Next Mac Pro to be 16-core?

[indiochano]

32 core workstation?

not gonna happen... maybe in the next two years, but for 2010 thats way too soon to tell... even if they wanted to, it would still run at a big 10k+ pricepoint.

 

[morrisman1]

it would be interesting to see if they do make such a beast. Whether it would be economical to produce would be another matter. There would be a lot of companies which would benefit from such a system and save money (from saving time) but whether there would be enough to make it worth apple producing.

Snow Leopard may make something like that possible

 

[Genghis Khan]

well...following Apple's pattern with increasing cores...

1977 (June) - The Apple II used a single processor (1 x 1MHz).

1996 (Nov) - They started to introduce dual processors (2 x 200MHz).

2005 (Nov) - The PowerMac G5 had 2 x dual-core processors (4 x 2.5GHz).

2007 (Apr) - The Clovertown Mac Pro used 2 x quad-core (8 x 3.0GHz).

2009 (Mar) - The Nehalem Mac Pro now has 2 x quad-cores with hyper-threading (16 x 2.93GHz).

Following the pattern of the last 5 years...

2011 (February) - The x Mac Pro with 32 cores. Taking a quick look at the Intel roadmap, this will probably be the Sandy Bridge architecture. However that only goes up to 8 cores at the moment, meaning that Apple will need to introduce 4 processor chips to get up to 32 cores.
However this is all speculation and, as witnessed by this thread, will probably be wrong.
(Who knows, they could break through the 3GHz barrier to 4-5 GHz 😛)

 

[Salavat23]

Next Mac Pro will be 12 cores. It will be based on the Westmere CPU, the 6-core successor to Nehalem.