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hey did anyone else notice, they didn't update the itunes music store today? Something involving the music store is definitly going on tommorow. Add to the fact that the mmusic video section has failed to update for like a month now and I think we could be looking at music video for sale from the itunes store.
 
MagnusDredd 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.
There are lots of quad-chip HT Xeon systems around, and they've been around for years (I have one with 1.6 GHz Xeon MP chips, for example).

Who's claiming that the fake screenshots are of dual-core Xeon systems?
 
nagromme said:
I think everyone is overlooking the obvious. That people--even in the industry--speak of "processors" in two DIFFERENT ways.

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 really depends on if you're coming from a hardware or software background.

From a hardware point of view, dual-core is a single processor. It's a single chip, with a single set of pins.

From a software point of view, dual-core is two processors. There is little, if anything, different from two separate CPU packages that software can detect or take advantage of.
 
Anyone remember the days when we could say that Macs were cheaper because they consumed less juice.

Not a major selling point i know, but nice to know.

now, well...anyone remember the scene from Natinal Lampoons Christmas Vaction when the lights fianily switch on and the local power station has to increase its output?
 
igetbanned said:
You're a little late to the party. :D

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.

Sorry, but you're completely mad.

X86 code doesn't equal X86 OSX code. All their X86 code is for Windows and mostly written in C or C++ or whatever high level language they use. A tiny fraction of it will be optimized assembler perhaps. There's a UI abstraction layer common to both platforms which has only just recently been completed so the whole carbon/cocoa debate is a red herring as Adobe have their own libraries to port. You can read about it at http://opensource.adobe.com/

Apart from that Adobe's products have over a decade of legacy code that may or may not have been touched in years. It's a massive undertaking to convert from Codewarrior to XCode for them. It's not 'rocket science' but it IS a lot of work.

When you have to touch every part of your code, even stuff you've not touched in years, that also means a long QA too.

And I'm sure Adobe wants CS3 to be full of new features to make it a compelling upgrade too. So they've got to couple in porting to a new environment (2 if you include Windows Vista), new development tools, training new developers, legacy support and new features.

Then they've the Adobe/Macromedia merger.

I can't imagine they're sitting back and doing nothing just now.
 
AidenShaw said:
This definition of CPU applies to the core - that's the only thing that "processes instructions and data".

Well, the physical CPU with two cores also "processes instruction and data", it just have two cores to do so. Hyperthreading makes everything in the CPU look double, does that mean it's a SMP-machine? I mean, the "Virtual CPU" also "processes instructions and data".

For the layman (joe 6pack), his dual-core is a dual-cpu machine

Nope, he wouldn't know a single-CPU machine from dual-CPU machine. But if he opened the case, he would notice that "my computer has only one of these thingamathings, so I have only one processor on my machine". He would not know about number of cores.

- he's been told by the ads that it's better because it can do two things at once.

I'm currently doing four things at once with my Mac Mini ;).
 
AidenShaw said:
There are lots of quad-chip HT Xeon systems around, and they've been around for years (I have one with 1.6 GHz Xeon MP chips, for example).

Who's claiming that the fake screenshots are of dual-core Xeon systems?
The chip that was quoted (~$1000) was a 2.8Ghz dual core Xeon w/ SMT.

There has been a ton of posts suggesting the machine would be "dual dual", meaning two chips, two cores, with SMT. And at least 5 of them somehow suggesting it was more likely due to the size of the Powermac case (as if that would have anything to do with it). Since the P4 identifies itself as a P4 from the command line version of system_profiler and I was unaware of dual Pentium 4 boards it would follow that the people in the previous posts would have to be referring to a Xeon, provided it wasn't just completely ignorant speculation.

I don't know why most people in this forum seem to think that two dual core CPUs would be more likely than a 4 CPU box. 4 CPU machines have been around a very long time, dual core is new to x86. I have a friend who has a machine running 4x 166Mhz Pentium Pro CPUs. I have a Daystar Genesis MP 800+. Not a big deal at all. Having a dual CPU, dual core, SMT enabled, intel based system would be a huge deal given that the chip was only announced yesterday.

