Kentsfield (Quad-core Intel) by end of 2006?

[~Shard~]

Not naming names, but I find it funny how everyone suddenly becomes an engineer.

What kind of Engineer? A Train Engineer?

For the record, I'm an Electronics Systems Engineer - not sure if I see what you're getting at... How is "everyone suddenly an Engineer" in this thread?

 

[wildmac]

If you need it get it now. If you can wait 6 months then wait. What is out is better than what you have, just be ready than in 6 months there will be something better. This is always the case even if you stay in the Win Camp.

Yep, if you want an iMac, then buy it NOW. The laptops will soon see upgrades, but the rest of the product line is up-to-date.

And... unless you are doing hard-core gaming or intensive graphics or scientific work, a CPU upgrade is not likely to be noticed in your real-world computing.

 

[wildmac]

Quite simply, the way Intel is going about quad-core at this point in the game is both cautious and underwhelming. Once true quad core becomes a reality (and not simply two dual-core chips on a single peice of silicon, like Clovertown and Kentsfield), and the FSB is replaced by direct interconnects, then I'll upgrade from my Mac Pro. Otherwise, I expect the machine to remain capable and viable for the next three years or so.

But that underwhelming feeling can be a good feeling. You know you are working on the latest hardware.

I expect to see a speed-bump in the next 5-6 months for the MacPro, but nothing else.

 

[FFTT]

The new Mac Pro has finally achieved acoustic running levels to make it perfect
for audio recording solutions.
It will be interesting to see how quiet the new Merom iMacs run.

We've read countless complaint threads over the years about noise issues.

This is why I think Apple will pass on some of these processors to maintain
the new standards they have achieved.

It will be interesting to see how the 65nm back to back mirrored quad chips perform compared to the 45 nm chipsets.

For now, I think the priority is still to get heat down in the notebooks and to improve battery life.

 

[fblack]

I agree that the expandability of the 24inch imac is impressive, but until I see ease of upgradability as well Im all for a mid range. Its also about the CPU, the C2D's are nice, but their not really a match for their desktop counterparts, there are some of us that want the power of a desktop but dont have the budget for the xeon range...

I'm right with you when you say "that some of us want the power of a desktop but dont have the budget for the xeon range." Also I dont like all in one solutions. However, the 24" might be apple's way of saying that's close enough. Plus looking at what Macworld had to say about the 2.16 C2D and the potential for the 24" 2.33 it sure does narrow the performance some what and this might be what apple is thinking.

More significant, the 2.16GHz system narrowed the performance gap between iMac and Mac Pro product lines. With twice the number of processor cores, all running faster than the iMac, the Mac Pro had a definite advantage in this match up. But because not all applications and tasks take full advantage of the Mac multiprocessing capabilities, most results showed the Mac Pro between 20 and 30 percent faster than the 2.16GHz iMac. I expect that test results of the new 24-inch model—with its faster graphics and the optional 2.33GHz processor upgrade—could close this performance gap even further.

http://www.macworld.com/2006/09/firstlooks/imacbench/index.php


I cant wait to see the benchmarks on the 24".

But dont get me wrong I would still prefer a headless tower.

 

[brianus]

You appear to have no imagination. Kentsfield Will Go Into A New iMac Redesign. Have you not seen this mock-up yet? There are options in design that can make the iMac much cooler even with more heat producing elements inside.

Sorry, but that mockup is just stupid. Whoever made it obviously has no concept of Apple's product line. CONSUMER = WHITE OR BLACK. PRO = ALUMINUM. NEITHER = MIX OF IMAC WHITE + ALUMINUM. Every single frickin' product follows these guidelines. Get a clue.

And by the way, the iMac G3 design lasted, with modifications, for 4 years. The G5 design is a winning, modern, attractive design and one gets the sense there's really nowhere else to go with it at the moment as far as being a flat-panel monitor with a computer mounted behind it. There Will Be No New iMac Redesign Anytime Soon[TM].

 

[Dr.Gargoyle]

Gotcha! That would get old quick, at least the old apps would work. It is kind of cool now that a G3 can still run Tiger. Oh well, can't have everything!

I doubt that 10.6 will run on G4. CS4 will probably run very sluggish on a Quad G5.

 

[Dr.Gargoyle]

Some applications just can't be multithreaded and writing reliable multi threaded applications is damned hard still.

Back in the early 90s I was using ICL DAPs which had a grid of 1024 CPUs. You could fly through a Mandlebrot set in realtime or analyse weather patterns quicker than anything else at the time short of a couple of Crays. A Mac SE/30 however was quicker at handling files and we used to use that to handle the normal stuff.

