Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Future Mac Pro Processor Information?!
- Thread starter Topper
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I think the processors for the next generation Mac Pro will be Harpertown for quad-core and Wolfdale DP for the dual-core.
Here is some information that was just leaked:
Yes this looks great, but when?
Yes, you are right.
But clock speed may not be the important thing.
I don't know much about processors but this is what I've read about why Harpertown and Wolfdale DP are very significant processor upgrades:
"The new-generation chips produced using 45nm process technology and featuring Core 2 micro-architecture, will have greater instructions per clock (IPC) execution, which means that they will be faster and more efficient even at the same clock-speeds with the current generation chips.
The major micro-architectural improvements for new Intel Core 2 processors, besides SSE4 instruction set, include the so-called Unique Super Shuffle Engine and Radix 16 technique. The Super Shuffle Engine is a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing. Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications performance on multi-core chips."
But I have no idea what that all means.
It's a little boring but it sounds good on paper.
If those are the only Wolfdale processors comming I don't think there will be any new 4 core Mac Pros and Apple will use the earliest opportunity to take them 8 core, whether with these or via the Xeon price drops in 2 weeks.
You think Apple is going to go all 8-core Mac Pros? Maybe.
I don't believe either the Wolfdale DP or Harpertown processors will be available until the end of the year.
I believe Intel said sometime in Q4/2007.
I'm not sure what the price drop is going to do for us in two weeks.
Oops, I am sorry. I didn't see you there, buddy.
From what I have read, Harpertown will be available in Q4/2007.
Intel recommends using Seaburg as the chipset.
Seaburg is rumored to be available in November.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20070521050821.html
Not good news, but that's the best info I could find.
Oops, I am sorry. I didn't see you there, buddy.
From what I have read, Harpertown will be available in Q4/2007.
Intel recommends using Seaburg as the chipset.
Seaburg is rumored to be available in November.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20070521050821.html
Not good news, but that's the best info I could find.
Thank you very much for the info. November seems like and awful long time to wait!
And with the old FSB, but as we saw with the G4 -- the increases in cache will have just as big an impact, along with the improvements in the processing units.
AMD's Barcelona has so far been a disappointment.
AMD is so desperate to get Barcelona on the market that it will only have a 2.0GHz clock speed with it's first release.
BUT, with AMD at least bringing out Barcelona, it may force Intel to bring out their Penryn line of processors sooner.
I'm hoping that means the next generation Mac Pro will arrive faster than expected.
Intel's has some interesting things on the back burner.
The next Mac Pro may have a Penryn family processor (Harpertown)
The Mac Pro after that may have a Nehalem family processor.
It looks like Intel is going to allow computer manufacturers to overclock their processors.
Which obviously would mean greater clock speeds.
I seriously doubt Apple would be dumb enough to go that route however.
But the improvements don't appear to be in clock speeds but rather in technology to make processing faster.
Graphics next
Don't think AMD have anything in the wings to outperform the intel CPU range at present. The most likely performance upgrades will come via the graphics card or card's with the long over due move to incorporate Nvidia's 8800GTX range hopefully in SLI mode, dont forget the last round of MBP upgrades have the latest mobile GPU's
Don't think AMD have anything in the wings to outperform the intel CPU range at present. The most likely performance upgrades will come via the graphics card or card's with the long over due move to incorporate Nvidia's 8800GTX range hopefully in SLI mode, dont forget the last round of MBP upgrades have the latest mobile GPU's