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

[Eidorian]

Multimedia, I was wondering if you could address the FSB issue being discussed by a few people here, namely how more and more cores using the same FSB per chip can push only so much data through that 1333 MHZ pipe, thereby making the FSB act as a bottleneck. Any thoughts?

It honestly depends on if those processors are going to fully saturate the FSB. If the FSB has a high enough data transfer rate then it shouldn't matter much that the cross talk between processors is over the FSB and not onboard via shared cache.

 

[~Shard~]

It honestly depends on if those processors are going to fully saturate the FSB. If the FSB has a high enough data transfer rate then it shouldn't matter much that the cross talk between processors is over the FSB and not onboard via shard cache.

Thanks Eldorian, I appreciate the insight. Oh, and I think you meant "shared cache", although I honestly don't mind having cache named after me...

 

[slinger1968]

I don't think Cloverton will run on standard DDR2. Kentsfield sure but doesn't Xeon REQUIRE ECC/FB-DIMM?

Yeah, you are correct it would have to be Kentsfield because of the Xeon chipset/motherboard design requires ECC/FB-DIMMs.

What you are asking for will be Kentsfield not single Clovertown.

You are correct, I lumped both 4 core chips under the Clovertown name.

I would love a Kentsfield "desktop" based tower but I don't know if Apple wants to add another product line.

 

[Eidorian]

I would love a Kentsfield "desktop" based tower but I don't know if Apple wants to add another product line.

Yeah I'd love one too. A little pricey for a process since it's in the Extreme series though.

 

[04440]

Yeah

The quad cores are already amazing.. Shoot.. I can't imagine where are programs are going. You know there's going to be that program that will only run on these 2 quad cores. Disgusting. But beautiful.. I don't want to start counting down the days for this release. I'm still burnt out about the MBP C2D. I'm waiting for my mac store to get it in stock.

 

[Multimedia]

No Thoughts

Multimedia, I was wondering if you could address the FSB issue being discussed by a few people here, namely how more and more cores using the same FSB per chip can push only so much data through that 1333 MHZ pipe, thereby making the FSB act as a bottleneck. Any thoughts?

No thoughts. Hope for the best.

 

[c.hilding]

You are right Multimedia, it's too early to worry about the FSB, we don't even know what rate they've put it at yet.

 

[slinger1968]

Yeah I'd love one too. A little pricey for a process since it's in the Extreme series though.

I was thinking about the mainstream quadcore Kentsfield chips that will be released in Q1 07 but even an Extreme series 2.66GHz Kentsfield (~ $999) will be a lot cheaper than a 2 chip 2.66GHz Woodcrest ($715 x 2 @newegg).

I'd guess the mainstream 2.4GHz quad-core Kentsfield will be somewhere around $700, certainly cheaper than two 2.33GHz Woodcrest chips(I know this isn't currently an option on the Mac Pro) and probably about the same as two 2GHz Woodcrest chips.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4217

Plus the chipset/motherboard and ram will be cheaper too.

By next spring/summer, just in time for CS3, Apple could reasonably sell a single chip quad-core Kentsfield towers for no more than $1999 but I don't think there's much of a chance it will happen. Too bad

 

[Trishul]

ah i'm so glad i check this website, sold my Quad G5 day before yesterday, and put in an order for a Mac Pro, that would have arrived Tuesday, fortunately (at least i hope it turns out that way) i saw this news last night, being unable to cancel online, i had to call and have just now cancelled the order. Don't know how to read into this, and i doubt customer services are in possession of such information but when the lady asked me why i was cancelling i mentioned hearing about new version coming out, it was news to her she thought i was making it up, so she put me on hold, and came back after a minute or two, i was worried she was coming back with news saying i couldn't cancel my order or something, but she had a different tone as if someone told her the news was true and she was happy to cancel.

But seriously i wish there was some more concrete news of the Octo core, i'm going to have to finish off a lot of work this weekend before i ship my G5 on Monday, as i'm going to be without a Mac for at least 2-3 weeks, and even if the new Revision comes out as planned lord knows what the waiting time will be, what if they have option of x1950 or something and we are looking at the delays like before?

Looks like i have an excuse to get one of those new fangled MB Pros. no Mac for a month, can not imagine it.

 

[Multimedia]

Selling a G5 Quad Classic? I Don't Get It.

ah i'm so glad i check this website, sold my Quad G5 day before yesterday, and put in an order for a Mac Pro, that would have arrived Tuesday, fortunately (at least i hope it turns out that way) i saw this news last night, being unable to cancel online, i had to call and have just now cancelled the order. Don't know how to read into this, and i doubt customer services are in possession of such information but when the lady asked me why i was cancelling i mentioned hearing about new version coming out, it was news to her she thought i was making it up, so she put me on hold, and came back after a minute or two, i was worried she was coming back with news saying i couldn't cancel my order or something, but she had a different tone as if someone told her the news was true and she was happy to cancel.