1024 CPUs??? WOW... and I thought I had nasty simulations.
Still, dont you think that it is a terrible waste of computing power if the app doesnt take advantage of multiple processors, eventhough it might be very hard to write such an app? This is really not my field and I know far too little to have an opinion, so take it for what it is worth.

 

[Lollypop]

1024 CPUs??? WOW... and I thought I had nasty simulations.
Still, dont you think that it is a terrible waste of computing power if the app doesnt take advantage of multiple processors, eventhough it might be very hard to write such an app? This is really not my field and I know far too little to have an opinion, so take it for what it is worth.

It is a terrible waste to have unused CPU power, especially when the application is CPU intense, there are entire fields of research dedicated to optimizing certain types of calculations.... Ive said it before, the core wars will also stop eventually...

Whats wrong with having two dual core processors on one chip? I can understand that the FSB might become a bottleneck but thats not only a issue related to the number of cores/processors is it?

 

[crees!]

A mid-tower between the Mini and Pro seems to be the only possible home for Conroe. And, even though I would love to buy one, I'm not sure if Apple really want to release such a machine.

You never know though, we could be in for a nice surprise sometime soon.

What about the patent designs that were just shown of the Cube 2?
http://www.unwiredview.com/2006/09/07/apple-cube-ii-computer/

 

[arn]

What about the patent designs that were just shown of the Cube 2?
http://www.unwiredview.com/2006/09/07/apple-cube-ii-computer/

It's the same patent as the original cube.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/231892/

specifically, read:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/2812045/

nothing new.

arn

 

[~Shard~]

I'm right with you when you say "that some of us want the power of a desktop but dont have the budget for the xeon range." Also I dont like all in one solutions. However, the 24" might be apple's way of saying that's close enough.

I agree with you (and I realize I'm preaching to the choir here) but I would argue that in some ways, a 24" AIO is even worse than a 17"/20" AIO, due to the sizable (no pun intended) investment in the display. If your 17" iMac bites the big one, but the display is still fine, well, okay, you have to throw away a perfectly good 17" display. But they're fairly cheap these days, so whatever. However, what if something goes a year or so from now on your 24" iMac? For me at least, throwing away a perfectly good, high quality 24" display would really suck.

 

[fblack]

I agree with you (and I realize I'm preaching to the choir here) but I would argue that in some ways, a 24" AIO is even worse than a 17"/20" AIO, due to the sizable (no pun intended) investment in the display. If your 17" iMac bites the big one, but the display is still fine, well, okay, you have to throw away a perfectly good 17" display. But they're fairly cheap these days, so whatever. However, what if something goes a year or so from now on your 24" iMac? For me at least, throwing away a perfectly good, high quality 24" display would really suck.

And that's one of the reasons I don't like all in ones, I dont like throwing away display no matter what the size. My last CRT lasted me about 6 years and I had an old apple 14" monitor that was still working after 10 years! Now that's getting value out of your components!

However, in regards to the longevity of a 24" apple might say hey buy apple care and be covered for those 3 years and "protect your investment". But maybe this is another issue that apple should address and that's their extended warranties. Perhaps you or others might feel more confident in a AIO solution if apple offered 4-5 year extended warranties?

Who knows they may surprise us yet with a headless imac/pro. But I think they have it set up like buying a car. You want those extra features? Then you have to pay for a higher priced model that has the features you want and dont want...

 

[sord]

Dare I dream? How about a quad processor quad core system! 16 cores in all!!!

I hope they at least keep dual processors in the pro machines if they start using these so we get 8 cores. Then toss one of these suckers in a mini.

 

[~Shard~]

Dare I dream? How about a quad processor quad core system! 16 cores in all!!!

That's nothing. Just wait for Dunnington or Harpertown.

 

[Object-X]

Mid-Tower Dreaming

A mid-tower between the Mini and Pro seems to be the only possible home for Conroe. And, even though I would love to buy one, I'm not sure if Apple really want to release such a machine.

You never know though, we could be in for a nice surprise sometime soon.

I for one need just this kind of setup. I use a mini, but it's integrated graphics is a bit pokey and cost difference between that and a Mac Pro leaves me with no choice but to endure the mini for a bit longer. The iMac is perfect, in terms of performance, but I don't want an all-in-one white computer at work. This is the downside to Apple taking a minimilist approach to their product offering. I think they could add a mid-tower without compicating things.

