Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro 628
ivan1024 writes "The Apple website is announcing the availability of an 8-core Mac Pro. The machine will ship with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 processors. Older models with the Dual-Core chips remain available. Base model with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors start at $3997, (albeit with unacceptably minimal RAM or HD space; fully spec'd with dual 30" monitors and tons o' RAM/HD still over $10K... bummer)"
Advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a longtime mac user, I must admit that it feels inordinately good to say that.;-)
Re:Advantage? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a chicken and an egg problem. If you don't have a system like this then no one will write software for it. Besides, we're already going dual and quad core on our desktops.
Re:What do use it for? (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back some folks (Ars Technica, I think) swapped the dualies in the Mac Pro for these new quad cores and found out that it could not only see all the cores, but also utilize them. (Though they could never get it to peg the processors, even while playing 8 high-def videos on it.)
Mac OS X automatically sees and uses as many cores or processors that it has available. Final Cut Pro, the de facto video editing app for professionals these days, can see and use all these cores.
Now if you want to do that on the Windows side, I won't be of much assistance.
Re:RAM/vidcard deficiencies are no big deal... (Score:3, Interesting)
No new video cards (Score:2, Interesting)
How about updated NVIDIA 8800 class video cards?
Re:awesome machine (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a reasonable question. The general answer is a lot of niche markets, but not many general markets.
- Video/multimedia editing at real time or faster than real time
- Raytracing/3D image generation
- High-end data analysis (quite good for most sciences)
- Financial/Business data analysis
Upgrades? (Score:2, Interesting)
Even with Apple 30" displays being $1800 ($1600 higher ed) new (Dell's is cheaper now too- didn't used to be), I doubt I'd add a second one- my desk isn't big enough! I highly recommend the 30" though. It's even nicer than you'd think.
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Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah on minimums. (Score:3, Interesting)
But I think I see Apple's desire to sell an operational machine - it'd be hard to support a machine if it is untestable in the store - in other words, there are a lot of idiots out there who can still manage to screw up RAM and HDD purchasing and installation, and when the do screw up, they're likely to blame anyone else other than themselves.
Then again, my needs aren't really impacted by the "unacceptably minimal" 250 GB single disk and 1 GB of RAM - my world is CPU bound - loads of RAM and disk do not solve my problems where I work.
Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just ECC DDR-SDRAM, but FB-DIMM. The latter's even harder to get since it's only used for Intel's Xeon line of processors (which the Mac Pro and xServe use, and any workstation or server with multiple physical CPUs (not cores)).
When I purchased my Mac Pro, Apple's RAM was very close to the price of FB-DIMMs locally and not too much more online - it was worth it buying Apple's stuff, have it all installed and having Apple actually being forced to fix it should it cause kernel panics and stuff. Plus, Apple's RAM has larger heatsinks - I think Crucials do too (if you ask for them). I saw a memory test somewhere the revealed the memory can run hot, and you get a number of correctable ECC errors. But if your RAM has the larger Apple-recommended heatsinks on them, the ECC errors drop to zero.
But yes, FB-DIMMs are also why the Xeon platform's memory numbers aren't that great due to their higher latency - for raw memory-intensive stuff, a regular desktop Core2 processor will run rings around a Xeon Core2, even though the latter may have much faster RAM.
Re:awesome machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple needs to rerelease the Cube. In dual and quad configurations, with a PCI express x16 slot, 1 x1 slot, 4 ram slots, Firewire 800 and USB.
Went with quad 3.0... (Score:3, Interesting)
Toward the end of the year, if its still too slow, i can always throw down on some of the quad core chips. They're around $1200 right now on Newegg.
But so far, its not the processors that are slowing me down - its the hard drives and the 2 gigs of ram.
If you're buying the 8 core box, and you're NOT buying a SATA raid w/card to go with it, you're pissing in the wind... because you'll NEVER keep the processors busy enough..
encoding h.264 right now is taxing the 3 drive array inside my box, not the computing bits.
I'm sure that with the release of Final Cut Suite 6 - we'll hopefully get some 3D graphics - finally - and maybe we'll even get shake with the Uber package if we're lucky.
THEN we'll see.
but right now, i have literally thrown dozens of needlessly complex stuff at Motion 2, and i can't get the CPUs to bog down.
Re:Where's the updated video card? (Score:3, Interesting)
But with the popularity of boot camp, they instead elected to go with a card that had working windows and linux drivers.
I want a MBP pretty bad, but I specifically will not purchase anything with ATI graphics. I gave them another chance after years of avoiding them (Radon 9600XT) and it turned out they STILL can't write drivers worth one tenth of one shit.
On top of that, as others have pointed out, the only benefit to that for non-gaming purposes (and this is simply not a gaming machine - there is currently no benefit to having more than two cores in one of those) would be for using the GPUs as coprocessors.
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
This varies depending upon the release dates and whatnot, but in general, I disagree. Apple usually wins for small form factor, with the mini almost always cheaper than Dell and anyone else, and they frequently win for pro notebooks, though not always. In fact, Apple is usually a bit more expensive for the Mac Pro line and this is an anomaly. For matching the exact same hardware and ignoring installed software, the last market study I saw put Apple at 8% more expensive than Dell, but 4% cheaper than the market on average. Of course it also put Apple far and away ahead of Dell in customer support and hardware reliability which was not accounted for in the price difference.
In general, you have to add extras to Dell machines to get them to the same functionality as Apple machines. Dell mostly sells minimal machines, while Apple is committed to the midrange, with firewire, dual monitor support, etc. in everything. Realistically, Apple does not usually lose on price, they lose on lack of variety, making it harder to find exactly what you want and usually resulting in your purchasing more than you need, to get the features you do need. This is a subtly different problem.
Re:Advantage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:awesome machine (Score:3, Interesting)
As for what connectivity is missing from the iMac, generally RAM capacity, The lack of any type of PCI or ExpressCard expandability. Insufficient number of either ethernet ports or USB/Firewire ports with independent controllers. Which is to say, the kinds of high bandwidth expandability that make a computer useful in the age of digital A/V connectivity.
Your response to this is likely to be that "we", the xMac crowd, simply need to buy Mac Pros and get over it. I think this attitude is rediculously unfair. What we want is not that bizarre, in fact, its the most commonly sold type of desktop machine in the personal computing market. We want a Mac Minitower. A machine, smaller, lighter, and with less expandability than a Pro workstation, but with more than an iMac.
Re:Stop me if you've heard this one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pegging 8 cores (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:a good chunk... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really. I call BS on this one.
Show links to 3 GHz Quad-core Xeon Clovertown CPUs (these can be used in pairs) and a motherboard that can support a pair of them.
Just the dual-core 3 GHz versions of the Xeon (5160) run $871 [newegg.com] each ($1742 a pair) at New Egg. It is very doubtful that you could find even a pair of the right quad-core processors alone for $2000.
If you're not trolling, perhaps you are confused. Remember, the quad-core variant of the cheaper Core 2 Duo (qx6700 etc) can't be used in pairs.
Re:honest question: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have an application that is spending more time spawning threads than executing the threads, then I would question the software design, but furthermore I would say that if the threads are spending so little time actually processing, then execution time is going to seem instantaneous regardless of operating system. The sole exception would have to be an application that does nothing _else_ than spawn threads.
I don't think Apple is plannng on fixing this problem because they probably give higher priority to fixing real problems.