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Mac Pro Update With 6-Core Xeon Gulftown Processors Due Soon?
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Yea, I've been wondering too. I've got a first-gen MacBook from summer '06 and it's on its last leg... no battery life, burner is unreliable, display flickers, out of hard drive space, etc.
I was hoping for i5 MBPs to be released at the press event last week, but I guess they wanted to focus on the iPad. I'll probably jump on it as soon as it comes out - it'll be quite the leap from my current rig. 😎
WTF? Seriously MR?
It's not going to be i7, it's going to be Xeon. Xeon is the only one that will work with dual socket boards, ECC memory, and Apple is not going to build two completely different models of Mac Pro when the current configuration is so much easier and profitable.
The current single CPU Mac Pros have essentially the same bottom PCB, just without the second socket. Streamlines the whole PCB production and support process.
I mean, seriously? This made it to the front page?
It's not going to be i7, it's going to be Xeon. Xeon is the only one that will work with dual socket boards, ECC memory, and Apple is not going to build two completely different models of Mac Pro when the current configuration is so much easier and profitable.
The current single CPU Mac Pros have essentially the same bottom PCB, just without the second socket. Streamlines the whole PCB production and support process.
I mean, seriously? This made it to the front page?
Here's hoping they release an i-series "low" end model and Xeon for top end. I want a tower so badly, but don't need the power of a Xeon processor in it.
jakebot
macrumors member
You said you only have quad core? So then you should be peaking at 400%
There are TONS of applications that use all your cores. Not to mention most of apple is now 64bit that takes advantage of them all.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
The difference is that the chips in your servers are high-end "multisocket" chips, based on the older Core 2 architecture.
The chips that are about to come out are newer single-and-dual-socket chips based on the newer "Nehalem" architecture. The new Nehalem chips are so much faster than the old ones that the current eight-core Mac Pro is generally faster than a four-socket/six-core (total twenty-four cores,) server of the generation you are referring to.
The new six-core chips are even faster still. (As they have six of the new cores.)
While I don't know anything about the timing of the chip's release, or of Apple's potential use, my speculation is that Apple will continue to use only the Xeon-branded parts in the Mac Pro. i.e. Just one six-core Xeon in the single-socket MP, instead of the nearly-identical Core i7 equivalent.
In the current generation of chips, the Xeon-branded version has one major improvement over the Core i7-branded version: The Xeon adds support for ECC memory. Which Apple does take advantage of. Yes, it would be nice to have a lower-priced "Core i7" version instead of the Xeon, but it looks like Apple really wants to keep the Mac Pro a "Pro" machine, with "Pro" prices. (Which pushes even the four-core Mac Pro well out of my price range, even though I can afford a nearly identical Core i7 PC, with the same speed Core i7, same graphics card, etc... The eight-core model may be competitively priced with similar Xeon dual-socket systems from Dell and HP, but the single-socket is most definitely overpriced.)
The quad-core "Nehalem" chips have Hyperthreading, so they appear to the system as eight cores. Therefore, 800% would be correct full usage. On the eight-core systems, 1600% is full usage. (And on the upcoming six-core models, it's 2400% for two chips!)
jakebot
macrumors member
I'll alert the media. The New York Times in particular has been awaiting the news about what "psingh01" on the MacRumors forum was going to do. Thank you for clarifying your historic decision. We can finally go on with our lives!
Chupa Chupa
macrumors G5
Looks like March is going to be expensive to get through. iPad, updated MP, maybe even updated MBP. My bank account is trembling with 
fear.
fear.re: older Mac Pros having more value
Agreed! Even here in the USA, I was just telling my g/f that she'd be wise to consider upgrading her 24" white Intel iMac with a refurbished or used Mac Pro of the first or second revision, as opposed to buying a new 27" iMac. The 27" iMac is a great machine, but she's already got at least 5 or 6 devices hanging off the back of the existing iMac because she wanted to have 4 hard drives attached, among other things. The iMac loses much of its appeal as a "clean, all-in-one solution" when you start adding external drives and everything to it. You may as well put 4 drives inside a Mac Pro tower instead, and then you have all sorts of display choices too, AND the bonus of putting more RAM in it than an iMac can handle too (if you so choose).
I'm still using a Mac Pro from 2006 and it still feels just as "snappy" as anything Apple sells today as a new model. I'm sure if you benchmark the right programs doing the right things, the latest high-end systems outperform it .... but the difference is negligible for 90% of the things you're going to do with it day to day.
I considered upgrading it to the latest Mac Pro, but couldn't see any reason to do it. My money was far better spent upgrading the SATA drives in it to faster, larger ones and putting a newer video card in it.
