G5 PM's are still little power houses that can easily go head to head with a Quad Core Mac Pro and come in a close second most of the time.

As for gaming.... I play games on my Power Mac G5. Processing power isn't really the key. I've noticed every time I put more RAM or a newer Graphics Card in my 2.0 Dual Core PM that my games responded the most. What I want to see, instead of games maximized for 8 Core processing, is multi-display support. If I am playing a game like Call of Duty 2 on my home system, which has 3 monitors set up in extended desktop, I want to be able to use my side monitors as peripheral vision, so I don't need to keep sweeping my mouse back and forth to see to my 9 and 3 o'clocks.

Just wait for applications to open up more to these mega multi-core machines.... however, aren't we still waiting for 64-bit support from this same app makers???? Hmmmmmm.......