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Intel Announces new Xeon Processors

VirtualRain

VirtualRain

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 1, 2008
6,304
118
Vancouver, BC
Good review of the new Xeon platform here...

http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews Folder Pages/EP/EP0.htm

Finally. The technology shown at present is one of the most momentous advancements achieved within a short timescale. The introduction of Seaburg's 5400 chipset was hailed as the new unsung hero within the workstation environment. Now we seem a new stallion gallop forth from Intel's pedigree stable with impeccable breeding. The key words are "blisteringly fast". Move over Harpertown and Woodcrest: The Intel® Nehalem-EP Processor is here to stay.
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WOW! Does that author have a doctorates - in marketing hype - or what?

A galloping CPU? Hahahahahaaa....
 
well, the new mac pro config isn't necessarily that much faster than its predecessor, but for the server market, the new xeons are going to make a huge impact.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3536

It all depends on what your requirements are. Since the processor speeds aren't very different from previous generations, if you don't have programs that can fully take advantage of the Hyper-Threading and other functional changes, then you really aren't going to see huge increases in performance. In the linked review, the rendering performance was better, but not amazingly and this is because the Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS, processor speed) isn't much better than that of the P4 based xeons.

I'm guessing that most of the performance qualms on that people are having with the new mac pros are due to programs mostly needing faster FLOPS or other changes that aren't as improved in this new release.

My question is: Can software developers create new software (rendering is especially important to me) that takes full advantage of these new processors? I'm guessing yes, unless there is something inherent in operations such as rendering that just don't won't be helped much by the new xeon's improvements.
 
wally21 said:
My question is: Can software developers create new software (rendering is especially important to me) that takes full advantage of these new processors? I'm guessing yes, unless there is something inherent in operations such as rendering that just don't won't be helped much by the new xeon's improvements.
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Yes, but it takes time. There are several issues with s/w development. Multi processor machines like the Mac Pro are part of the solution. Snow Leopard features like OpenCL and Grand Central are another part.

The inclination of the software company to commit resources to the product development is critical. Will Apple jump in with both feet to try to take advantage of these features? I would bet yes! How about the others? Adobe seems to be lagging, with no 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 for the Mac.

Another area is how to break down the tasks into parallel parts to spread the load from a single processor to many. This is not trivial. It remains to be seen how Grand Central will help. OpenCL will help with math processes that are highly parallel. But all of this is still a bit in the future...
 
Tesselator said:
WOW! Does that author have a doctorates - in marketing hype - or what?

A galloping CPU? Hahahahahaaa....
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Eh... I dunno, I've always thought Apple's marketing-hype/gimmicks (especially on the front page of their site when they announce something etc.) are pretty ridiculous myself... not much tops them.
 
 
Tallest Skil said:
No one had Gainestown or Xeon Bloomfield until the Mac Pro.

So, no.
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Then no wonder the 2009 Mac Pro's have had so much disappointment, if they didn't have Gainestown, in spite of reports on this site that people had unboxed systems with them.
 
kevink2 said:
Then no wonder the 2009 Mac Pro's have had so much disappointment, if they didn't have Gainestown, in spite of reports on this site that people had unboxed systems with them.
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You're confusing yourself.

The Mac Pro uses Xeon Bloomfield and Gainestown processors.

These processors were in no computers prior to the Mac Pro release.
 
Tallest Skil said:
You're confusing yourself.

The Mac Pro uses Xeon Bloomfield and Gainestown processors.

These processors were in no computers prior to the Mac Pro release.
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I guess I am really conused then.

I don't understand then why Apple released new updated Mac Pro's just a month before Intel released new Xeon processors. Unless the chips released today aren't applicable to a Mac Pro system.
 
Apple got access to these new Xeon CPU's a month before they were publicly announced and available to others... so this is old news to many here.

The reason I posted this thread, was not to circulate old news, but to provide links to the official information... which had been difficult to find prior to the official release at the end of March.
 
VirtualRain said:
Apple got access to these new Xeon CPU's a month before they were publicly announced and available to others... so this is old news to many here.

The reason I posted this thread, was not to circulate old news, but to provide links to the official information... which had been difficult to find prior to the official release at the end of March.
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Any thing in particular you're looking for?
 
VirtualRain said:
Apple got access to these new Xeon CPU's a month before they were publicly announced and available to others... so this is old news to many here.

The reason I posted this thread, was not to circulate old news, but to provide links to the official information... which had been difficult to find prior to the official release at the end of March.
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Which was the reason for my original post, with smiley. Others got confused and insisted that no one had computers with these announced CPUs before the announcement day, even those who had ordered the 2009 Mac Pros.

It was also an attempt at humor for the many posts expecting an early (next few months) upgrade to the Mac Pros even though Apple normally waits nearly a year.
 
kevink2 said:
Which was the reason for my original post, with smiley. Others got confused and insisted that no one had computers with these announced CPUs before the announcement day, even those who had ordered the 2009 Mac Pros.

It was also an attempt at humor for the many posts expecting an early (next few months) upgrade to the Mac Pros even though Apple normally waits nearly a year.
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Well, there are rumors afloat that apple may add the 3.2Ghz xeon chip and nvidia quadro fx5800 card to the lineup sometime in june. That sounds like a possible upgrade to me, unless you don't consider it an upgrade (maybe an update).
 
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