my brain hurts
I must love punishment because I scanned this whole tread. We need some sort system to gather the correct info into one location.
Multimedia, you're so far out of mainstream that your comments make no sense to all but .01 % of computer users.
Seriously.. Most people don't rip 4 videos to h264 while they are creating 4 disk images and browsing the web.
I work at a wealthy research university, I set up a new mac every week (and too many PCs). A 1st Gen dual 2.0 G5 is plenty fast for nearly all users. I'm still surprised how nice ours runs considering it's 3 years old. In my experience the dual cores are more responsive (UI latency) but a slightly faster dual proc will run intensive tasks faster.
The reality is, a dual core system.. any current dual core system.. is a fantastic machine for 95% of computer users. The Core2 Duo (Merom) iMacs are extermely fast. The 24" iMac with 2GB ram runs nearly everything instantaneously.
The dual dual-core systems are rediculously fast. Iv'e set up several 2.66GHz models and I had to invent tasks to slow the thing down. Ripping DVD to h264 does take some time with handbrake (half playback speed ((that's ripping 1hour of DVD in 30 minutes) but the machine is still very responsive while you're doing that, installing software, and having Mathematica calculate Pi to 100,000 places. During normal use (Office, web, mail, chats...) it's unusual to see any of the cpu cores bump up past 20%.
I'm sure Apple will have 4 core cpus eventually but I don't expect it will happen immediately. Maybe they'll have one top end version but it'd certainly be a mistake to move the line to all quad cores.
Here's the reality...
- fewer cores running faster will be much better for most people
- there are relatively few tasks that really lend themselves to massively parallelizaton well. Video and Image editing are obvious because there are a number of ways to slice jobs up (render multiple frames.. break images into sections, modify in parallel, reassemble...).
- though multimedia is an Apple core market.. not everyone runs a full video shop or rending farm off of one desktop computer. Seriously guys, we don't.
- Games are especially difficult to thread for SMP systems. Even games that do support SMP like Quake and UT do it fairly poorly. UT only splits off audio work on to the 2nd cpu. The real time nature of games means you can't have 7 or 8 independent threads on an 8 core systems without running into issues were the game hangs up on a lagging thread. They simply work better in a more serial paradigm.
- The first quad core chips will be much hotter than current Core2 chips. Most people.. even people who want the power of towers.. don't want a desktop machine that actually pulls 600W from the wall because of the two 120-130W cpus inside. also, goodby silent MacPros in this config.
- The systems will be far too I/O bound in an 8 core system. The memory system does have lots of bandwith but the benchmarks indicate it will be bus and memory constrained. It'll certainly be hard to feed data from the SATA drives unless you've got gobs of memory and your not working on large streams of data (like video).
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/
Finally, Apple's all about the perception. Apple has held back cpu releases because they wouldn't let a lower end cpu clock higher than a higher end chip. They did it with PPC 603&604 and I think they did it with G3 & G4.
It's against everything Apple's ever done to have 3.0 GHz dual dual-core towers in the mid range and 2.33GHz quad-core cpus in the high end.
I see some options here..
Maybe we'll get the dual 2.66 quad cores in one high end system. The price will go up.
Alternately.. this could finally be a rumored Mac Station.. or.. Apple has yet to announce a cluster node version of the intel XServe.
Geez.. almost forgot.
For most people... the Core2 desktop systems bench better than the 4core systems or even the dual Core2 Xeon systems because the DDR2 is lower latency than the FBDIMMs. To all the gamers.. you don't want slower clocked quad core chips.. not even on the desktop. You want a speed bump of the Core2 Duo.
