Details of Core i7-980X (Gulftown) Mac Pro Processors Leaked

[eastcoastsurfer]

Wrong.

Go to AnandTech to see how the Nehalem Mac Pros use special Xeons without the Intel heat-spreader on top. They bind the bare cores directly to the cooling assemblies for a better thermal coupling.

Our IT department routinely replaces failed components in Dell towers, and has never had to replace a component in a Mac Pro over the same time period. One reason is that Apple uses very conservative designs -- they always use memory that is one step down from what the CPU can handle, for example. Gamers hate that, but it does extend the life of the components pretty dramatically. And anyway, LCDs are locked at 60 Hz, so Mac Pro is now a pretty damned good gaming platform as well.

And you think Apple isn't using bargain basement components? I've already replaced the mobo and the battery in my MBP. Great components they purchased there with their stepped down tight integration. The other problem is that you're comparing against Dell and your stats are flawed. How many Dells do you control? How many macs?

I still have an old OCed Celeron machine running at a family members house. I don't even know how old it is now. I have an Athlon 64 machine running as a server next to me, again not sure how old.

I know the Apple lovers hate to admit it, but great machines that last a long time can be built by home builders and companies other than Apple - usually at much less cost.

 

[*LTD*]

But will it run Crysis?

 

[Setmose]

But will it run Crysis?

Hell yes. And it looks gorgeous on the LED Cinema Display. 1920 x 1200 is almost a medium resolution these days, but damn it looks good on the Nehalem Mac Pro.

 

[Setmose]

your stats are flawed...

I don't even know how old it is now...

...again not sure how old...

MY stats are flawed?

 

[mosx]

The Mac Pro.. the most overpriced computer on the market.

It doesn't matter how fast your processor is if you still have to put several hundred dollars worth of upgrades into the system to bring it up to the same level of PCs costing half as much.

Look at the $2,499 Mac Pro. To get it to match a standard Core i7 PC at around $1,000 I need to double the RAM, put at least a 1TB HDD in there, if not more, blu-ray, and upgrade from that pathetic GeForce GT 120 to something actually modern.

Pretty quickly that $2,499 system ends up costing $3,000 or more.

And to think, I could have gotten almost no real world difference in processor performance, twice the RAM, double the HDD space, a blu-ray WRITER, and a GPU thats several times faster for a little more than 1/3 of that cost.

In the end, it wouldn't matter if there was a 36 thread Core i7/Xeon processor, as long as Apple is still shipping systems at well over $3,000 with overall specs that don't even match when you get for 1/3 of the cost in the PC world.

 

[Neodym]

The case needs a redesign. Everyone objecting to it are only looking at it from aesthetic points of view, but I am talking about expanding memory, hard drive, and video card configurations

That's exactly the point: The outer design is fine and probably hard to improve from a functional point of view (mmmh - maybe the handles could be a little bit more rounded).

But what is missing most in my opinion is the option to plug in 2,5" drives directly. SSD's have 2,5" as standard form factor these days, so it'd be very welcome to have bays for that without having to rely on flimsy plastic adapters. 2 bays for 3,5" drives (cheap storage) and 4 bays for 2,5" would allow for nice setups (including RAID's) while not taking up more space than the four 3,5" bays currently.

Being the creative company Apple has been in the past, why not make the case smaller, put a "normal" core i7 inside and offer only two 3,5" bays, which could optionally be populated with four 2,5" drives?! That would close the line-up gap many people complain about, while keeping the distance to the full-fledged workstation MacPro with four 3,5" bays, XEON CPU's, more memory sockets etc.

I bet many people would even accept the iMac as alternative if it had two externally acessible 2,5" drive bays and external I/O faster than FW800.

In any case there are many possible ways to improve the MacPro case without changing outer appearance (and actually this is what Apple did since the G5 days anyway - so one can still hope...).

 

[borcanm]

And I jizzed in my pants.

 

[azentropy]

and more than 4 memory slots and can support more than 16gb (the current entry Mac Pro only supported 8gb when first released).

Funny, but the Mac Pro has 8 memory slots in the DP version and is currently rated to 32 GB - at least. In most cases, Mac Pro systems have been able to handle larger RAM DIMMs when they became available, too.

But that isn't the entry level Mac Pro, which is what I stated. So I don't know what is funny!

 

[DeepIn2U]

Goddamn!

 

[crackbookpro]

I hope this Gulftown processor rumor is true. Hopefully by spring, the 4GB DD3 cards will have bumped down in price, so we can get 8GB or 12GB of RAM for the base Mac Pro model. I would also like to see dual Graphics card as an option even though I know you can add one as you go.

I want the 6-core, with 12GB of RAM, powerful dual 1GB GPU's. And I will worry about the monitor at a latter date.

