Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro

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)"

Comments

Advantage?

[martin_b1sh0p]

Not trolling, as this does sound awesome, but in reality how many applications out there really take advantage of these nifty multi-processor computers?

Re:Advantage?

[tuskentower]

If you build it, they will come
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.

Technological superiority at last!

[Nova Express]

IIRC, Neither Dell nor HP have yet shipped duel-3GHz quad core desktop machines, which means that Apple officially makes the fastest Intel desktop PC in the world.

As a longtime mac user, I must admit that it feels inordinately good to say that.;-)

Re:What do use it for?

[Paulrothrock]

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:awesome machine

[jimstapleton]

Um, he was wondering what markets this targeted, not complaining that something less powerful and less expensive wasn't available. Such a response is rather nasty and uncalled for given it isn't even relevant to the gp.

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

Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip

[tlhIngan]

Remeber the Pros, like the XServes, take ECC RAM. No matter who you buy it from, it isn't cheap. Apple's price for the Pro isn't much more than (~$140 at this point), than decent third-party RAM. (4 1GB ECC from Crucial is $560, 2x2GB is $840) The HD's may be more comparable, but check access time, cache size, and warranty.

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:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yes, Mac Pros are cheaper than the equivalent Dell machines. However, this is practically the only case where this is true.

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.

The sites I've seen that compare average desktops and laptops always cheat by adding extra upgrades to Dell machines to make the prices match rather than just speccing them out exactly the same and seeing what they get.

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.