Mac Pro Quad Core vs. 8-Core and CS4

[ravenandcrow]

Hello, dear ladies and gentleman. If you could lend me your expertise for a moment, I would love some advice.

Our company is need of a new desktop and I've been doing some reading but need some pushes, one way or the other. We're trying to decide, basically, between buying either:

• A fairly standard 8-core, which we're drawn to mainly for the expandability of the memory and the hope that software will catch up eventually to make better use of the multiple cores

or

• A quad-core with 8-16 MB of memory, which, the more I read, sounds like it may work better with many applications that aren't yet ready for 8-core machines

We're graphic designers, so we mainly use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, with some work in Captivate with Windows XP via Boot Camp and Parallels, a little bit of Flash and HTML design, and that's about it. We currently use CS3, but have been contemplating upgrading to CS4, though I'm now reading some not so great user reviews regarding slow speeds, freezes, etc. with CS4...so any input anyone could give me on that would be greatly appreciated as well.

...or should we just wait until Q1 to see if the whole Mac Pro gets this fabled Gulftown upgrade? We ideally need something nowish, but, you know...

Thanks in advance, ya'll.

 

[Hellhammer]

I think quad is enough. 2.26GHz Octo is significantly slower in apps that doesn't support 8-cores and Adobe apps don't.

 

[ravenandcrow]

Thanks much, Mr/Ms Hammer. Does anyone know if there's hope of Adobe supporting more cores downt he road, or is that not really the direction things seem to be going?

 

[Hellhammer]

Thanks much, Mr/Ms Hammer. Does anyone know if there's hope of Adobe supporting more cores downt he road, or is that not really the direction things seem to be going?

Adobe is known of it's slow update process, so support for 8-core may not be around corner, but who knows. CS5 will be 64-bit though so it should add support for more RAM.

 

[MacKiddyWiddy]

go with the quad

adobe will take a long long time to bring out 8core support just liek they did with 64bit

 

[ravenandcrow]

Cool. And thanks. Anyone have any recommendation on 2.66 GHz vs. 2.93 GHz (for $500 more)?

Or potentially waiting for the Gulftown processor?

 

[Hellhammer]

Cool. And thanks. Anyone have any recommendation on 2.66 GHz vs. 2.93 GHz (for $500 more)?

Or potentially waiting for the Gulftown processor?

I think 2.66GHz will be enough. Gulftown will be more expensive, but if you can wait, it'll be worth it

 

[uuaschbaer]

I'm probably wrong but I was under the impression that the point of GCD was to eradicate the problem of having to develop programs for a specific number of cores. The threadpool would take care of that. If that's true would I be wrong in thinking that an application written to cooperate with GCD would have no bias for eight or four cores qua efficiency?
Also, if CS5 will be rewritten in Cocoa, will it not likely 'support' Snow Leopard's GCD?

Edit: CS5 will be written in Cocoa, of course, not rewritten. Adobe's applications will be rewritten however. A semantic imbroglio, not important.

 

[Hellhammer]

I'm probably wrong but I was under the impression that the point of GCD was to eradicate the problem of having to develop programs for a specific number of cores. The threadpool would take care of that. If that's true would I be wrong in thinking that an application written to cooperate with GCD would have no bias for eight or four cores qua efficiency?
Also, if CS5 will be rewritten in Cocoa, will it not likely 'support' Snow Leopard's GCD?

GCD will help in developing for multicore computers but as I said above, Adobe is EXTREMELY SLOW to adopt a new technology to their products, especially for Mac versions.

 

[ravenandcrow]

So, just to be clear, GCD/Snow Leopard won't help existing applications not alreday written to take advantage of an 8-core (like Adobe's) work any better with an 8-core, correct?

 

[Hellhammer]

So, just to be clear, GCD/Snow Leopard won't help existing applications not alreday written to take advantage of an 8-core (like Adobe's) work any better with an 8-core, correct?

As far as I know, GCD only helps when it's built into the application.