 

[*LTD*]

Goddamn!

I agree.

But I have to admit, I've always found the inclusion of what appears to be a substandard videocard rather odd.

Sure, you can upgrade further on your own dime, but I'd still expect a very decent stock card.

Any actual reason for this?

 

[avidmacuser]

My 2006 quad core 2.66 MP with 5 Gig of Ram has been running fine for me. I've not noticed slowdown in any of my workflows and it's H.264 encoding has been acceptable. I recently put a Radeon 4870 in it (1 gig) and have been playing Bioshock at 2560x1600 with never a dip below 30 FPS....HOWEVER....

My wife is using a G4 iMac and I put her on notice that towards the end of next year I'll be looking at a New Mac Pro.....so she can have the 4 core machine.

I'm not doing it for me...it's for her, after all....

Maybe she'll surprise you and buy a new machine for herself before you buy yours.

 

[-hh]

...why a new case design for a tower computer is so important, especially regarding the Mac Pro? The design of the Mac Pro's case is extremely functional -the best in the industry- and for a machine that will probably either go into a machine room or under a desk, I honestly don't get the uproar over the Mac Pro case design.

Nicely said & agreed. The last thing that I want to put under my desk for the next 5 years is something that's going to be a hula-hoop fad.

This obsession with the Mac Pro's looks must be a gamer / geek thing.

Along with the constant cries for the xMac at 95% of the capability at 33% of the price.

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 ...

And what's also worth pointing out is that using the same design in manufacturing for years and years means fewer tooling changes, which means lower costs.

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 is that if our standard is to retain the same level of quality, changing the current case requires new tooling, which would result in a cost increase.

The case needs a redesign. Everyone objecting to it are only looking at it from aesthetic points of view, but I am talking about expanding memory, hard drive, and video card configurations

This is a reasonably fair statement, although I do have to question it to some degree:

• the current case supports four (4) HD's native .. the old G5 case only supported two (2).
• the current case supports two (2) opticals .. the old G5 only one (1)
• the current case supports more RAM .. YMMV on if counting RAM slots is really all that meaningful.
• video cards - - bus speeds have similarly improved, even if it doesn't necessarily have as many "16x" slots as a few people apparently want.

In general, a lot of these complaints have their basis in the home "serious hobbyist" niche - - this describes me too, BTW.

But to be realistic, do we really need to have a 5th HD slot when the reality is that our "need" is to keep online that old 160GB HD that our Mac originally came with, when we consider that we can have a 1.5TB drive ... 10x more storage ... sitting next to it for than $150? Suffice to say, this is a downright irrational requirement.


-hh

 

[avidmacuser]

So re-reading this story.... available in March... that's BS i want it now. I'm desperate for a new computer. Apple at least give me a new mbp in January

<grunt> YEA! What he said.

 

[evilcat]

The Mac Pro is a workstation, not a server. How in the world would you ever run that many parallel VMs on a WORKstation to benefit from 12 cores?

As a web designer, I need to quickly flip between the following:

Windows XP SP1 with IE6
Windows XP SP2 with IE6
Windows XP SP3 with IE7
Windows Vista with IE8
Windows 7 with IE8

That's five cores right there. The last benefit from 2 cores apiece when testing Flash. That's 7 cores.

Throw in the 4 that are generally in use while I run PS, Fireworks, Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, an FTP client, local copies of Firefox and Safari simultaneously...

I currently run VBox under Ubuntu and can get by with 4 cores running the above, and it's pretty good. My Quad G5 for development uses 200-300% most of the time while I'm working and purrs along nicely.

If I were to move up to a Mac Pro I'd want to dispose of the Linux box, so 8 cores would be a minimum for me to not experience a downgrade in quality.

My Quad G5 has run for nearly four years and still works fine. I expect to see it through to a full five years. Whatever I buy after that I would want to be just as future-proof, so I expect 8-12 cores will do the job.

 

[AidenShaw]

You don't need a core per VM

As a web designer, I need to quickly flip between the following:

Windows XP SP1 with IE6
Windows XP SP2 with IE6
Windows XP SP3 with IE7
Windows Vista with IE8
Windows 7 with IE8

That's five cores right there. The last benefit from 2 cores apiece when testing Flash. That's 7 cores.

Cores are not statically assigned to VMs or other programs - they're dynamically assigned millisecond-by-millisecond when a thread needs to compute.

If you "flip between" the VMs, you'll almost never need more than the number of cores equal to the number of virtual CPUs in the VM (a dual CPU VM will need two cores when it's at 200% CPU (100% in Windows)). Your "7 cores" calculation isn't accurate unless you have background tasks on each VM that are constantly computing.

On the other hand, if you have 2 GiB RAM for each VM, you'll chew up 10 GiB with your five machines most of the time.

