could you explain this a tad more?? my brain cant comprehend that at this hour!
You can choose how many cores you want (4 or 8) and then what clock speed you want the cores to be at (2.67 GHz or 2.93 GHz, plus 2.27 GHz 8-core). So you can go for a lower-clocked 8-core for multithreaded applications, a higher-clocked 4-core for single-threaded applications, or a higher-clocked 8-core for the best of both worlds.
Previous Mac Pros (and the Power Mac G5) didn't offer you this kind of choice. As you moved up in price, both clock speeds and core counts increased. For example, the 2008 Mac Pro.
2.8 GHz 4-core
2.8 GHz 8-core
3.0 GHz 8-core
3.2 GHz 8-core
If you want a higher clock speed than 2.8 GHz, you can only go for an 8-core model. And you can't have a lower clock speed for an 8-core than 2.8 GHz.
The charts visually represent these points.
The first one gives performance on the horizontal axis and expandability on the vertical axis. So as you go further right, you get more performance, and as you go further up, you get more expandability. The iMac is quite low on both axes since it doesn't have much performance or expandability. The 4-core Mac Pro (4C) is high on the expandability axis since it has a lot of expandability, but is a bit on the left side on the performance axis (more performance than the iMac though). The "iMac Pro" still has low expandability like the iMac, but since it is a bit further to the right on the performance axis than the 4-core Mac Pro, it has more performance than the 4-core Mac Pro. The 8-core Mac Pro (8C) is high on the expandability axis and is to the far right on the performance axis, which means that it has a lot of performance and expandability.
So, if you wanted performance but not much expandability, you'd go for the iMac Pro, and if you wanted expandability but not much performance, you'd go for the 4-core Mac Pro. That was what you were talking about in post #28 (I decided to expand on it).
If you start with the lowest performance and expandability (iMac), you have the choice to move up or to the right depending on whether you wanted more expandability or more performance.
The second chart is the same thing, except that now clock speed (related to single-threaded performance) is on the horizontal axis and core count (related to multithreaded performance) is on the vertical axis.
Starting at the lowest priced one (4-core 2.67 GHz), you can move up, to the right, or to the upper-left depending on how much single-threaded and multithreaded performance you wanted. With the 2008 Mac Pro, there is only one direction you can go from the 4-core 2.8 GHz, and that is up.
Code:
Core count (multithreaded performance)
|
|8C 2.8 8C 3.0 8C 3.2
|
|
|
|4C 2.8
----------------- Clock speed (single-threaded performance)
If my explanation made it more complicated (as I often do), then I apologize…