Agreed! Even here in the USA, I was just telling my g/f that she'd be wise to consider upgrading her 24" white Intel iMac with a refurbished or used Mac Pro of the first or second revision, as opposed to buying a new 27" iMac. The 27" iMac is a great machine, but she's already got at least 5 or 6 devices hanging off the back of the existing iMac because she wanted to have 4 hard drives attached, among other things. The iMac loses much of its appeal as a "clean, all-in-one solution" when you start adding external drives and everything to it. You may as well put 4 drives inside a Mac Pro tower instead, and then you have all sorts of display choices too, AND the bonus of putting more RAM in it than an iMac can handle too (if you so choose).
I'm still using a Mac Pro from 2006 and it still feels just as "snappy" as anything Apple sells today as a new model. I'm sure if you benchmark the right programs doing the right things, the latest high-end systems outperform it .... but the difference is negligible for 90% of the things you're going to do with it day to day.
I considered upgrading it to the latest Mac Pro, but couldn't see any reason to do it. My money was far better spent upgrading the SATA drives in it to faster, larger ones and putting a newer video card in it.
kernkraft
macrumors 68020
Considering there is hardly anything that can take advantage of the original quad core Mac Pros, or the Nehalims, what's the point?
I guess if you're running Maya or ZBrush it's good news.
I guess if you're running Maya or ZBrush it's good news.
Glideslope
macrumors G3
You hit the nail on the head. With the MP and it's ability to upgrade both RAM and video cards, it's life is prolonged by years for all but the most processor intensive applications. My MP '08 came with 4x1GB of RAM and when the 2GB stuff dropped in price, I picked up 4x2GB for under $200 from OWC. Eventually when then 4GB sticks come down enough I'll do the same thing and replace the 1GB sticks and have a total of 24GB of RAM. I'm not a gamer so my 8800GT is fine for all the work I do in Adobe CS4. I do a fair bit of photo and video work and so the HP provided by the 8 cores for encoding is appreciated. I figure in 2-3 years when Intel delivers an 8 core processor and Apple drops two of them into a tower to make it a 16 core machine (which is double the cores I've got now) then I'll take the plunge and get myself a new box.
I doubt most people actually need a 12 core Macpro, 6 core would do for 90% of professionals I reckon.
cjmillsnun
macrumors 68020
Please Apple PLEASE finish updating the Cinema Displays!!! 🙁 I want a bigger LED Cinema Display STAT! 32" would be good! I won't buy the new Mac Pro until I can get dual LED Cinema Displays BIGGER than 24"!
First off, the Hyperthreaded cores aren't "imaginary", they're simply logical. Let's take a Nehalem-based quadcore for example. With hyperthreading enabled, it has four physical cores, but eight logical cores. This typically occurs by adding adding another set of registers (control registers, status registers, address registers, etc.), while not adding in another execution set (as this would result in a truly additional physical core). The idea behind it is that since a system is not always dependent upon 100% execution set utilization, by adding in the additional control and general purpose registers, it can execute an additional thread and take advantage of the available execution resources (if anyone has any other thoughts or wants to make make any corrections please do so, my general memory on the fine details of a hyperthreaded architecture are a bit rusty 🙂 ).
Anyway, people often think that to take advantage of Hyperthreading that you needed specially-coded software for it, and that's simply not the case. To see any type of benefit, you simply need to be using multithreaded applications, and in that regard, there are plenty of currently-available applications that are multithreaded.
Now, there has been considerable discussion on whether hyperthreading is even worth it for dual-core systems, given the extra power consumption, thermal output and the fact with a dual, quad (or soon to be 6-core) processor you already have multiple cores available for multithreaded apps, thus negating some of the usefulness of it.
Production costs haven't really gone up per-say, it's simply that Intel doesn't have nearly the competition that they used to (as AMD is in a somewhat sorry state these days), and so there's really no reason to keep costs low, especially when it comes to the professional/workstation/server markets.
Dr.Pants
macrumors 65816
If only I could find that chart of processors I saw at one point in time... Its somewhere in the MacPro forum (posted by Eidorian, methinks) that had a list of Gulftown chips and most were dual-socket labeled (56xx series) instead of single socket (36xx).
Not saying there won't be matching single-socket chips with the dual-socket processors, but it would be nice if Apple dropped the daughterboard single and dual socket nonsense and went back to using a plain dual-socket motherboard.
Also, EDIT
That. Right there.
Not saying there won't be matching single-socket chips with the dual-socket processors, but it would be nice if Apple dropped the daughterboard single and dual socket nonsense and went back to using a plain dual-socket motherboard.
Also, EDIT
That. Right there.
NO KIDDING! Every time these rumors surface, it seems to make it here somewhere. Xeons are also higher-binned chips, so theoretically better quality than the standard Core iX series, therefore feeding into the sensibility of a enormously over-priced machine.