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.
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Quad Processor Intel Mac?
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shamino
macrumors 68040
It really depends on if you're coming from a hardware or software background.nagromme said:
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.
combatcolin
macrumors 68020
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?
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:
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:
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".
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.
I'm currently doing four things at once with my Mac Mini 😉.
The chip that was quoted (~$1000) was a 2.8Ghz dual core Xeon w/ SMT.AidenShaw said:
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:
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:
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.
thogs_cave
macrumors regular
shamino said:
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. 🙂
thogs_cave
macrumors regular
aegisdesign said:
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.
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.
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.
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.
savar
macrumors 68000
Evangelion said:
"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:
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.
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
System X too
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)...
The System X SuperCluster at Virginia Tech also "processes instructions and data"...but would you call that "a CPU"? 🙂Evangelion 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?
(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)...
Attachments
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).
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!
Have pity on those of us with dial-up. 4.4 MB really stops us dead!
fed-ex said:
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.
longofest
Editor emeritus
riciad said:
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.
strydr
macrumors 6502
savar said:
Uhh, I hope yor kidding, but if not, check this out..
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/
up to 512 CPU's per server....