 

[holycat]

Yep, if you want an iMac, then buy it NOW. The laptops will soon see upgrades, but the rest of the product line is up-to-date.

And... unless you are doing hard-core gaming or intensive graphics or scientific work, a CPU upgrade is not likely to be noticed in your real-world computing.

ThaNKS!!i

have ordered my new 24' iMAC

I m doing some 2D graphics...and some biOinformatics stuff..but i guess...it still can cope it...and last at least for 2-3 years for me...

 

[sfwalter]

I have a dream...

...I would like to be able to purchase a machine without an integrated display (aka iMac). This machine would have a graphics card in a standard slot so that it can upgraded. It would be great also to be able to remove and upgrade the hard disk, space for a second hard disk is would be a nice to have.

Currently I'm stuck in the middle between an iMac (I want a separate display, and some upgrade paths) and Mac Pro (too upgradeable for my needs, and way too expensive).

Apple really needs a pro-sumer box.

 

[Demoman]

Source reading material for architecture

I remember back in the 2nd half of the 90's, HP came out with the dual Pentium II processor configuration, which only ran on NT. At the time I was administering a new Sparc network and we had a Sun 690MP with 4 ultra-Sparc processors. I thought is was cool that MS PC's had moved to multiple processors.

However, I was disappointed to learn that the 2nd processor could be only be used for little more than a coprocessor. So, I did some reading about the relationship of the Bus design, processor architecture and the OS. It made me appreciate Sparc a lot more.

Fast forward 10 years and it seems like I need to do some more reading. I would like to get current with what is being used today, and what may be in the pipeline for the next couple years.

I can search the web. But, I know some of you are very knowledgeable about this and may have a good source to recommend. Thanks.

 

[xUKHCx]

I have the oringal iMac G5 bought on the very day they were announced. (well i dont have it as it is in for another replacement midplane - total worth of applecare to me so far is about the £1400 mark). It is feeling rather old and very slow for my tasks. I am now wishing i had that display so i could connect it to the mini or a mid range tower. I long for upgradable graphics as a not so proud owner of the geforce 5200 or whatever it is in my mac so such a pitiful perfonace it is not listed as Aperture capable. It really is a shocking video card. I have upgraded the harddrive that was a snap in the iMac, i have even replaced the logic board 30 mins no fuss. THings i liked about the original iMac ease of replacement parts. Things i didnt like: the non upgradable parts - processor and graphics.

I truely long for the Mid range tower.

double height Pci graphics slot ala Mac Pro with the X1900.
Space for two harddrives for Time Machine mostly.
Pretty beefy processor, preferably with some sort of upgrade path
Option to purchase a bundle display 17" really cheap option.
1 gb ram - 8 gb provided by 4 ram slots

Cost: £700
Cost: £850 with the 17 inch mointor
Cost: £1000 with the 20 inch mointor

 

[aegisdesign]

1024 CPUs??? WOW... and I thought I had nasty simulations.
Still, dont you think that it is a terrible waste of computing power if the app doesnt take advantage of multiple processors, eventhough it might be very hard to write such an app? This is really not my field and I know far too little to have an opinion, so take it for what it is worth.

You had to explicitly write your applications in a special parallel computing version of Fortran or OCCAM. It was exceptionally quick at matrices and vector equations so working out the weather was one of the things it was good at. They did a later DAP with 4096 processors.

The point is, multiple cores are only of use if you've a task that can be split up into separate threads. Many general purpose computing tasks simply can't be multi threaded easily or at all.

On the Mac though, the main advantage of at least two cores is that the OS can run the WindowServer task, that handles all your windows on screen and generally consumes a lot of CPU when you've got 16 apps running on your screen on one CPU and your application on another and it's still nippy so you don't get the beachball so often switching apps. The second core can also be doing something like running backups, indexing a hard drive for Spotlight, hotclustering files, updating thumbnails in iPhoto.... Past two cores and you're in diminishing returns except for specific applications that can be multithreaded.

The one advantage Macs have had for a few years of course is that there is a long history of dual CPU machines. Windows on the other hand rarely has multi threaded applications. Both OS's are a pain in the arse to write multi threaded apps for though. The wisdom of BeOS's designers would work wonders with today's CPUs.

 

[dernhelm]

Apple, please,

BRING BACK THE MAC CUBE concept!

A small yet powerful Mac. But this this at a REASONABLE price, to be a best-seller.

Thanks.

Put a Conroe processor in a midrange headless system, and you'll have what the cube was supposed to be. The problem is that Apple just finished rationalizing a minimized line. To add something else into their lineup makes for all kinds of headaches.

