Advantages of i7 versus i5 ?

[NutsNGum]

Wow, I thought I was a nerd until I saw this thread. Kudos, everyone.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

On the home front I will lightly indulge in digital photography. As a hobby only. And I'll get a flatbed scanner to digitize perhaps 150 old rolls of B&W negatives and then print.

If your scanning will be mainly 35mm film, I'd suggest looking into a dedicated film scanner. They're better for small format than any flatbed. The only drawback to that is that the best ones, such as the Nikons and Minoltas, are all out of production, which means trying to find a good used one at a reasonable price, which can be hard.

 

[bawbac]

Two more questions from the OP. With Mac Expo coming up in April, will prices on existing i5 iMacs drop following new model introductions? I want to time my purchase.

And does anyone know what the standard MUG group discount is?

The typical price drop on current models being phased out when a new model is introduced is about $100 (which you can get close to this discount now at various places like BB, Amazon, etc.).
Apple knows they will deplete their current models at these prices so no need for them to do a "liquidation sale" to clear out current stock.
They also probably slow down or stop production of current models when they have a new model coming out so their backlog of current stock is low.

 

[garycurtis]

For only a $100 drop in price, it would then seem advantageous to get the newer model. It would, I hope, have new features that are more than just cosmetic.

Do you think new iMacs will have an option for a solid state drive? And if not, will there be a Thunderbolt-ready external SDD in the near future?

 

[rocknblogger]

Very interesting thread but some stuff just a wee bit over my head?

Simple question. When converting an avi to AppleTV 2 mpeg4, how much faster would the current i7 be over the current i5 (iMac)?

On my Windows PC with i7 920 Quad 12GB's RAM it takes about 15 minutes to convert a two hour movie. Can I expect approximately the same performance on a current i5 iMac?

 

[monokakata]

If your scanning will be mainly 35mm film, I'd suggest looking into a dedicated film scanner. They're better for small format than any flatbed. The only drawback to that is that the best ones, such as the Nikons and Minoltas, are all out of production, which means trying to find a good used one at a reasonable price, which can be hard.

Let's assume those are 36-exposure rolls. Here's more simple arithmetic:

150 x 36 = 5,400 negatives to be scanned.

I have a Nikon Coolscan 4000. As I remember (I haven't used it for a while) it can take up to 4-5 minutes to scan a single negative or slide, when I figure in handling, cleaning, etc. I'll go for 4 minutes.

5,400 x 4 = 21,600 minutes = 360 hours.

I find that sort of work mind-numbing, but let's say that the OP can stand it for 4 hours a day.

That's 90 days, and that's why my thousands of b/w negatives and thousands of slides remain unscanned. Or part of it, anyway.

The scans will be better than from any flatbed scanner. The OP is going to have to weigh what's important to him.

It's a very hard problem to solve. There are solutions out there but they are either time-consuming or expensive. I'm looking at the one where everything is sent off to India and worked on slide by slide by the same person.

As for the 1000+ page InDesign project -- I'd ask about that project over in Design and Graphics. I've done a little InDesign, and have read about large projects . . . I think that 1000+ pages is going to require some seriously heavy lifting.

 

[garycurtis]

Ouch, Mono. I'll have to rethink the whole matter. I don't feel comfortable sending my negatives to India, and don't have a trained Chimpanzee to do the work for me at home.

The InDesign project is the complete flight manual for the 747. It's all in Pagemaker format right now, so I have to import into InDesign and then cherry pick specific sections, mostly single pages.

 

[forty2j]

Ouch, Mono. I'll have to rethink the whole matter. I don't feel comfortable sending my negatives to India, and don't have a trained Chimpanzee to do the work for me at home.

The InDesign project is the complete flight manual for the 747. It's all in Pagemaker format right now, so I have to import into InDesign and then cherry pick specific sections, mostly single pages.

I would think you'd want that in iBooks...


Edit: NVM. Just got my wires crossed with another article about iPads on planes. (Unless what you're doing is producing the manual for iPad consumption?)

 

[Melbourne Park]

I would think you'd want that in iBooks...


Edit: NVM. Just got my wires crossed with another article about iPads on planes. (Unless what you're doing is producing the manual for iPad consumption?)

I think that QuarkXpress v9 outputs its page layouts to iPad very easily. Not sure that Indesign does that as simply.

 

[monokakata]

Ouch, Mono. I'll have to rethink the whole matter. I don't feel comfortable sending my negatives to India, and don't have a trained Chimpanzee to do the work for me at home.

The InDesign project is the complete flight manual for the 747. It's all in Pagemaker format right now, so I have to import into InDesign and then cherry pick specific sections, mostly single pages.

I'm surprised that the B747 manual is only about 1000 pages!

As for the India option, it's a very interesting one. These are the people:

http://www.scancafe.com/about-us

If you look through their site, you'll see that they have many safeguards in place, particularly with regard to shipping. I'm leaning strongly towards using them, within the year.

For me, the alternative is (realistically) to keep wondering what the hell to do, and do nothing, while the images age. And the people whose way of life (in the Southwestern Pacific, late 60s-early 70s) they document really should have them in a form they can use. In the rainforest, slides and negatives wouldn't last long. DVDs will last much longer; they have computers now, and I can always send out fresh copies. Or my descendents can.

