Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac Pro to Get 6-Core Xeon Gulftown Processor in 2010?

skate71290 said:
so you're saying a 13" MBP should be more powerful than an i7 8GB 2TB 27inch iMac... 17inch might see that.... ages away, laptops should never be more powerful than desktops, if you need processing power pick a desktop!!!
Click to expand...

The main reason laptops are less powerful is thermal management. If one were to make a SSD dual i9 MacBookPro, it would actually work out really well.

If Apple were concerned it would cannibalize MacPro sales, they could simply charge more.

It would need PCIe, mini-SAS, Light Peak, and/or dual Ethernet for I/O on a monster like that. MacBooks have been "portable supercomputers" for a while already.

Rocketman
 
Bubba Satori said:
Breaking news.

Lots of people already have nice monitors and don't want to look at a mirror when they are using a computer.
Click to expand...

You'd have to have the brightness all the way down!! - you cant see yourself under normal conditions on an iMac screen - way too bright.

Adam
 
This is exactly why i postponed my purchase of the 8 core mac pro. The only thing im worried is a price rise ! I hope not !!:eek: Please God !!! :(
 
thelastbencher said:
This is exactly why i postponed my purchase of the 8 core mac pro. The only thing im worried is a price rise ! I hope not !!:eek: Please God !!! :(
Click to expand...

that would kill the a lot of the excitment. I wonder how much these bad boys will cost :eek:
I wonder if apple will redesign the case?
 
Nice but that will cost you big bucks.....
Still, I hope Apple keeps the same price points of the current Mac Pro line up.
 
If Apple gets the tablet right laptops will be far less common.

CmdrLaForge said:
For a long time I have been using laptops now, but with an Apple Slate on the horizon I am re-thinking by screens. I think a tablet and a desktop Mac would make a very good setup.
Click to expand...
I agree with this, well slightly qualified. Apple will need to get the tablet right and have optimally priced services. The reason ibsay this is because the ergonomics of laptops suck on the desktop where most are used.
With the tablet you can do all the computing where no serious power is required e.g. surfing, emails and with a MacPro video and pictures editiing.
Click to expand...
Plus a tablet should be far more portable.

In any event I qualified my statements above because the tablets success will very much depend upon it's software and the associated services. If networking is to expensive it won't fly for example. The user needs better access to the machine and part of that means clean syncing of the tablet with user specified files and directories. In other words the tablet should sync automatically when in range of the desktops network so that the users current working set is always available.

Of course this all depends upon what exactly the tablet will be.

Dave
 
puckhead193 said:
that would kill the a lot of the excitment. I wonder how much these bad boys will cost :eek:
I wonder if apple will redesign the case?
Click to expand...

What's wrong with the case? Still very nice after all these years, plus Apple has been very good designing the interior to fit and make easy to swap drives, RAM, etc.
I hope they will keep it like that.

The only thing I really hope on the pro line to be update design wise is the 30" ACD to catch up with the same look as the current 24" and maybe a larger than 30" display. That would be something.
 
Very important stuff here!

ChrisA said:
The Applications that need it already do support multiple cores.
Click to expand...
Exactly!

The one caveat is that some software can still be refactored to take advantage of Apples new tech. As you point out though there is software out right now that can exploit this capability very well. This can be seen in benchmarks for things like Ray tracers and other easily paralleled codes.
For example Logic can us any number of cores. So can Compresser, Final Cut can even use processors that are on another Mac via the network.
Click to expand...
The next bottle neck is through put to ram and I/O. Feeding all those hardware threads becomes axproblem for some software.
And then Mac OS X itself runs many processes and each of these can be on it's own core.
Click to expand...

This is an important point that many mis. Many users are these days running multiple processes, if you have the right resources thien you have a much smoother machine. In a way it macs one wonder about bench mark programs that run only single processes as it doesn't reflect common usage any more.

Not to mention things like Flash running with a web browser that literally needs one processor to itself. Cores are a good thing today and become far more interesting in the future. Figuring out the optimal number is up to the user, many users should apply a 2X factor though. This to keep the machine viable for a couple of years and because people underestimate the importance of cores.

Dave
 
rosebud said:
Those who were thinking that the switch to intel would bring the prices down and the speeds up were and are dead wrong. Although the prices did go down for Apple but not for costumers. As for the speeds (a lot for complaining the the G5 could not hit the 3GhZ barrier) check this out and complain: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/595/specs.html. Apple has turned into a greedy company that cares the least for those that kept it afloat, the professionals. They killed Shake, Livetype, left Color crippled and worked nothing in the past two years on the FCS apps. Time to switch to a company that makes computers and not shinny toys.
Click to expand...

PowerPC sucks. I've designed both PowerPC and x86 microprocessors, and, trust me, Apple made the right choice. You can't compare MHz and think that tells you anything.
 
gugy said:
What's wrong with the case? Still very nice after all these years, plus Apple has been very good designing the interior to fit and make easy to swap drives, RAM, etc.
I hope they will keep it like that.

