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92 Comments
- ilgaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+70If you are old time mac user, think like this is exactly completely opposite of how IBM/Motorola treated to Apple.
- KCinWisc, on 10/12/2007, -5/+52Just to clarify, I am not an apple fanboy, I am typing this on a Intel PC (home-built), however as a graphic artist I have been using Macs for nearly 10 years. I have worked with 8 core machines before in a Unix environment (7 years ago), so even this is not new to me.
The truth of the matter is...this is the greatest news I have heard in a long time...Apple is a company that is pushing forward. They may not have been the first company to see the future of multiple cores...or 64 bit processing for that matter, but they are definitely the first to push it into the mass market (if 6-7% qualifies). Their deals with Intel were not a means of cornering a market, but rather a leap of faith. Placing your trust in any tech business, even one as firmly rooted as Intel is still a huge gamble. But even more noteworthy is their commitment to such a small base of users. People need processing power...and Apple continues to provide it at a premium price that most early adopters are willing to pay.
Simply put, sometimes the premium price is worth it considering that waiting for the price to drop usually includes a decrease in quality as well. AMD is as guilty as Intel of lowering their standards in order to meet the demands of a somewhat stingy consumer. Apple has almost never lowered their expectations, just look at their long relationship with the powerPC processor, they reached peak performance, so Apple looked elsewhere...towards the future.
Sorry for the long rant, I just wanted to nip the countless comments from the Anti-Apple camp that I'm sure are to follow in the bud.
Kudos to Apple, for their vision - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+42It's because of Apple's deal with Intel. They get early access to chips that may not even be on the market at any point, let alone within a year. Look at the AppleTV; at its core is an very early version of an x86 system-on-chip Intel's been working on for years called Tolapai. It probably won't be available to anyone else for another 6-9 months, and then not in massive volume.
- inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+38Get out of your house sometime, okay? Fresh air clears your head. Corporate purchasers are very definitely Apple's biggest customers for the high-end machines. The design and publishing industries are standardized on Macs and those customers have the cash and the desire to get the fastest and most powerful--with good reason. Do you really think "Mac fans" are rushing out in droves to buy high-end machines like that?
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37The "Clovertown" core is in all Core 2-based Quad Xeons, the "unannounced" part is the 3.0GHz part. Everyone else only has 2.6GHz parts (or less), but Intel's doing a short-run of factory certified 3.0GHz parts, which Apple decided to incorporate into their Mac Pros. Whether or not they'll be available to anyone else is unknown, but seeing as the run is a "limited" run, it's likely Apple will be the sole purchaser of said part.
- frem001, on 10/12/2007, -1/+29if i'm a design professional and i make my money by charging for the time it takes to create something and the idea as a whole, i would want to have the fastest machine possible, so that work can be completed either on time or ahead of schedule so that i can either refine it if need be or move on to the next client. Don't forget when you're working with moving image 3d or video, it takes up lots of resources. also one project would easily pay for the equipment. I'd get one of these just for the performance boost in maya, modo, adobe cs3 and after effects cs3 (when it arrives)
- OhJay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23@imus
The creative business use demanding programs like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Shake and a slew of other programs of that sort.
If you're doing that kind of work, you need all the power you can get. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21"Hell. Their first x86 chips were 32bit, so now they have to maintain both a 32bit and a 64bit OSX for x86."
It already is, dude. OS X is pretty damn amazing. - velvethead, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18What, do you want to go backpacking with it?
- frem001, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16yeah but you aren't talking about your average home user, if you're a pro it's chump change
- ilgaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1316 Gig is max on Quad G5 too and I actually have that at my home. I saw it on a professional DTP house as maxed, 16gig of RAM. It takes about 2 min to cold start because of RAM test and also the machine has "never put hard drives to sleep" setting since startup disk keeps sleeping. :)
The DTP house was working with 6-7 layers of 39 mpixel images which would eventually get printed on buildings so I assume they really needed it. - robbh66, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Voting on a website and actually dropping 2500+ are two different things.
- frem001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13sure most apps like after effects would have a maximum of around 2-4gb, but what if you were running more that one of these apps at a time, which is quite a common thing to do.
- BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -5/+18I wonder if it's mostly just because Apple's a big buyer and intel hasn't ramped production up to the levels to supply Apple + all the other vendors that want them
- DontSayFanboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13That's not how multithreading works. Why would some bother to write a multithreaded app if it's only going to fork two threads? By design, it will scale out to many cores...
- Balanced, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Ramble: However, note that this isn't a server, it's a desktop.
- Me1000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10There is no such thing a a perfect 5 on vista!
They just try to tell you there is so you whap out more money for a better computer, so you get another OEM copy! - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11"Then you can buy one 3.0 cloverton thats $mucho a piece"
The problem is Intel hasn't even committed to building Clovertowns at 3.0GHz, this is a very limited quantity of them being built, and from the looks of it Apple's purchasing all of them. Secondly, Apple doesn't want you to buy the machine then upgrade it later, they want you to buy what you need, and use it as you need it. The old addage of "if they could weld it shut they would" seems to apply quite aptly here. The same goes for every computer company on the market: nobody wants you to upgrade, but instead to replace.
