The Apple News That Got Buried
An anonymous reader writes, "Apple's Showtime event was all well and good, but the big news today was on Anandtech.com. They found that the two dual-core CPUs in the Mac Pro were not only removable, but that they were able to insert two quad-core Clovertown CPUs. OS X recognized all eight cores and it worked fine. Anandtech could not release performance numbers for the new monster, but did report they were unable to max out the CPUs."
NeXT multiprocessed the guts of OS X on 2-4 processors. The result is that the mach kernel doesn't scale the processors linearly. There isn't the straightline performance boost of adding another processor beyond 4 cores with Mac OS X's mach kernel.
Calm down...