But seriously i wish there was some more concrete news of the Octo core, i'm going to have to finish off a lot of work this weekend before i ship my G5 on Monday, as i'm going to be without a Mac for at least 2-3 weeks, and even if the new Revision comes out as planned lord knows what the waiting time will be, what if they have option of x1950 or something and we are looking at the delays like before?

Looks like i have an excuse to get one of those new fangled MB Pros. no Mac for a month, can not imagine it.

I don't want to seem judgemental, but the last thing I ever plan on doing is selling my G5 Quad. I mean like I will have my G5 Quad until I DIE. Why would you do that? It runs classic. It runs Adobe native. It is pretty fast for email and word processing. And it runs dead silent. It's the perfect backup for when the Mac Pro goes down. At the very least it makes for a great HDTV player and recorder with EyeTV 500 or Hybrid attached.

What was your reasoning?

And what's up with you not knowing the 8-core was coming? This is very old news. Some of us have known since early this year.

 

[bigwig]

That is simply false. The schedular in Mac OS X handles 8 cores just fine... what Applications do with them in a different story.

Scaling isn't really a product of your scheduler, it's a product of eliminating bottlenecks to multiple threads of execution. I'm glad that Apple is working on this. I didn't come up with this from whole cloth or animosity towards Apple, I saw several benchmarks showing how poorly OSX scaled, which I hope are now out of date.

I mentioned SGI several times here because I used to do kernel work for them, so I have a real good idea what it takes to scale performance on large (256-1024 CPU) systems. Btw, that's not a cluster, that's a single kernel being shared by all processors.

 

[bigwig]

At the rate SGI is going, I could probably buy SGI myself for whatever is in my pocket within the next year. Talk about a company that failed to follow the industry and adapt with the times.

Probably true, and quite sad really. SGI was a heck of a company in its day. I'm not sure they could have adapted. Once everybody else abandoned MIPS SGI couldn't afford new processor revisions by themselves, and the false promise that was (and is) Itanium irrevocably doomed them. Itanium basically killed off all the competition when the Unix vendors all hopped on the Itanium bandwagon, and Intel's complete failure to deliver on Itanium's promises looks in hindsight to have been Intel's plan all along. Just think of the performance a MIPS cpu would have were it given the development dollars x86 gets.

No point in anyone buying them, the only thing keeping them afloat is the few tidbits of technology they've licensed over the years, which is all just about obsolete now anyway.

SGI's technology isn't so much obsolete (who else sells systems with the capacity of an Altix 4700?) as it is unnecessary. 4 CPU Intel machines do just fine for 99.9% of people these days, and the kind of problems SGI machines are good at solving are a tiny niche. That's not just number crunching, a big SGI machine has I/O capacity that smokes a PC cluster.

 

[bigwig]

Multimedia, I was wondering if you could address the FSB issue being discussed by a few people here, namely how more and more cores using the same FSB per chip can push only so much data through that 1333 MHZ pipe, thereby making the FSB act as a bottleneck. Any thoughts?

I don't know if Intel ever changed it, but one of the historical reasons you couldn't make a scalable multi-cpu x86 system is that x86s did bus snooping. Once you got more than ~3-4 x86s on the same bus the bus would be saturated by snooping traffic and there would be little room for real data. I think that's why Intel is pushing multi-core so much, it's a hack to work around Intel's broken bus. The RISC cpus (MIPS et al) didn't do that, that's why all the high cpu count systems used them.

 

[sblasl]

Perspective Please

I am in the process of selling my Dual 2.0 GHz PPC. I was planning on replacing it with the Mac Pro 2.66 GHz. Should I consider holding off in the purchase of the new system. What potential impact would there be the system that I am considering buying?

On a forward thinking basis, what potential(speculation) revisions are possible to this system in the next 6 - 12 months?

Thanks

 

[~Shard~]

I don't know if Intel ever changed it, but one of the historical reasons you couldn't make a scalable multi-cpu x86 system is that x86s did bus snooping. Once you got more than ~3-4 x86s on the same bus the bus would be saturated by snooping traffic and there would be little room for real data. I think that's why Intel is pushing multi-core so much, it's a hack to work around Intel's broken bus. The RISC cpus (MIPS et al) didn't do that, that's why all the high cpu count systems used them.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the info.

 

[combatcolin]

Bugger only 8 Cores.

Not swiping my Visa card till they get to 1024 Cores....

