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8-Core Mac Pro (Clovertown)
- Thread starter plinden
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whooleytoo said:
probably due to latency involved in distributing the load across the two processors. that's the same problem a single Clovertown would have. Only true quads wouldn't suffer from these problems (earliest seems to be Harpertown in 2009, don't know if there are any non-MCM Xeons scheduled before then)
I believe the article stated that quad core is not likely to reach dual core speeds. Some situations will get better performance from faster dual core CPUs while others may get better performance from slower quad core CPUs.Patch^ said:cool!! They should hopefully increase speed
I like the fact that you can upgrade the processors now, but Xeons are pretty expensive.
Do you really need that amount of power? I'm guessing yes 
I'd love to see the performance on the Clovertown Mac Pro.
I'd love to see the performance on the Clovertown Mac Pro.
Fixeddornoforpyros said:DAMN
so 2-3 years from now are people going to be asking "why am I stuck with dual core in my macbook?" oh yeah I'll mostly be surfing the web and maybe editing a photo once and a while"
Nice! Im with iGary and others, soon as they are out, Im buying. That should correspond nicely with the release of CS3.
Im doing work in Alias these days, I can only imagine how 8 cores could do a render!
Suprised the MacPro could handle the heat of 8 cores with its 4-core heatsink design. I read the article about Kentsfield on Tom's Hardware, and that chip made ALOT of heat; these are basically the same chip.
EDIT: Who knows, the hot setup may be a refurb'ed MacPro 2.0Ghz, then drop in better CPUs!
Im doing work in Alias these days, I can only imagine how 8 cores could do a render!
Suprised the MacPro could handle the heat of 8 cores with its 4-core heatsink design. I read the article about Kentsfield on Tom's Hardware, and that chip made ALOT of heat; these are basically the same chip.
EDIT: Who knows, the hot setup may be a refurb'ed MacPro 2.0Ghz, then drop in better CPUs!
RichP said:
Damn, yes, that would be the ultimate future hot machine - a second hand or refurb Mac Pro 2ghz, - I reckon by October they will about £1200 second hand, then in the new year, down to about £800, get one, then pop in 2 x 4 cores.
Anyone know if the chipset will be pin-compatible with the next generation quad-cores?
Seems we are stuck as far as increasing MHZ goes, 3ghz seems to be near the realistic limit. Now we're just adding more and more cores in. How many cores will be the feasible limit?
After that, what will be the next method of radically increasing computing throughput?
This is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. Hardware companies don't want to release multicore hardware b/c no software is out to support it and software people don't want to ship multiprocessor software b/c no multiproc hardware is out. Since there are a few multiproc computers out now, some software companies might start multithreading their apps, most people probably don't have it them yet.FleurDuMal said:
Also, some apps won't really benefit from being multithreaded. Take a basic calculator. Why would you really need it to take advantage of multiproc computers? It isn't that processor heavy to do 2+2. AV software, like iTunes, Final Cut Pro, etc., could greatly benefit from multiproc systems. One core can do the audio while the other does the video for FC or iTunes could use one core for playing music and the other for ripping.
Something I'd like to see is to have AV stuff offloaded to the sound or graphics card to speed it up. I've heard of a company called Aspex Semiconductors (www.aspex-semi.com) that designs PCI cards that speed up MPEG encoding. Might be nice for video pros.
I guess I'll wait until Tigerton. I want to buy a merom MBP when it comes out.
The architecture of Tigerton is without the Frontside Bus. More in direction of AMD. Much more efficiency than put just 8 Cores to the 1.3 FSB. Clovertown alos has slower RAM.
The architecture of Tigerton is without the Frontside Bus. More in direction of AMD. Much more efficiency than put just 8 Cores to the 1.3 FSB. Clovertown alos has slower RAM.
Sheesh...just when I'm already high up enough on Apple for innovating, they throw even more leaps and bounds in there to put themselves even further ahead. I can't wait 'til my broke @$$ can finally get the money to buy a Mac and chuck all my Windows machines out the door.
I'm sure we'll see similar efforts from other PC manufacturers eventually, but let's see the software use those extra cores in Windows land. Ain't gonna happen...not on the level of what Apple's doing at least.
I'm sure we'll see similar efforts from other PC manufacturers eventually, but let's see the software use those extra cores in Windows land. Ain't gonna happen...not on the level of what Apple's doing at least.
FleurDuMal said:
Mac OS X distributes threads and processes across cores/CPUs to optimize performance already. (Subject to some limitations, as noted already.)
Many Mac programs which can benifit from mutiple threads already use this, and will automatically get boosts from 8 cores depending on the amount of cocurrency they support.
On the other hand, not everything is suitable for cocurrent execution. Photoshop editing an image would love to have a core per pixel. BBEdit couldn't care less, most likely. It all depends on what you are doing.
Plenty of Mac software would use the extra cores, if they were avalible.
(Note: I keep specifying 'Mac' here. There is a reason. Windows isn't as good at multithreading/processing yet...)
*sigh* My poor, poor wallet.....may as well call it iWallet for the use it gets buying Apple gear constantly....
Shagrat said:
I was wondering the same thing. How can people not be pleased with this? The fact that the processors can be swapped, the fact that the OS recognizes all 8 cores, and that it was so difficult to use all of the processing power. What is there to complain about?
Are these processors 32 or 64 bit? I told one of my PC-lovin' IT guys about the 8 core Mac this morning and he said, "32 bit processors are ancient technology no matter how many you stuff into a box, but I guess they are OK for entertainment computers."
RedTomato said:
Personally, I still see data transfer, namely from storage media, as a huge bottleneck in performance. Unless you are doing something really CPU intensive (vid editing, rendering, others) Most of the average "wait-time" is the damn hard drive.
relimw said:
How much more 'blind' do you want it? All the programmer has to do at this point is use multiple threads. Even if they don't, multiple cores will be automatically used for system and other processes.
Splitting one thread so that it ran cocurent with itself is a recipie for massive trouble. Mac OS X is about as blind as any system out there for the programmer. There may be some more optimizations that the system could make in it's own handling of multiprocessing, but from a programmer's perspective it doesn't matter how many cores the system has. (Unless you really want it to.)
aricher said:Are these processors 32 or 64 bit? I told one of my PC-lovin' IT guys about the 8 core Mac this morning and he said, "32 bit processors are ancient technology no matter how many you stuff into a box, but I guess they are OK for entertainment computers."
Clovertown is a 64-bit CPU.
Ask your PC-loving IT guy if he uses Windows XP64 and more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. If not, then 32-bit processors are apparently okay for him, too.