 

[itsmrjon]

Interesting stuff. This is consistent with my observations on Westmere-based clusters. For parallel codes (typically MPI based, not OpenMP thread based), using HTs can yield a benefit if the code is bottenecked on the arithmetic functional units and message passing overhead of running 2x the number of MPI processes is small. If memory bandwidth is the issue or the parallel scaling when running 2x the number of MPI processes is bad, then performance will be slower. For the majority of computationally intensive parallel applications, HTs are not an advantage. What you are running matters. On our clusters, we have HTs enabled but you are free to use or not use them. Logically, CPUs 0-11 are the "real" CPUs and CPUs 12-23 are the "Hyperthreads".

I've never considered running MPI with HT. Mainly because I've always assumed that the communication would negate the ability to make up idle time. I've only used it in shared memory parallelization. I kinda want to give it a shot. Do you have any example problems where it would yield a benefit?

Lately I've had a huge interest in mixed parallel programming, using MPI to distribute among nodes, OpenMP to distribute among local processors on nodes, and FCUDA/FortranCL to schedule along GPUs. I've tasted superlinear speedups... feels good man.

Do you think new iMacs will have an option for a solid state drive? And if not, will there be a Thunderbolt-ready external SDD in the near future?

More than likely yes, there will be SSD options as there currently are.
There are already thunderbolt SSD on the market, although they are extremely pricey. For example the LaCie little big disk has a 240GB thunderbolt option.

 

[tuccillo]

GROMACS is an example of a code that can run better with HTs. It is an MPI code. Depending on the problem being solved, it may run faster using HTs - essentially 2x the number of MPI tasks for a fixed number of "real" CPUs. Some problems, and "real" CPU counts, do not show an advantage - need to run the experiments.

I first started using the "hybrid" MPI/OpenMP paradigm back in the late 90s on IBM clsuters when they first introduced SMP nodes ( 4-way PPC). "hybrid" can yield a performance advantage but the insertion of the OpenMP directive must be well done otherwise tou are better off just running "pure" MPI (i.e one MPI process per core).

I've never considered running MPI with HT. Mainly because I've always assumed that the communication would negate the ability to make up idle time. I've only used it in shared memory parallelization. I kinda want to give it a shot. Do you have any example problems where it would yield a benefit?

Lately I've had a huge interest in mixed parallel programming, using MPI to distribute among nodes, OpenMP to distribute among local processors on nodes, and FCUDA/FortranCL to schedule along GPUs. I've tasted superlinear speedups... feels good man.


More than likely yes, there will be SSD options as there currently are.
There are already thunderbolt SSD on the market, although they are extremely pricey. For example the LaCie little big disk has a 240GB thunderbolt option.

 

[iTiki]

I understand the advantage of wanting a i7 for video editing, but how about for digital photography? I use PS, Aperture and various plugins. Any recommendations on CPU and RAM for those applications? Thanks.

 

[Melbourne Park]

Analyse the bottlenecks

I understand the advantage of wanting a i7 for video editing, but how about for digital photography? I use PS, Aperture and various plugins. Any recommendations on CPU and RAM for those applications? Thanks.

IMO RAM and hard disk would be more obvious speed bottlenecks for PS. If you do lots of layering, that is not CPU intensive; it is primarilly RAM and when virtualising due to file size, then the hard disk becomes an issue. Also loading large files would effect performance.

Hence I reckon that a good dose of RAM, and SSD drive, would benefit speed more than an i7 v a QUAD i5.

I am unsure of the screen car effecting PS though ... others would have to comment on that.

 

[daleelliott]

refirb imacs

looking to get a refurbished imac from the apple store and can't wait. currently have a really outdated system: PPC G5. using for graphic design business - photoshop, illustrator, indesign, and quark. no video editing at this point.

it sounds like the i7s are "better" than i5s. but is something released in may 2011 superior to july 2010 and would it likely last longer?

which do you think would work best for my described situation? either one would be a major improvement.

Refurbished iMac 27-inch 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
Originally released May 2011
27-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display
4GB memory
1TB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics with 512MB memory

Built-in FaceTime HD camera
$1,419.00
Save $280.00

OR

Refurbished iMac 27-inch 2.93GHz Intel Quad-Core i7 processor
Originally released July 2010
27-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display
4GB memory
1TB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB memory
Built-in iSight camera
$1,569.00

thanks!

 

[iTiki]

IMO RAM and hard disk would be more obvious speed bottlenecks for PS. If you do lots of layering, that is not CPU intensive; it is primarilly RAM and when virtualising due to file size, then the hard disk becomes an issue. Also loading large files would effect performance.

Hence I reckon that a good dose of RAM, and SSD drive, would benefit speed more than an i7 v a QUAD i5.

I am unsure of the screen car effecting PS though ... others would have to comment on that.

Thanks. Thinking of getting mini on the next upgrade. Definitely will go SSD and 8 or 16 on the RAM. Just was not sure on the CPU.

 

[srf4real]

Thanks. Thinking of getting mini on the next upgrade. Definitely will go SSD and 8 or 16 on the RAM. Just was not sure on the CPU.

Yes. SSD is best bang for buck, certainly. I have the current mini server as my main workstation with ssd, 8GB (waiting for 2x8GB to come down in price) and it astonishes me with its performance in every aspect. Including CS5.5, Final Cut X and Handbrake. I don't game my computers.

In other related threads here, some i5 dual core mini owners seem underwhelmed even with the graphics card. Gotta go quad core i7 imo.