 

[Multimedia]

If You Need 8-Cores, You Would Know It Already

I am in the process of selling my Dual 2.0 GHz PPC. I was planning on replacing it with the Mac Pro 2.66 GHz. Should I consider holding off in the purchase of the new system. What potential impact would there be the system that I am considering buying?

On a forward thinking basis, what potential(speculation) revisions are possible to this system in the next 6 - 12 months?

Know your workload. Do you use applications that are multi-core aware? Do you want to run them simultaneously? Do you want to run several applications simultaneously - each doing work at the same time? Leopard is bound to be very multi-core friendly since 4 cores will be the norm when it ships.

Since you have hung on to the Dual 2GHz model for far past its hayday, I'm thinking you don't need 8 cores. I had a Dual 2GHz G5 back in '04 and got the 2.5 soon as it went refurb early '05. By early '06 I was in a panic with not enough power to do my Multi-Threaded Workload. I was in a cold sweat when I ordered the Quad G5 in early February.

I found its limit within a few months and have been enthusiastically awaiting these 8-core Dual Clovertown Mac Pros since before the 4-core Mac Pro shipped.

Since that does not describe you, you may be happy with the 4 core Mac Pro. But if you can afford it and you do Video, 3D work, lots of heavy Photoshop processes and/or want to run a bunch of single core processes simultaneously in the course of a day and/or nights, you would be much better off in the long run with the upcoming 8-core. Figure with RAM it will run you around or above $4k. Does that work for you?

Oh, and I'm not selling my Quad G5 either.

 

[AppliedVisual]

Probably true, and quite sad really. SGI was a heck of a company in its day. I'm not sure they could have adapted. Once everybody else abandoned MIPS SGI couldn't afford new processor revisions by themselves, and the false promise that was (and is) Itanium irrevocably doomed them. Itanium basically killed off all the competition when the Unix vendors all hopped on the Itanium bandwagon, and Intel's complete failure to deliver on Itanium's promises looks in hindsight to have been Intel's plan all along. Just think of the performance a MIPS cpu would have were it given the development dollars x86 gets.

SGI tried to build more popularity for MIPS by spinning it off as a totally separate company in the late '90s. But other than embedded applications and various closed architecture implementations, the MIPS CPUs became a dead product line. Too bad, they were always fairly nice CPUs... As for the Itanium deal, the only major UNIX vendor that essentially sunk with the Itanic was SGI. Sun just brushed it off and moved on, as did HP and IBM. SGI's ship was sinking long before thier jump to IA64... They initially started to even go x86 and it was totally obvious that this would work for them. But I think their corporate leadership and investors panicked when suddenly they had two Windows systems on the market that were outperforming their current model Irix workstations for less than half the price. If SGI was smart, they would have dug right in and milked that cow for all it was worth and continued to expand their x86 lines... 64bit x86 was already on the drawing board back then so it wasn't an unknown factor. SGI would have done well to port Irix to x86, too bad they didn't have the foresight to do it.

SGI's technology isn't so much obsolete (who else sells systems with the capacity of an Altix 4700?) as it is unnecessary. 4 CPU Intel machines do just fine for 99.9% of people these days, and the kind of problems SGI machines are good at solving are a tiny niche. That's not just number crunching, a big SGI machine has I/O capacity that smokes a PC cluster.

Altix is nice, but hardly unique in todays marketplace. That and it's still Itanium based, which is a glaring red flag. I'd much rather go for one of Sun's large-scale solutions based on Opteron CPUs. It may only give me 90% of the per-CPU performance with 70% of the bandwidth across the entire cluster, but it's also half the price and I know that the CPU architecture will still be supported several years from now. Itanium is all but dead and Intel doesn't even seem interested in supporting it anymore. Most major workstation and server vendors have dropped it already and Intel has missed ship dates for most of the IA64 products on their roadmap. SGI claims they came out of bankruptcy a very focused and agile company... Yet they're still producing products based on a CPU architecture most the rest of the industry has already written off. So yeah, niche market for sure. SGI can't even muster the resources to continue development of Irix and it's being discontinued this year. So now all they have is some overgrown IA64 Linux boxes. What's going to happen if their current sales figures stay about the same and their own technologies dry up? They're just going to become another business-oriented Linux server vendor placing off-the-shelf components in some of the prettiest boxes around for a super-premium price. ...That's practically all they are now and the only thing that really differentiates their products (other than the cool system bezels and rack enclosures) is their NUMALink design.

I used to be very fond of SGI and their products, but that was years ago... The past 6 years have been a continuous downhill spiral and the company I once loved has been dead and gone for a long time now.

