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Quad Processor Intel Mac?
- Thread starter MacBytes
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jeriqo said:
You're a little late to the party.
My point is, Adobe already as x86 code.
They're not starting from scratch.
They're a huge company, with quite a few developers.
It isn't rocket science.
If they wanted to get the conversion done in a timely manner, they could.
Now, if you're going to tell me that Adobe has one developer, still writing code with a bare text editor, then I'll concede that it might take a little while to get it done.
nagromme said:
Not at all correct with the Pentium D. The cores do not communicate across the die. They still use the old north bridge inter-processor communication methodology. Intel has admitted that the Pentium D was rushed and done rather poorly, recently.
The Athlon 64, and the IBM implementations do not suffer from this retardedness.
Future Intel dual core CPUs (ones based on the Pentium M) will also not be crippled in this fashion.
MacTruck said:
I didn't notice that either.
Looks fake now that I've taken a closer look.
Good eye Xenolith.
SMT Support (Hyperthreading)
This is almost certainly incorrect.
Remember the big ruckus about 4 CPU core support was going on because of the new features in the CHUD developer tool. What most everyone seemed to not notice was that the CHUD tool showed 2 physical CPUs and two logical CPUs. The fact that this was reported as showing support for dual cores across multiple news sites with no checking of terminology was shocking to me. Dual core CPUs have two "physical CPUs". "Logical CPUs" refers to the use of Symetric Multithreading, which is the industry term for Hyperthreading.
There'd be no reason to support SMT in the developer toolkit, unless there was some level of support for logical CPUs.
Having a system support multiple core CPUs (especially the Pentium D) requires nothing other than SMP support. This is because as far as the OS is concerned, the system has multiple chips.
shamino said:
This is almost certainly incorrect.
Remember the big ruckus about 4 CPU core support was going on because of the new features in the CHUD developer tool. What most everyone seemed to not notice was that the CHUD tool showed 2 physical CPUs and two logical CPUs. The fact that this was reported as showing support for dual cores across multiple news sites with no checking of terminology was shocking to me. Dual core CPUs have two "physical CPUs". "Logical CPUs" refers to the use of Symetric Multithreading, which is the industry term for Hyperthreading.
There'd be no reason to support SMT in the developer toolkit, unless there was some level of support for logical CPUs.
Having a system support multiple core CPUs (especially the Pentium D) requires nothing other than SMP support. This is because as far as the OS is concerned, the system has multiple chips.
igetbanned said:
These were released for sale yesterday. Noone other than Intel or OEMs have these yet. This is almost certainly not what was running the machine the screenshot was taken from.
AidenShaw, you're being contrary to the definitions used within the industry.
Yes, a core is a CPU. We're all agreed there.
A Processor (the things you can buy, the things that go in sockets, etc) can have multiple CPUs on them.
When the CPUs are within the same die that is mounted onto the Processor, connected externally via a single interface to the bus/interconnect, then each CPU is known as a 'core'. e.g., 970MP, Athlon X2. Each core may share some resource on the Processor, for example L2 cache, the bus interface, memory controllers and so on.
When the CPUs are separate dies then the Processor is known as a Multi-Chip-Module, which contains several CPUs. e.g., Xeon (Paxville). You could argue that some dual G4 expansion cards are MCMs.
The two can be mixed, you can have MCMs containing dual-core processors, for example POWER5.
In the end what is important is how many cores a system has, but remember that on some systems 4 single-core CPUs could act differently to 2 dual-core CPUs so it is important to classify exactly what the specification is.
Yes, a core is a CPU. We're all agreed there.
A Processor (the things you can buy, the things that go in sockets, etc) can have multiple CPUs on them.
When the CPUs are within the same die that is mounted onto the Processor, connected externally via a single interface to the bus/interconnect, then each CPU is known as a 'core'. e.g., 970MP, Athlon X2. Each core may share some resource on the Processor, for example L2 cache, the bus interface, memory controllers and so on.
When the CPUs are separate dies then the Processor is known as a Multi-Chip-Module, which contains several CPUs. e.g., Xeon (Paxville). You could argue that some dual G4 expansion cards are MCMs.