My personal perspective:
A CPU is a Central Processing Unit, which I take to mean a discrete part. It may or may not have multiple cores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-core

When referred to as a dual core CPU, CPU (the chip) is referred to as a single entity with two cores.
 
shamino said:
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.

Except for the fact that OSX up until 10.4 had only two funnels so it would indeed have problems with more than two processors. 10.4 fixed that.


shamino 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.

See above. However, if you're running an application that only has 2 threads then you're not going to see any advantage from a 4 CPU system.

This was the problem that was solved with BeOS by making developers multi-thread everything in an application and why lots of people were dismayed when Apple chose UNIX and especially Mach/BSD based NextStep as it's way forward. As it turned out, I don't think that was a bad idea business wise but it's sure stunted it technology-wise.

And now it's about to bite both Windows and Mac developers as their inherently single threaded or at best double threaded applications will get beaten by applications that scale better to multi-cpu, multi-core setups. If Apple had gone for BeOS, overall system performance would have been much better.
 
shamino said:
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.

True. Most of the major *NIX vendors have over a decade of SMP already, and the OSs reflect that. Solaris, IRIX, AIX (to name a few) all have the ability to scale across large numbers of CPUs efficiently. I've personally worked on a Sun F15K with 106 CPUs running one instance of Solaris and running it quite well.

OS X is already quite well-threaded for a young OS. I have a dual G5, and I'm very impressed at how well it makes use of both CPUs. While I'm pretty sure the screen shot was misleading or a fake, I can certainly see OS X running on a big SMP box.

Now I think I'll go pat my 12-CPU E5000 on the head. It's doing a good job of keeping my den warm. :)
 
aegisdesign said:
However, if you're running an application that only has 2 threads then you're not going to see any advantage from a 4 CPU system.

Not to split hairs, but that's not entirely true. If the application were the only process running on the box then yes, you can't see any benefit from more than two CPUs. However, no application is an island. Additional CPUs can offload a lot of the ancilliary OS tasks, like I/O. While not a n+1 speedup, it still makes for a faster experience overall.
 
For the sake of arguement

The pics are almost certainly fake. For the lack of the diplay showing Hyperthreading enabled showing up in the screen shot, if nothing else

However, we do have confirmation that OSX does support SMT (Hyperthreading), beyond the controls in the CHUD tool. I don't have access to an SMT machine running OSX so I had no way of being sure.

I have verification that OSX for intel (cracked) will run on hardware it almost certainly does not have drivers for. The more unlike the DevKit the hardware is, the more unstable/unusable OSX gets. For the record, I don't have a copy of OSX intel cracked or otherwise. I havent helped anyone with breaking the law. I've just seen the result.

While the screenshot is a fake, this could probably be done using a Quad Xeon box. The question would be how well it ran, and how well it scales (handles more and more CPUs). I for one would like to test it on a Quad CPU box, but since I don't have a 4 CPU x86 machine, nor a desire to pirate OSX x86, I'll have to wait for someone else to do it.

For the record, last I checked, OSX does not see the additional CPUs in my 4 CPU Daystar Genesis.

This is a partial output from system_profiler on a machine I logged into via SSH.

Last login: Mon Aug 15 09:57:45 2005 from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Welcome to Darwin!
smhstech:~ root# system_profiler
Hardware:

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Mac
Machine Model: ACPI
CPU Type: Intelå¨ Pentiumå¨ 4 CPU
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.68 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
CPU Features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMO
V PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM
Memory: 256 MB
Bus Speed: 400 MHz
Boot ROM Version: A05 (Dell Computer Corporation)
Memory:

RIMM_1:

Size: 128 MB
Type: RDRAM
Speed: Unknown

RIMM_2:

Size: 128 MB
Type: RDRAM
Speed: Unknown

RIMM_3:

Size: Empty
Type: Empty
Speed: Empty

RIMM_4:

Size: Empty
Type: Empty
Speed: Empty

And yes that's Rambus memory. According to the person it was kinda unstable, rosetta was non-functional, and the video card didn't accelerate the GUI or work well. I was very shocked when I logged in to say the least, since I wasn't told what the machine was. I don't know the person in Meatspace, or I'd have to have played with the machine in person.