Oh, and then there's Penryn to consider, which is the only obvious upgrade path. - wonderchemist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10There is a good reason for Intel to give exclusive access to a new chip to Apple first:
PR Buzz. What do you remember better?
The last time Intel introduced some new product?
The last time Apple introduced a new product? - LeonardNimrod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Don't forget to mention software in your rant. If the OS isn't optimized to work with multiple cores (which OS X is) or if you are mainly using one program that hasn't been optimized for use with multiple cores. Luckily for Mac users, all the high-end A/V applications can take advantage of the hardware in the Mac Pros.
Moving on....
I don't doubt that you like AMD more, but that is a personal opinion based on feelings,not one based on fact. Intel is the leader in chip performance right now. AMD had it's day but that is now long gone.
You are correct in saying that these Quad-core chips aren't "true" quad-core chips, but how does this make AMD a better choice? Are you not aware that AMD has no quad-core chips available and that Intel will shortly have a "true" quad-core chip out this year?
Apple has these chips for good reason, but the most important reason for this discussion is that Intel can only produce a very limited supply, so who better to receive them than the one computer manufacture who is not also getting chips from their competitor, AMD, and whose customers would most benefit from the increased in processing performance.
Personally, if I needed the extra power, I'd rather just buy a 2nd 2.66GHz Mac Pro than spend an extra 2K. The processing power across both machines would be more useful to me. - flickr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9University Student? I hope you're drunk or something because that made no sense...
- blakespot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Ehh, 4 cores is one thing. 8 cores requires to many external status LCDs... :-)
http://pix.blakespot.com/view/computers/status_lcd/IMG_8816.JPG.html - robbh66, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Oops, my bad. Dual quad cores start at 4 grand.
- afwjam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I have to say it might take a little more then a year to make this computer an old hat. I almost feel as though this thing is future proof for at least a year. I don't really see any regular applications taking an 8 core xeon to its knees anytime soon.
- LeonardNimrod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7MioTheGreat wrote...
"I've said it once, I'll say it again. HP had 8-core workstations ever since Intel put out the 4-core Xeons. That was several months ago. How does that make Apple the one pushing forward?
Hell. Their first x86 chips were 32bit, so now they have to maintain both a 32bit and a 64bit OSX for x86."
HP doesn't have the 3.0GHz Quad-Core! Only Apple does! The reviews of the Quad-core vs. Dual-core chips on AnandTech show an insignificant performance gain in these chips. Apple, whose pricing has been very competitive this last year, was smart not to include these expensive chips for very little gain in performance. Surely, these new 3.0GHz offering are faster; however, in your defense, this may also be a marketing stunt by Apple now that CS3 is ready to make an appearance.
By the way, OS X can do both 32 and 64-bit within a single build, it also supports both PPC and x86 architecture and OS X Leopard (10.5) will be fully Unix compliant. One OS for the consumer and one for server. Simple, elegant, powerful & stable. - danielwsmithee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@slickto
The 7100 is the older Xeon design. These are the 53xx series based on the core 2 design. The older xeons had a faster clock speed these new ones have better performance. - Sneakernets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You'd still have to wait 3 days!
- Batmanuel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@splinechase
People still use After Effects on the Mac? You know there's this wonderful app called Motion that just totally kicks After Effects in the ass. It's a Universal Binary, and it can use all 8 cores really, really well. - maledin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You have quite a lot of unread emails...
- monospaced, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4There's no way your Dual G5 is faster than the MacPro if the MacPro is using Universal software.
- subscriber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"I don't know any applications that would need that much RAM."
Yes, I agree. I'm pretty sure personal computers will never really need more than 512 kilobytes of RAM.
- Bill Gates, circa 1980 - bmoseley07, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I love how you have to say you're not a fanboy for anybody to take you seriously.
- narzy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4this is like a point release for apple, mac pro v1.5 wait for WWDC for more system announcements.
- streak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5No doubt these early release chips come with special errata sheets, too. As Donald Rumsfeld might say, those are the "known unknowns". What will really bite consumers will be the "unknown unknowns", many of which will never be known (let alone addressed with fixes).
- kerplunk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3When I first heard the news of the new 8-core 3.0 GHz Mac Pro machines, I wondered if it was actually the 3.0 GHz quad-core Xeon chip everyone has been waiting for, or if it was just an overclocked 2.66 chip. I think it's pretty awesome that Apple got this chip before everyone else. I mean, seriously... before everyone else.
If I owned Yahoo! and I wanted to build a brand new server farm for MySQL and I wanted to use these chips, I most likely wouldn't have even been able to get them. (Then again, Yahoo! probably wouldn't use top-of-the-line hardware, but my point still stands.) - danielwsmithee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3While that is true for most applications, it is not true for the applications that this machine is going to be running. Take for example video. Each frame in the video can be handled by a separate thread. This scales very well you can have as many frames being processed simultaneously as the cores available. This is why render farms work so well for video processing. The same is true in photos, a large image is broken up into sections or lines to processed simultaneously.
- cjwl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Apple actually owns a lot of technology&patents that they used at the bargaining table with Intel, few PC makers have that card in their hand. It may not have been a factor in this machine but it will help Apple in the long run.