The two can be mixed, you can have MCMs containing dual-core processors, for example POWER5.
In the end what is important is how many cores a system has, but remember that on some systems 4 single-core CPUs could act differently to 2 dual-core CPUs so it is important to classify exactly what the specification is.
freiheit said:
Why would the screenshot show 8 Logical CPUs then?
Noone, Intel or otherwise, is shipping quad core SMT enabled chips. That's what would be required for this to be a single chip system.
Furthermore, dual core Xeons of the type suggested in other posts went on sale yesterday at astronomically inflated prices. I don't think think that anyone other than Intel or the big OEMs have these yet.
Finding a 2.8Ghz 4 CPU Xeon machine with Hyperthreading machine is not so difficult. They have been available for quite some time.
Whatever the case if the screenshot is not a fake, and it'd be annoying to go through the effort to produce a fake this decent, then the machine would not be not something produced by Apple.
CPU = Chutda Puck Up.
Feels like the beating of a dead horse here. I think we all agree that the more processing units that exist in a box, the faster it is likely to run. Two is better than one. Four are better than two. To the average Joe, the more they have, the better. Beating the terminology to death will never change that. JMO
Feels like the beating of a dead horse here. I think we all agree that the more processing units that exist in a box, the faster it is likely to run. Two is better than one. Four are better than two. To the average Joe, the more they have, the better. Beating the terminology to death will never change that. JMO
MagnusDredd said:
Tell that to Aiden.
He's the one who threw up current Xeon prices.
It all started with someone saying Apple should put the newest Xeon's in the PM.
I just said that would be one hell of an 'Apple Tax', considering the initial cost of the chips.
reyesmac said:
Like windows? Multithreading does this without breaking the user interface. Furthermore even though windows shows each window as a separate process (like the 4 Firefox windows opened on the machine on my left side) it's only a single process. You can check this using the task manager and view processes. The whole one window in the application window is a throw back from windows 3.1. It's broken and I'm sad to admit that at one point I prefered it.
I'm better now though.
Speaking of dual core, I would dearly love to see Freescale's new dual core G4 in the next (hopefully tomorrow) upgrade of the Powerbook.
dual core
IBM has been making dual core CPUs for quite a while. They're on their third generation of dual core Power CPUs.
Intel on the other hand is just getting started.
nagromme said:Yes--so I have been led to believe. Technical comments/corrections from those in the know are welcomed. We may know soon enough
Apple doesn't make G5s, IBM does. Dual-core chips are only recently emerging from Intel--and from IBM presumably.
IBM has been making dual core CPUs for quite a while. They're on their third generation of dual core Power CPUs.
Intel on the other hand is just getting started.
4 Physical Intels - they should call it the Power-Oven and sell it as a computer and furnace - in one of my machines, I have a 2.25 Intel and it just about heats the office on it's own...
No modern multiprocessing OS kernel should need to be rewritten for this support. Especially not any UNIX-based kernel. Once the scheduling code for distributing threads across processors has been written, it's no big deal to throw more processors at it.Alvin777 said:
A 4- or 8-CPU system should not require any OS or app changes. The system will simply distribute threads across all the CPUs it has at its disposal. If your apps are multithreaded, they will take advantage of the extra power. If they're not, then they won't. Just like it is now with two CPUs.
What are you talking about? Nobody is even close to shipping 7-core processors. Intel is talking about 4, and even that won't be for a while.Alvin777 said:
As for adding CPUs, it's never been an OS issue. The problem is all of the bus and cache contention that happens when you have a ton of processors sharing the same memory space.