Low-end (headless) - mac mini
Mid-range (all-in-one) - iMac
High-end (headless) - mac pro
Server room (headless) - xserve

In order to rationalize another product line in the mid-range (pro-sumer?) market, I think they'll need to focus it on some other feature that people need. Dropping the cube back out there just cannibalizes sales of existing product, if you are not careful with it.

Apple does not seem to believe that there is some large contingent of people who want a mid-range system that would prefer it not to have a monitor. I, however, think they are wrong, and they are missing a large segment of people who are willing to pay top dollar for a high-end well-designed machine. That market is the one for the high-end gamer.

Apple absolutely could produce a great machine aimed at high-end gamers. Produce a super-cool design aimed at that segment. Make it BTO with multiple upgradable graphics cards, fast bus speeds, fast ram, RAID 0, etc. They could leave off FW800, Bluetooth (most wireless gamer mice don't use it), and some of the other connectivity options that high-end gamers could care less about (modems, etc). Put the Conroe processors in there and crank them up as high as you can. The high end system could be liquid cooled, we already know apple can do that when needed. Most games are still not threaded all that well - but an MT OpenGL also couldn't hurt...

They could also Pre-install boot-camp as a BTO option. We all know any serious gamer is going to want windows installed - so just prep them for it. It wouldn't surprise me to see many more people buying macs to run windows on in the near future anyway.

There isn't any reason why such a machine couldn't look like the "cube" I suppose, but I'd probably prefer to see something different. The cube had a different design goal and has too much baggage associated with it anyway.

 

[Mundy]

Whats wrong with having two dual core processors on one chip? I can understand that the FSB might become a bottleneck but thats not only a issue related to the number of cores/processors is it?

The problem is that a double-dual-core solution (like Intel's Kentsfield and Clovertown) still requires that two cores communicate with the other two cores over the FSB. A single, shared FSB is one of the reasons that Intel's first generation of dual-core CPUs could not compete with AMD's 64-bit X2 line.

Intel has its reasons for the way it's doing its first generation of quad-core CPUs, but performance is not one of them. Right now, the primary concern is silicon yields, and the double-dual-core method allows Intel to throw away a bad core without tossing the entire quad-core silicon wafer. A true quad-core CPU would not allow this—i.e. Intel couldn't "cut out" the bad silicon—and therefore the potential for monetary loss is greater.

The truth is that Kentsfield and Clovertown are trial runs. They are stopgap measures in the same way that Yonah was a stopgap on the way to Merom. Once Intel goes to true quad-core CPUs and a 45 nm process, it might be time to worry about the Mac Pro being obsolete. Until then, anything Intel releases will be incremental.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[aegisdesign]

I remember back in the 2nd half of the 90's, HP came out with the dual Pentium II processor configuration, which only ran on NT. At the time I was administering a new Sparc network and we had a Sun 690MP with 4 ultra-Sparc processors. I thought is was cool that MS PC's had moved to multiple processors.

However, I was disappointed to learn that the 2nd processor could be only be used for little more than a coprocessor. So, I did some reading about the relationship of the Bus design, processor architecture and the OS. It made me appreciate Sparc a lot more.

That's bollocks.

Both processors on Windows NT going back as far as NT3.1 at least will run at full speed, share tasks between them if threaded or just run one task on each.

There was even a hack to have the Explorer (the equivalent of Finder) run multithreaded that sped things up on multi-cpu machines. I've almost always tried to have multi-CPU desktop machines even if that meant a little slower for each CPU. Back in 97-98 my favourite machine was a dual Celeron 366 overclocked to 550Mhz each. Each CPU was about $80. It creamed boxes costing much more but was also really smooth to use since there was also a spare CPU quite often to keep things ticking along whilst CPU1 was tied up.

 

[Multimedia]

It's Showtime with the Mac Home Entertainment Cube II on Tuesday?

You might just get your wish; I saw this article/link while surfing over the MacNN website a couple of days ago (I'm still waiting for new MBPs myself, though! ):

Ultra compact computer arrangement Apple Patent Filing - Looks Like Cube II

Hope this isn't old news for everyone; this is my first post, although I've been following the forums ever since I started thinking about replacing my old Powerbook (should finally have the money by next month!).

Excellent find and an award worthy first post. Thank you very much and welcome to the forums.

What about the patent designs that were just shown of the Cube 2?

From Unwired View - Apple Cube reborn

This is very encouraging. Perhaps this is what Steve has to talk about on Tuesday. I am a Cube lover - still own two.