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8-Core Mac Pro with Clovertown... in November?

There Is Nothing Early About Dual Covertowns Added To Mac Pro Offerings

twoodcc said:
well i must say i'd be kinda suprized to see an update this early with apple. especially since i just bought a mac pro. i'd be mad if the prices of the one i just bought goes down
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It is not early. You should have known about this since August. I did.
 
I can't think of what I'd possibly need that kind of power for here at home, but just the extravagance of having 8 CPUs ticking away is tempting in itself.
 
That is ridiculous. More proof, if any more was needed, that Apple made a big mistake in changing over to Intel.
 
mhar4 said:
That is ridiculous. More proof, if any more was needed, that Apple made a big mistake in changing over to Intel.
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No more proof is needed. The stock is up, sales are great, performance is continually climbing...what were they thinking....
 
ONE THING IS CLEAR:

Multitasking, multiprocessor, multithreading Mac OS X and applications are needed right now and will be much needed in the future.

Because microprocessors will evolve not with more Mhz, but basically with more cores and more microprocessors per Mac.

And the same on Linux and Windows. So, hopefully, default true multithreading is around the corner. Or else all this power will be wasted for most applications.

JUST IMAGINE A COMPUTER IN WHICH EACH PIXEL IS CONTROLLED BY A SINGLE PROCESSOR.
 
zwida said:
OK. I know that many of my apps aren't going to take advantage of this level of multithreaded power, but I can't help but get excited by this development. After so many years of sluggish improvement, it feels like we're in the midst of rapid (and radical) change.

I'm hoping that the 8-core, 3.0 (or faster) GHz MacPro arrives the same day as Leopard and about the same time as CS3. I'd gladly swap my 2.66 GHz quad core...:)
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Many of the applications that graphics, audio, and video producers use do take advantage of the extra power. It just happens differently than one might think -- it has via better multitasking. It is up to the user to learn how to use quad and eight core boxes to improve production.

We've been learning this technique for the past year with PowerMac Quad Core and are blown away by how much more work we accomplish.

DJO
 
CTYankee said:
Open and doing something. Safari, Mail, iTunes, and working in photoshop probably won't benefit much from quad cores. Batching in PS, Aperture and doing a render in FCP would.

I am on the brink of buying something. What, time will tell. If the quad core does make a marked difference when running PS and at most one background process I'll consider it. Otherwise its a Dual core 2.66 for me.
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I could not disagree with you more. Our G5 and Mac Pro Quads give us an extra production hour, at least, per day, using many of the apps you mentioned above. It is up to the user the know how to push these boxes.

Just today, we processed 8.7 Gig of Photoshop documents (high res art scans from a lambda flatbed of 4x8 foot originals at 300 dpi -- i know the artist was crazy, but it is what we GOT.) -- We open all this data over 20 docs, changed RGB to CMYK, adjusted color, resized to a normal size, sharpened, added masks and saved. We did all this in 40 minutes -- that is 2 minutes per average size doc of 600MB.

Are you really going to tell me that my G5 Dual 2.7 could hang like this.

No Way -- We had activity monitor open -- Photoshop used an average of 72% off ALL FOUR PROCESSORS.

We did use safari at the same time to download a template for the art book (250 MG) and we had a DVD ripping via Mac the Ripper as well.

Quad Core Rules. Soon to be OCTO.
 
I had a sneaky feeling since August this might happen so I decided not to take the plunge with a MacPro straight away. :D

*gleefully rubs hands in anticipation*

*shuts down g5, goes to bathroom, brushes teeth, goes to bedroom, gets changed. Goes down stairs. Jumps in car. Drives to work. Gets to work. Turns on 'ancient' G3. Sighs loudly*

*Logs back in to MacRumors*
 
parenthesis said:
If history serves as a template for the future
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Honestly, with Apple, history doesn't serve as much of a template for the future when you think about it.
 
dante@sisna.com said:
No Way -- We had activity monitor open -- Photoshop used an average of 72% off ALL FOUR PROCESSORS.
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Wow. You must be using some uber version of PS.
I havent managed to break 110% whatever I am doing with my MP.
You have the CS 3 or 4?


dante@sisna.com said:
We did use safari at the same time to download a template for the art book (250 MG) and we had a DVD ripping via Mac the Ripper as well.
Click to expand...


Ooooh..
Have you tought that that might be the reason for the high cpu usage? Eh? By any coincidence?
 
anyone know how loud the new 8-core pros might be? probably impossible to speculate, but i would imagine that it will produce more heat and need better cooling than any of the current offerings.
 
killr_b said:
That was with the flicker filter on max, and a minor color corection using the color corrector.
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Maybe the drives couldn't feed the CPUs fast enough. This is going to be a problem going forward unless Apple gets hardware RAID in there,
 
bigwig said:
MacOSX scales very poorly compared to (say) Linux, Irix, or AIX, owing to its Mach underpinnings. 8 cpus won't get you much over 4 until Apple rips out the Mach guts and replaces it.
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This may have been true prior to 10.4 in which OSX had essentially two funnels for processes to go to. In 10.4 they expanded that and in 10.5 they're taking it even further with features like separating OpenGL rendering on to a second CPU core even if the app isn't multithreaded.
 
Marx55 said:
JUST IMAGINE A COMPUTER IN WHICH EACH PIXEL IS CONTROLLED BY A SINGLE PROCESSOR.
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I've used one. Back in the 1980s, beginning of the 90s. The low end model had 1024 processors and the high end model 4096 processors. It was a pig to program. When drawing on the screen you split the task at hand up into many parallel threads each drawing a part of the screen. Not quite 1 CPU per pixel but you get the idea.
 
arn said:
If the pricing is any indication, the (low end) Quad Core 2.33GHz Clovertown is the same price as the (high end) 3.0GHz Dual-core Xeon...

so unless the bottom of the line Mac Pro is expected to start at $3298, the current Dual-Core Xeon Mac Pros will stick around.

arn
Click to expand...

Then again, the way Apple's pro segment machines have been going up in both power and price...
 
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