I'm just looking forward to the day the word 'Dodeca-core' enters the common lexicon.
It worked with 'nano', didn't it?
Next year there should be icositetracore workstations, thanks to AMD.
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Details of Core i7-980X (Gulftown) Mac Pro Processors Leaked
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Next year there should be icositetracore workstations, thanks to AMD.
I like the case as it is. Its a great combination of form and function. Its cool that it looks nice as it is, but to sacrifice function for form then you screw it up.
As a Tool & Die maker/designer for over 25 years there are tons of things that can be done to modify ones own case. Since its aluminum there are many things you can do with it easily. If you want people to know you have the latest then write the specs on the case. Some of these ideas will warrant you having to tape up and seal all gaps and holes and others you will need to strip out the guts. Yes it involves work.
Want a shinny new mac? Alum is very easy to polish till it shines like chrome. Fine sandpaper then use alum wheel or other polish. Dont like the color? Get some vinyl and cover it, Or go to a sign shop and have them make a custom vinyl wrap for it. Don't like the sharp edges? Then get a file to it. Can even radius the edges or change the shape of the handles. Get or make some stencils and sandblast the case with a design, graphics/text you want on it. Get some paint or strip it out and have it powder coated. There are so many mods you can do to them Im really surprised that theres not a lot of people doing it or even reselling wrap kits etc for them. But then its a comp made for use as a workstation so not that many really care what it looks like only how it preforms and what can be connected to it or parts changed in it.
If a revised case design helps lower the over all cost, then I'm all for it. I think the current case design is beautiful and brilliant.
Bottom line for me is if Apple comes out with a new 6 core Mac Pro that supports more than 8gb with 2gb DIMMS (so at least 6 slots), with a good mid-range video card and is priced less than $2K I'll be interested. Heck I'd be interested even in a Quad Core at that price.
Cool, can't wait to buy... Hopefully it won't be a huge price increase. Anyone have any leaked benchmarks comparing the currently mac pro to the gulftown?
Apple isn't going to use these, they'll use 32nm Xeons instead (X56xx) which will be released on 16th of March. Basically same as Core i7-980X but under Xeon tag
So is the Xeon. At least, that's what people here have been telling when they talk about why a Mac pro is so expensive compared to a regular i7.
Mid-tower needed.
The problem is not the Mac Pro, but the fact that Apple has a huge gap in their lineup between the Mac Pro and the iMac. A large group of people, me included, wants a powerful and configurable mid-tower. We don't need a display and we want to be able add our own HDs and PCIe cards as needed. But we don't want to pay a gazillion dollars extra for Xeon server processors. i7 is fine for us.
The problem is not the Mac Pro, but the fact that Apple has a huge gap in their lineup between the Mac Pro and the iMac. A large group of people, me included, wants a powerful and configurable mid-tower. We don't need a display and we want to be able add our own HDs and PCIe cards as needed. But we don't want to pay a gazillion dollars extra for Xeon server processors. i7 is fine for us.
Apple could make their quads a mid tower and keep the dual quads a full tower.
They could call it a Mac Mini Pro and make it about the size of a shuttle PC.
Agreed. I'd love a Mac Mini with some more raw processing power and a user serviceable hard drive. I love the current iMacs, but the hard drive issue is a deal breaker for me. I go through a system hard drive in about 2 years, I just put lots of stress on the hard drives and they just break. Now there's no way of replacing the hard drive in iMacs without voiding the warranty and it's kind of complicated to do it yourself. And giving up your machine for a few weeks just to have the hard drive replaced is just not an option.
I really want something like the good old G4 cube: adequately powerful, user serviceable, and pretty portable. Even a Mac Pro cut in half (half the tower, just 2 drives, just 1 CPU, half the price, etc.) would be fine.
I was really disheartened to read this story.
I just sold a maxed out Nehalem 8-core. Buying it was a huge mistake. The performance was not thousands of dollars better than my 1st gen mac pro, and I had to mod it out to get it to a point of being impressive. Upgraded graphics card, 16 gigs of RAM, dual intel SSDs - all this made it very fast, but made Photoshop occasionally unstable.
What is the point of even 1000 cores if the current software can't use it? The main programs I use, Motion, Illustrator and Photoshop don't.
It just seems like more of the same to me. The iMac i7 is such a better deal for the money, in my opinion.