 

[MattInOz]

Your tower was a much better value than the current Mac Pros.

And they are still fetching a good price on the used market.

Funny I tried to off load 4 of that exact model the other week, none of the second hand dealers wanted to touch them. We tried giving them away to staff and could rid of couple but it was a hard sell......

Still I thought it was a dog of a machine to work on compared to the 2Ghz MacBook which was subjectively 3to4 times faster, but if people still want them good luck to them I say.

 

[heisetax]

Duals are the ones

I don't want to pay $2500 for a Mac tower that has the performance of a $1000 PC tower - which is what we have today...

It can't get any worse, can it?

Try the dual quad core. They're that high or higher.

 

[Speedy2]

Actually the #1 comment you see from tweakers who are pushing the limits is: "I get a good frame rate unless there are a lot of NPCs on the screen, then I get some stuttering." yadi yadi yah

NPCs (aka moving objects) with high triangle count will kill your graphics card about 100x times earlier than they'd kill your CPU. That's what those people with weak computers are complaining about. Has nothing to do with n-core CPUs.

 

[Speedy2]

As a web designer, I need to quickly flip between the following:

Windows XP SP1 with IE6
Windows XP SP2 with IE6
Windows XP SP3 with IE7
Windows Vista with IE8
Windows 7 with IE8

That's five cores right there. The last benefit from 2 cores apiece when testing Flash. That's 7 cores.

Right.
And you are simultaneously hitting refresh in all VMs to need a dedicated core for each VM?

I am a developer myself and frequently use VMs. All you need to run many of them at the same time is RAM, RAM and nothing else but RAM. You, as a single person using the computer, simply do not have the opportunity to max out a 12-core computer (or even quadcore) with a bunch of VMs running IE.

Throw in the 4 that are generally in use while I run PS, Fireworks, Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, an FTP client, local copies of Firefox and Safari simultaneously...

Yeah, and you work on a picture in PS and at the very same time on a Flash animation and at the same surf the web in like 3 browsers at the same time? Or (which is more likely) you simply have all those applications open. Big deal.

Man, really. All you need is RAM, and maybe a nice quadcore, because neither PS nor Flash could max out more cores, and you'd still have a few reserves.

 

[heisetax]

Forget the furnace

My current Mac Pro, an Early 2009 2.93GHz quad-core brings the ambient temperature in my office up from 75 to 90 degrees even with AC. I'd really be interested to know the BTU output of this model and the power requirements.

I use my 1st gen dual 3 GHz Intel Mac Pro as my office heat here in Omaha NE during the winter. Today's high will be a balmy 10 degrees. Summertime gets a little hot as the outside temp can be in the low 100's & only a very small widow ac at the other end of my home/office. If the new ones put out even more heat, I'll have to use my old dual 125 GHz G4 PowerMac or my water cooled dual 2.5 GHz G5.

Here I thought the heat came from my dual ATI 3870s & the 4 displays I am using, a 28", 2 - 30" & a 47" LCD displays. They're good heaters by themselves.

 

[PeterQVenkman]

Try the dual quad core. They're that high or higher.

And the dual quad cores are the ones that are competitively priced! The low end mac pro is kind of a joke now. The high end ones scream if you can afford it (I cannot responsibly buy one of those)

As much as I would think a smaller case made of less expensive materials would be nice, I gotta say the current case IS beautifully made. I just wonder how much of that is mac users extra.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Just because most of the people on here would just want six cores for bragging rights, it doesn't mean others wouldn't use them. I'd want six cores for n-body simulations. I know lots of people who would want similar machines for their scientific work and others who would want it for high end video development. These people can't be bothered to waste their time justifying their desire for more cores on a forum like this. They'll make their points by coughing up the dough for Octo cores/12 cores in the future.

 

[Bubba Satori]

Hopefully it won't come with 3GB, a 640GB HD and an Nvidia GT120.

 

[Furrybeagle]

I still have an old OCed Celeron machine running at a family members house. I don't even know how old it is now. I have an Athlon 64 machine running as a server next to me, again not sure how old.

I am so sick of this argument. I used to make it, too, until I realized how ludicrous it is to suggest the reliability of an entire platform/piece of hardware/manufacturer/design based off of the few computers that I own.

And you think Apple isn't using bargain basement components? I've already replaced the mobo and the battery in my MBP. Great components they purchased there with their stepped down tight integration. The other problem is that you're comparing against Dell and your stats are flawed. How many Dells do you control? How many macs?

How can you even make this argument? You’re extrapolating the reliability of every MBP based off yours alone. Then your criticizing someone who seems to have dealt with a somewhat sizable number of computers. And what does comparing against Dell have to do with anything? You realize they make workstations, right?