Whether it can be run on an Athlon with any degree of stability is another question altogether.
 
Evangelion said:
I think it's pretty reasonable to talk about CPU and cores. CPU is the chip that's in the computer and that chip may have one or more cores in it. But if we started calling the individual cores as CPU's, we would start to REALLY confuse things! Add to that the weirdoes who call the computer itself (in case of PM, the tower) CPU's.

"Central" makes no sense to begin with in any sort of multiple processor environment...How can a G5 be a "central processing unit" if there's another G5 right next to it doing the same amount of work? The two together might be taken as a the "central processing unit"...these terms are old and useless anyway.

As Aiden has suggested, identifying the number of chips and cores seems to be the best way to do things, i.e. "dual-chip dual-core = four procs"...
 
thogs_cave said:
Now I think I'll go pat my 12-CPU E5000 on the head. It's doing a good job of keeping my den warm. :)

Know anyone who can use an E4000 Chasis? It was in a rack I bought. It's not really worth auctioning. I'd just like to see it get used.
 
aegisdesign said:
Sorry, but you're completely mad.

snipQUOTE]

That's my take on the situation too. I read the interview with the Adobe CEO and he made it very clear that we'd have to wait for CS3 in the Leopard time frame to get Photoshop on Mactel.
I do think PowerMacs will be one of the first machines to get Intel procs though. The chips for those machines (P4's and Xeons) are already ready for production. At the point in time that they decide not to release anymore PPC PowerMac updates then it because reasonable that they should release Mactel PowerMacs, even if the Pro software isn't ready. They should, however, continue to sell the PPC machines for people who want them.

Oh yeah, Adobe software for Vista requires no modifications or porting. Nearly everything from XP will work on Vista. The only possible porting will be to 64-bit (After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition)
 
System X too

Evangelion said:
Well, the physical CPU with two cores also "processes instruction and data", it just have two cores to do so.
The System X SuperCluster at Virginia Tech also "processes instructions and data"...but would you call that "a CPU"? :)

systemx.jpg



IMO the smallest unit that fits the criteria is the core. Look at the PPC970MP picture. It's pretty clear that this chip has two complete "thingies" on it - cut it down the middle and you'd have two CPUs, so wouldn't you have 2 CPUs even if you don't cut it?

(see thumbnail or http://www.ibm.com/chips/photolibrary/pervasive/951.jpg for the 4MB original)

Before too long, maybe new clearer terminology will be settled upon, so that the characteristics of how many "thingies" in how many "whatchamacallits" in your system will be clear.

Until then, I'll CPU (Cease Promoting Unambiguity)...
 

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Silly me!
I thought that was an infrared satellite photo.

I was looking for my house (& for a moment there I thought I had found it - just next to the KFC with the red roof).
 
IMO the smallest unit that fits the criteria is the core. Look at the PPC970MP picture. It's pretty clear that this chip has two complete "thingies" on it - cut it down the middle and you'd have two CPUs, so wouldn't you have 2 CPUs even if you don't cut it?

Have pity on those of us with dial-up. 4.4 MB really stops us dead!
 
fed-ex said:
hey did anyone else notice, they didn't update the itunes music store today? Something involving the music store is definitly going on tommorow. Add to the fact that the mmusic video section has failed to update for like a month now and I think we could be looking at music video for sale from the itunes store.

They have posted some new music, however. I bought my dangerdoom! [adult swim] all the way! It's release date is listed as October 11, even though officially it was supposed to be the 12th. (Indeed, it wasn't uploaded until today) So, I'm sure glad they didn't wait until tomorrow for everything.
 
riciad said:
IMO the smallest unit that fits the criteria is the core. Look at the PPC970MP picture. It's pretty clear that this chip has two complete "thingies" on it - cut it down the middle and you'd have two CPUs, so wouldn't you have 2 CPUs even if you don't cut it?

You can't just precision cut a dual-core proessor and get 2 separate processors. The two have connections to each other that would be severed that are used for cache "snooping" (which is a nice advancement of dual-core systems over dual-proessor systems).

While each core might have separate caches depending on the CPU type (different companies have different implementations), you always cannot just split them and have 2 cpus. The cores are totally reliant on each other.
 
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