What does more cores mean?

[M-apple-T]

thanks for the answer but overall will multitasking be any faster? Or will that be based on ram? Or only faster multitasking with some apps?

 

[JeffDM]

Remember there are actually people who needs the 8 cores or else Apple wont offer them.

Clearly.

If you dont, perhaps the mac pro is just not for you yet.

I have other reasons for owning a Mac Pro. CPU power isn't the only reason to get one. But I am still a bit frustrated that there isn't a whole lot of individual apps that can fully use more than two cores at a time. I'm also a bit frustrated with the ambiguity of whether the early 2008 quad core model will accept another CPU module should the need arise. There's a lot of speculation and very little hard information.

 

[PAUL BRIAN]

clearly, most of you guys in this thread are visual / graphics artists

what about the digital musician? does 8 cores really help out as far as processing plugins and DAW workflow?? will i be able to run multiple virtual instruments more effectively in an 8 core system vs a quad core?

i want to hear more musicians take on this issue because im getting a mac pro soon and i could use the extra $450 dollars on other audio gear

 

[vansouza]

I am not a programmer

so I may see this too simply but... dual cores have been with us for more then two weeks now and shame on any OS from anywhere that does not utilize at least two cores when they are detected. Is coding for multicores impossible or difficult? And while we are on the shame box, shame on any application house that has not coded its SW to work with muliticore computers. I mean if not now when, if not Apple who?

 

[Maldini]

An excuse for a new computer...

Best answer

 

[martinlk]

so I may see this too simply but... dual cores have been with us for more then two weeks now and shame on any OS from anywhere that does not utilize at least two cores when they are detected.

All modern OSs will detect and utilize multiple cores/CPUs.

Is coding for multicores impossible or difficult?

Yes, it's difficult but obviously not impossible. For more insight, read this article on Wikipedia.

And while we are on the shame box, shame on any application house that has not coded its SW to work with muliticore computers.

Every piece of software out there will work with multi-core computers, but not every piece of software is multi-threaded. Also, not all apps will benefit from being multi-threaded.

 

[Infrared]

Here's my own little 8 core test.

FFmpeg compilation times:

8 cores: 24.936 seconds (5.12X speedup)
4 cores: 37.063 seconds (3.44X speedup)
2 cores: 67.240 seconds (1.90X speedup)
1 core: 127.660 seconds

[ 2 x quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro/4GB RAM ]

As you can see, the speedup is not linear
with respect to the number of cores. This
graph makes that more clear:



That said, 8 cores are still significantly
better than 4 in this test.

The ffmpeg source is available here, if you
want to try the test yourself:

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/

To quickly get the code and run an 8 core test:

$ svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg
$ ./configure
$ make -j 8

Fortunately ffmpeg seems to be compiling without
errors at the moment

 

[Alican]

8-Cores was definitely worth getting. For me anyway. I use Compressor a lot and to encode an hours worth of video with 1 core takes about real time. Turn all 8 bad boys on and it takes about 10 minutes.

Applications seem to vary as to how hard they make the cores work given certain processing tasks. Certain Handbrake encoding tasks seem to make them work at full stretch. As does iphoto 08 when importing raw photos for converting to jpeg. Can really hear the fans spin up.

 

[Lord Zedd]

I hear people saying stuff like " to bad that 8 cores wont be used" Or " 8 cores can actually be slower and 2 cores"
How is that?

People saying that don't know anything about computers.

 

[smogsy]

to the above post they are right n there own way

single core can be faster than dual core because single cores normally have a higher clock for example 3.0GHZ vs the early dualcore 2.0ghz.

If the app only reads 1 core (like Counterstrike source (last year) for example)

dualcore can also be faster than qaudcore if they have a higher clock and the app only reads 2 cores

this can follow all the way to Octcore.
in the future well be buying decagon Core with 12ghz clocks.

for example
Core2duo (dualcore)@3.0ghz
Core2Duo (qaudcore) @2.4ghz

in dualcore apps the duacore would win due to the higher clocks.

but as technology progresses 8 cores will be used so people "The people that say 8 cores will never be used will eat there words"

"they once said why do you need Dualcore?"