Are you aware that processors attached to a PCI bus (even PCIe) would have lousy performance? Have you taken even one computer architecture course? You can't just throw chips in a box and expect performance to keep on increasing without bound. It just doesn't work that way.Alvin777 said:
The PS3 is not using a 7-core PPC. They are using a Cell processor. Which is one stripped-down PPC core, with 7 separate vector-math units. That is completely different and not in any way useful for general-purpose computing.Alvin777 said:
Your imagination is running away from you. Adding two more processor chips (even dual core) does not automatically turn one computer into three computers. It doesn't make it any easier to provide OS emulation, and it certainly isn't going to convince Apple to start shipping Macs that run other people's system software.Alvin777 said:
This has absolutely nothing at all to do with the number of CPU cores in a box. If Apple wants to develop a clone for MS Office, they can do it just as well on a single-core single-CPU system as they can on your imaginary 56-core monstrosity.Alvin777 said:
KingArthur said:
Except those chips, the Pentium EE, aren't readily available, and cost over $1000 each.
Since I don't have access to a DevKit, I appreciate the info. The Hyperthreading display sounds like a dead giveaway that you'd have to have a developer kit to know about.AltiVec guru said:When Hyper-Threading is enabled, the Menu Extra shows an "HT" where they tried to overlay a "4". More obviously, with HT, the Processor Palette's display gains a horizontal split right down the center of the black graph area, with (okay, rotate this 90 deg CCW): [ Thread B | Thread A ]. If you disable Hyper-Threading, the display has no horizontal line or header near the top. The images are stolen from both an Intel DTK and from a dual-PPC Mac, and the image appears to have been composited/captured on a single processor machine anyway, since the Dock icon shows an indicator for only one CPU; on either a dual-PPC or a single-core x86 Intel with HT enabled, it shows two indicator columns, one for each logical unit!
So, almost certainly a fake for that reason alone.
I had noticed the icon. The icon can easily be explained for, by Apple not adding the ability for the dock icon to reflect more than one physical CPU. It's hard to say whether it'd display activity at all or show up as the screenshot would suggest due to lack of ability to track 4 CPUs.
Hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that.AltiVec guru said:Their mockup of Activity Monitor is also a sham. Due to the way memory allocation works in Darwin, you won't likely find six identical processes with the same exact real memory allocations, nor would you see a threaded CPU utilization with such little deviation (and the total utilization doesn't mathematically correspond with the time-lapse/average usage graphs anyway). The sequential PID's are another giveaway.
I've not seen the GUI of an x86 machine running OSX, but I've logged into one. It wasn't a dev kit though. An aquaintance I met in a chat room had me log into it via SSH. It was a Dell. So while I've seen output from system_profiler, it was via the command line.AltiVec guru said:The "Genuine Intel" pictures are definitely NOT from an x86 version of Mac OS X 10.4.1 or 10.4.2, otherwise the screenshots would be WATERMARKED with a visible pattern! Yep...
Also, If I were going to do this and post screenshots, I'd use my VGA -> analog (TV) converter. It'd fuzz out much of the detail, but subtle (and not so subtle) watermarks would be trashed.
Thanks again for the heads up.
The fact that you have never heard of such a system doesn't mean they don't exist.savar said:
here is one quad-Xeon board anybody can buy. Plenty more to choose from if you want to use AMD Opteron chips.
If you'd rather get a pre-assembled system, Dell and HP/Compaq both sell them. Compaq even sells 8-processor systems.
As for OS X running on one, why is that so difficult for you to believe? Despite what Microsoft would have you believe, you don't need proprietary chipset drivers in order to boot an OS on a PC. Linux and FreeBSD all work just fine on a huge variety of systems, including 4-CPU boxes. Given the fact that Darwin is an open source project, I would expect it to be similarly compatible.
The only thing keeping OS X from running on every PC in the world is explicit Mac-detecting code that Apple put in it. And even that has already been hacked.
I think everyone is overlooking the obvious. That people--even in the industry--speak of "processors" in two DIFFERENT ways.Hattig said:
That doesn't make either way "wrong" as long as you're clear what you are talking about.
A processor could be a chip containing two cores. That's not wrong to say.
A processor could be ONE of the two cores on the chip. That's not wrong either.
It's too bad the term doesn't have one standard usage, but it doesn't, so arguing over who is "right" is silly. We all know what's being said and meant.
*nod*igetbanned said:We've all come to that conclusion a long time ago.
Sorry, was backlogged.