Dell Precision vs Mac Pro

[cmaier]

Yeah, Pixar has several but the monster is all blades...
I was talking more like D2, Pinewood, and houses like that - usually 40 to 100 units maxed out memory, fast CPUs, and blazing network interfaces.

What you guys had sounds like a Beowulf, no?

Yep. Many thousand cpus cores spread across the world, running linux or sunos (mostly linux, at the end). Used LSF to distribute workload.

 

[Tesselator]

Yep. Many thousand cpus cores spread across the world, running linux or sunos (mostly linux, at the end). Used LSF to distribute workload.

Sounds like a whole BUNCH of fun! (is my geek showing?)

I updated my post on the previous page. A little tid-bit from the past.

 

[chewietobbacca]

Perhaps they have a little more significance in the PC machines and not so much apple.
The terms desktop, workstation, and server all have very IMPORTANT meanings to the chip, cache, code, chipset and motherboards it aligns to.
since apple only has the one desktop the relevance is not well relevant.

In the PC it matters based on the particular architecture and chipset. Being used. Again apple has 1 chipset for the MP so various levels of scalability don’t come into play

I think his point is that the differences between a desktop and workstation class is very minor now. And generally, I'd agree with that as well - we're not talking desktop versus server here.

As far as whether a lot of it is marketing hype... you betcha it is. Think about Intel Extreme processors.... for example, the QX9650 MSRP'd at over $1000. It was 3.0 GHz. You could get a Q9450 for a third the price for example and then OC it. Sure, the QX9650 had unlocked multiplie for overclocking, and tended to OC higher than non Extreme processors, but was it really worth paying 3x for essentially the same processor?

And since Apple moved to Intel, the fact is that all the boards/chipsets/CPU's etc. are made by the same OEMs in the world, so anyone saying that Apple has superior hardware is just dreaming. They use the same damn pieces.

 

[RebootD]

I've said it before if you are doing Video editing/3D rendering 24/7 by all means get a decked out Mac Pro/Dell Workstation but for web/print/video(non-feature film) I'd rather take my chances with a faster, cheaper desktop option.

Plus Dell and Apple are priced pretty close on the DP systems but the 2.66 Mac Pro is horribly overpriced. I would cut it a little more slack if Apple spent $50 for a 6 slot board, in fact I would probably own one right now.