The only thing I really hope on the pro line to be update design wise is the 30" ACD to catch up with the same look as the current 24" and maybe a larger than 30" display. That would be something.
Click to expand...
nothings wrong with the case. I just was wondering what apple would need to change to make this work, would they re-due the whole thing or just re-arrange some things
 
How do you expect anybody hear to answer your questions???

hajime said:
I work on computer simulations. Anybody knowledgeable to answer the following?

Assuming that each computer simulation requires Y GB. The new MacPro should be able to run 24 different scenario of simulations. To make things run smoothly, it will require 24*Y GB. Am I right?
Click to expand...
How would we know? There are to many possibilities here that can't be quessed at but rather requires knowledge of the software and the technigues used to write it.

For example how much data can be effectively shared between simulations. I could go on but this isn't something that can be effectivelly dealt with in a thread like this.
How the performance will be running the 24 different simulations on 24 single core computers (each with Y GB + required RAM for the OS) vs. that of a MacPro with (24*Y GB + required RAM for the OS)?
Click to expand...

Again no one here can say for sure other than to state generally that having everything on board a single CPU complex is an advantage most of the time.

The problem is your questions just aren't answerable withou imitate knowledge of what you are doing.

Dave
 
Guys, can I have a question regarding rendering and cores, please?


Is 8 core physical same as 4 core physical + 4 core logical?

What I am after is how much benefit do the logical cores really offer? Is it linear scale like with physical cores or is one logical core more like 50-70% of power of a physical core?

Thanks for reply
 
It's not linear scale. A core can still only execute one thread at a time and has to switch between other threads for them to execute. Hyperthreading just sort of does it more efficiently (i.e. some parts of the execution pipeline are run in parallel but not all). You're best bet is to look at benchmarks between the 2.93 quad and octo core Mac Pro.
 
Gloor said:
Guys, can I have a question regarding rendering and cores, please?


Is 8 core physical same as 4 core physical + 4 core logical?

What I am after is how much benefit do the logical cores really offer? Is it linear scale like with physical cores or is one logical core more like 50-70% of power of a physical core?

Thanks for reply
Click to expand...

The performance benefit of a logical core will only be slight. It's basically tricking the system into thinking one core is actually two cores for pipelining purposes. It doesn't actually give you any speed of a second core or anything, it's just nudging the operating system to try to get a little extra speed out by making the OS act like it's on more cores than it really is.
 
goMac said:
The performance benefit of a logical core will only be slight. It's basically tricking the system into thinking one core is actually two cores for pipelining purposes. It doesn't actually give you any speed of a second core or anything, it's just nudging the operating system to try to get a little extra speed out by making the OS act like it's on more cores than it really is.
Click to expand...
so in a sense it is a marketing trick than anything else?
Its good to know. I thought the whole point was that you would get the extra power from the logical core but as it looks its just another term to confuse more people :)))
 
Doesn't hyperthreading really act as a "cueing" system to make sure a core is busy if a process is available rather than reporting its availability for sending ONLY after finishing execution of the prior process?

In South Pasadena on the 110 freeway we still have on-ramps with stop signs and off-ramps with 10mph speed limits (reasonably).

It's better than not having an on-ramp, but it still slows traffic flow when you enter the freeway, as compared to "real" on-ramps.

Rocketman
 
Gloor said:
so in a sense it is a marketing trick than anything else?
Its good to know. I thought the whole point was that you would get the extra power from the logical core but as it looks its just another term to confuse more people :)))
Click to expand...

It allows the chip to make use of core resources that otherwise might go unused. On average you will get some benefit. In some cases none.
 
You are simply wrong here, it very much depends upon where you're interests are.

ericinboston said:
But the problem/complaint is that there are no apps (ok, maybe we can all put our heads together and list 3) that truly take advantage of multi-core technology. Multi-core technology has been around for almost 5 years (I've owned a few quad-core PC systems since early 2007) and even today practically nothing takes advantage of it (BOINC is 1 app).
Click to expand...
Practically nothing of the subset of apps that YOU use maybe. That does not however apply to the apps many do use on their Macs.
Not that all apps need multi-core coding (like a simple word processing program or slideshow)...but games, a/v editing/production, spreadsheet apps, photo editing, etc. could really see a huge performance increase if the apps were written to take really take advantage of multi-core technology.
Click to expand...
Each statement above is highly debatable. Well except for the one about not all apps needing multi cores.

For example photo editing might be better off with GPU acceleration over parallel processing on standard CPUs. For many apps threaded or parallel processing might only be useful for a few parts of the app.
Of course it all has to start with the OS, too, to allow the apps to be written in that manner.

-Eric
Click to expand...
That is what Snow Leopard is all about!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back