- splinechaser, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5After Effects and Shake can only use 3 gigs per instance of application running. That being said, I could easily use all of those procs and all of that ram doing feature film visual effects, or hardcore hi def motion graphics. It may seem like a worthless beast, and to the gaming PC crowd, it IS worthless. To those of us who actually use a ton of RAM and proc power, its great and the mac os is clean and elegant.
- shank2001, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3For those of you who do not understand why anyone would need this kind of power... think about 3D rendering, where one frame can take an hour of render time, even on a Core 2 Duo! Why do you think Industrial Light and Magic, and Pixar have literally THOUSANDS of CPUs in render-farms to render 3D graphics? In fact ILM has one of the fastest supercomputers in the world because of their render-farm. It doesn't matter how many cores you throw at it, 3D rendering can always use more, it is one of the ultimate applications for multi-core processors. For smaller 3D graphics businesses, an 8 core Mac Pro is just what the doctor ordered, and while you can get a pretty decent one from Apple for ~4,500 dollars, even $16,000 is a drop in the bucket for the performance increase you get with 3D rendering. Personally I am thrilled this kind of power is coming to the desktop! And this is coming from a PC user (currently anyway).
- twitchster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I used to fix Macs for a living, the vast majority of my clients were Design professionals, either Video or Photoshop users.
For these guys price was not an issue. They would upgrade thier machines every time a new upgrade was released. Processor upgrades every 6 months, System Memory would be Maxed out. I don't know if the graphic design places are still in a computing power arms race, but I wouldn't be surprised.
This market is why companies like sonnettech exsisted. - shank2001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sure... here are two biggies, 3D rendering, and Video editing! 3D rendering can take advantage of thousands of CPUs.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@imus...maya to name another.
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5[hijack sorry]
@geminitojanus:
Any more info on that? I thought it's was a Pentium M
[hijack] - slbyer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I do. Photoshop CS2 and Photoshop CS3. Get that 16GB in there, and install the Force VM Buffering plug-in. That forces Photoshop to write it's scratch files through the OS read/write APIs with buffering turned on. Meaning that extra memory gets used by OS X's aggressive file buffering. Watch "Inactive" memory climb up and "free" memory shrink - that's the file cache in action. Yes, it will make a performance difference if you work on very large files.
- shank2001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ummm, this is not about Clovertowns (which Apple has had just as long as HP and Dell), this is about them being 3.0Ghz versions. No one else on the planet is offering.
- LeonardNimrod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@ Crispytown,
I know AMD chips will be out this year, but so will Intel's offerings. Would you rather have stagnation in chip development for have a company like Intel who is committed to constantly putting out new offerings.
If you want to wait for a "true'" Quad-core chip to arrive later this year, does it hurt the consumer that Intel has something else ready in the mean time. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@imus...that 18,000 computer you spec'd was a waste of resources. You probably maxed out the ram, and added the max hard disks in all 4 bays. That's simply not logical to do when trying to build a case for an expensive computer. Try spec'ing out a computer based on a real-live application. For example, the Mac's in the render farm at ILM dont have the RAM maxed out...they dont need RAM. they just need fast processors chewing away on the project.
Additionally, any Mac user will tell you, you buy the processor from Apple, but you get your RAM and hard drives elsewhere. That's just smart for business.
Someone purchasing for industry, like video or animation, would want a fast processor and that's about it. I currently use a render farm of 4 older dual-G5's and I can tell you, the ram makes no difference, and use NAT for longer-term storage. All I want is processor power.
At work they also just put in a purchase for a new Mac Pro for Final Cut rendering. The render farm cant help us, right now, with rendering. It's only used for transcoding different formats for video. When you try to render a 1 hour movie in .flv, you'll appreciate the boost in processing performance anytime you can get it. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think there is some confusion here. That nice maxed out RAM WOULD allow you to run multiple pro apps; however, if you are acutally DOING anything with a pro app like logic, final cut, shake, maya, the processor will be maxed out. So, no matter how much ram you have in the machine, you wouldnt be able to use any other apps at the same time as rendering or encoding because you would have to little free processor resources available.
Quite the catch 22, isnt it? So the choice is, get a quad core processor and actually DO something with one pro app. Or spend all your cash on RAM, be able to have a ton of apps OPEN, but none of them really DOING any serious work. What a predicament. It's like the saying goes in the car world..."There's no replacement for displacement." The same is true of processors. - AngelBunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1at least osx doesn't bottleneck like windows does. ;)
oh and btw, i can understand liking amd more then intel, but putting your bias ahead is not productive. i'm a major amd fan myself, but intel is leading right now. if i had the option for a new computer i would get intel, even if i like amd more as a company - flipmeat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Ramble: However, note that this isn't a server, it's a desktop."
Bzzt! Scroll down the Apple Store's build-to-order page a bit: "Mac OS X Server (Unlimited-Client) [Add $999]"
You want a server, no problemo. Assuming you can keep the creative staff from pummeling you senseless before you can get to the secure server room.
8-core Xserves (xServes?) will likely be along shortly. -
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