I just sold a maxed out Nehalem 8-core. Buying it was a huge mistake. The performance was not thousands of dollars better than my 1st gen mac pro, and I had to mod it out to get it to a point of being impressive. Upgraded graphics card, 16 gigs of RAM, dual intel SSDs - all this made it very fast, but made Photoshop occasionally unstable.
What is the point of even 1000 cores if the current software can't use it? The main programs I use, Motion, Illustrator and Photoshop don't.
It just seems like more of the same to me. The iMac i7 is such a better deal for the money, in my opinion.
You couldn't buy a computer with Power7 for four digits. Not in the US, and not in the UK.
It's like asking "What exactly is the point of of driving a dump truck to work."
The answer is that both are a waste of moneybut if you have need to move tons of dirt or if you are creating any kind of "media" content then they'd be good to have
The large magority of Mac users don't create anything, they use their macs are media viewers for Web content or Hollywood movies, music or games. The Mac Pros are for the minority who make the stuff the others watch.
Actually Apple has good software that uses all those cores. "Logic" is one and then there is Final Cut and Aperture.
On the consummer side Google's Chrome web browser uses one process per tab. Which can translate to one core per tab but few web sites need anything like that. Perhaps Google is planning somethinf?
The other thing that people forget is that some of us may want to have 2-3 external monitors connected. The iMac isn't too well suited for that, short of hooking up some plus t he internal one. However, I'd like to purchase displays and then re-use them 5 years down the road with another machine. The iMac can't help me there.
I disagree. My work Mac Pro is pretty darn big, heavy, and made of material that adds significantly to the cost while not boosting performance. It's the biggest computer in our office.
IIRC, you couldn't buy a PPC 970MP machine under $5k either....unless you got a G5 quad. Apple had been known to seriously undercut IBM on these.
That said, to whoever had that line about the DP Xeons also being server chips....they aren't THAT kind of server chip.
Oh, screw it. I'll just say it. I miss the "uniqueness" of PPC.
http://www.coolermaster.com/product.php?product_id=5777
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8_1cQkYTO4
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131390
Not to mention the E-ATX stuff that you could get.
Have you tried to buy one of these? Apple went with the Intel chip because of the economics not for the raw compute power. Those 16 core power pc computers cost $50K to over $100K.
The Mac Pro is afordable. The old Mac all-in-one for the erly 1980s sold for $3,500 and people bought those. It was wel worth the money they completely revolutionized the way we wrote papers and made vu-graph slides
intel hit 5GHz with the Pentium 4 years ago and it sucked. the chip was designed only for GHz and the performance was crap. AMD Athlon 64 was cheaper and faster at the time. This is why Intel went to the Centrino design that was based on the P3 for all future CPU's. it might not be as fast in GHz, but it's a lot more efficient and performs faster than the "faster" GHz CPU's.
except for late 1990's marketing, GHz has never been a good way to measure performance
Apple only uses the hot part in a single-socket Mac Pro. All the dual-socket Mac Pros use the 95W parts.
The fans in the oversized cooling towers on the Mac Pro CPUs are called BOOSTA and BOOSTB, meaning that Apple has purposefully designed in order to get maximum Turboboost from the Intel processors.
BAHHH.
What crap. I'm gunna sell my 08 ONLY if the 12 core model is reasonably priced; I doubt it will. The only reason is that the current 4-c0re is not superior. These machines hold value like none other. Buy//Sell and repeat! Whilst at the same time I will be purchasing PC parts and constructing a water cooled core I9 overclocked with USB 3.0, SATA 6.0, and SLI 300 series with next years SSD in RAID.. Should arrive in time to shame a future mac pro and cover it in bit vomit.
What crap. I'm gunna sell my 08 ONLY if the 12 core model is reasonably priced; I doubt it will. The only reason is that the current 4-c0re is not superior. These machines hold value like none other. Buy//Sell and repeat! Whilst at the same time I will be purchasing PC parts and constructing a water cooled core I9 overclocked with USB 3.0, SATA 6.0, and SLI 300 series with next years SSD in RAID.. Should arrive in time to shame a future mac pro and cover it in bit vomit.
More and more software is going to be multicore. If you buy a Mac Pro today and use it for the duration of your AppleCare (3-years) you will get a good return on investment.
Selling your Mac Pro got those perceived performance dollars back? Switch to decaf man, you pulled the trigger too soon on that one.