 

[gnasher729]

Simple swap has already been tested and confirmed to work in early September by Anandtech.Not really. The 2.66GHz Clovertown lists @ $1172 vs. $851 for both the 2.33GHz Clovertown and the 3GHz Woodie. Since Apple charges +$800 for a 3GHz Dual Woodie, this means they will likely charge only +$1100 for the 2.66GHz Dual Clovertown - total $3599. Hardly expensive at all. I'd say they are going to be a bargain and LESS EXPENSIVE when you look at the per core price of $450 - or PLUS $275 for each of four more cores.2.66GHz is not significantly slower than 3GHz - especially when the workload can be shared among many more.

There is one error in your calculation: The 2.33 GHz Clovertown and 3.00 GHz Woodcrest cost the same, so you would expect the same price for both systems (price of 2.66GHz Woodcrest + $800, like today). However, the price difference between 2.66GHz Clovertown and 2.33GHz Clovertown is $1172 - $851 = $321 _per chip_ which makes it $642 _per eight core system_.

 

[Multimedia]

So $3899 For The 2.66GHz Dual Clovertown Is Still A Bargain

There is one error in your calculation: The 2.33 GHz Clovertown and 3.00 GHz Woodcrest cost the same, so you would expect the same price for both systems (price of 2.66GHz Woodcrest + $800, like today). However, the price difference between 2.66GHz Clovertown and 2.33GHz Clovertown is $1172 - $851 = $321 _per chip_ which makes it $642 _per eight core system_.

Quite. So + $1400 you think makes it $3899. No problem. Still a bargain - at least for me it is. My cars are all paid for.

 

[Eidorian]

Know your workload. Do you use applications that are multi-core aware? Do you want to run them simultaneously? Do you want to run several applications simultaneously - each doing work at the same time? Leopard is bound to be very multi-core friendly since 4 cores will be the norm when it ships.

Since you have hung on to the Dual 2GHz model for far past its hayday, I'm thinking you don't need 8 cores. I had a Dual 2GHz G5 back in '04 and got the 2.5 soon as it went refurb early '05. By early '06 I was in a panic with not enough power to do my Multi-Threaded Workload. I was in a cold sweat when I ordered the Quad G5 in early February.

I found its limit within a few months and have been enthusiastically awaiting these 8-core Dual Clovertown Mac Pros since before the 4-core Mac Pro shipped.

Since that does not describe you, you may be happy with the 4 core Mac Pro. But if you can afford it and you do Video, 3D work, lots of heavy Photoshop processes and/or want to run a bunch of single core processes simultaneously in the course of a day and/or nights, you would be much better off in the long run with the upcoming 8-core. Figure with RAM it will run you around or above $4k. Does that work for you?

Oh, and I'm not selling my Quad G5 either.

I know your love for the only Quad G5 ever made. (There was a quad 604e clone. Does that count? )

I haven't hit my performance wall on my Core Duo 2.0 GHz yet. So I'll be keep this thing for longer then my G5. I have Intel's roadmap memorized so I know when to expect a new purchase. Now to wait for 2 GB of RAM...

 

[sblasl]

OK, so I now know what the potential capabilities of the new machines will have. If I look at the Apple Store and see the 3 current base options & price, when the release occurs, what is the speculation of choices & prices?

I am also wanting to know that if I have decided that the current 2.66 GHz meets my needs, should I hold off because they may bump the speed, lower the price, etc., etc. I also understand that everything is pure speculation. I am also not wanting to shoot myself because something else happens to the current line up.

I appreciate the thorough & in-depth responses. It helps.

 

[sblasl]

Has any one installed a Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive in one of the current systems to use as their boot drive?

 

[Multimedia]

You Should Wait To See What Else Changes When Dual Clovertown Is Added

OK, so I now know what the potential capabilities of the new machines will have. If I look at the Apple Store and see the 3 current base options & price, when the release occurs, what is the speculation of choices & prices?

I am also wanting to know that if I have decided that the current 2.66 GHz meets my needs, should I hold off because they may bump the speed, lower the price, etc., etc. I also understand that everything is pure speculation. I am also not wanting to shoot myself because something else happens to the current line up.

I appreciate the thorough & in-depth responses. It helps.

This is a fairly short thread. All your questions and answers have been discussed in depth above. You should wait in case there is more base RAM to 2GB since that's the new base in MacBook Pros.

Figure Plus $800-$1400 for the 8-core

 

[Multimedia]

150GB Boot Drive Seems Way Too Small For Me

Has any one installed a Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive in one of the current systems to use as their boot drive?

What's your best price on that puppy? I've been wanting to do that for a while. But my 500GB boot drive is almost full all the time.

Wish they made a 500GB Raptor.