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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)"
Not trolling, as this does sound awesome, but in reality how many applications out there really take advantage of these nifty multi-processor computers?
While I do think this machine is awesome, and would love to have one... I am just wondering what applications out there would take full advantage of having 8 cores and 2 processors in the machine? I am sure NASA or some physics departments at some random university could, but what else? Anyone have any examples of what such a powerful computer could be used for business wise? I'm sure it would cut down the application issues I deal with on older mal-formed code I work on everyday to try to enhance... lol.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
I was really hoping there would be price drops on the quad core configurations. Or at least upgraded video cards.
As a longtime mac user, I must admit that it feels inordinately good to say that.;-)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
While most Mac folks would think it anathema to do it, I've always had no probs with getting a Mac w/ only the CPU strength I want, then buffing out the hardware specs everywhere else once I got it home - saves tons of cash that way.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
SO were is the link to the "I want to buy it right now"page... so that hords of slashdoter would run and start ........... ahh never mind let me get back to saving for a used p2 :p
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself. For the Mac Pro, Apple charges $700 for 4GB (4x1GB) of RAM. You can get the same amount of RAM from DealRam for $500. The same goes for hard drives. Apple charges you $329 for a 500GB SATA drive, which you can get from NewEgg for around $200. Granted, these aren't covered by your warranty, but they often have a manufacturer's warranty
I've often though the lack of user serviceable parts in the Mac Mini was designed to sell more RAM at Apple's hugely inflated prices.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Since Apple have now fixed Boot Camp so that you can run Vista, this new hardware will help with the Vista performance problems.
Solitaire and mindsweeper. Maybe some surfing the internet, and checking your email. Oh, and spreadsheets!
Okay, seriously now, how well does the Mac video editing software take advantage of the potential of this system? I was considering building a dual-quad core pc in about a year...for video editing...but I fear that the software packages just won't take advantage of the hardware. I this changing? I don't see the average consumer being smart enough to lobby for multi-threaded software....?
...but they hardly own it. For one, they're still missing a killer 3D app. Yes, Maya is on the Mac - but you'll be hard-pressed to find many companies using Maya on said Mac. Nevermind that it's not an Apple app (unlike Shake (by acquisition), FCP, Logic Pro (by acquisition) etc.) If Autodesk hadn't grabbed it up, I would have expected Apple to do so.
Similarly, for editing/post, there's a ton of flint/flame/inferno/etc./etc. out there which are nowhere near Apple.
And that's completely ignoring everything hardware that you'll find in a typical broadcast facility. Avid, Thomson/Grass Valley, et al would have a chuckle at your post. So would Apple, for that matter - Apple isn't interested in replacing them at all... they're more on the software side and helping to sell Apple hardware.
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.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I'm rather disappointed in this. There were rumors that they'd put a top-of-the-line ATI video card with Crossfire in the 8-core machines (http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2492).
Yes it's a workstation. Yes, it's not meant for games. But putting those cards in it would give Apple a significant salvo to fire into the boutique camp. I know a number of gamers who would buy them (outside the video card the machine is awesome).
8-core? Nice. But Apple, enough is enough: put a premium video card in these things. Coupling a 7300GT with a Mac Pro (the basic configuration) should be classified as a low-level travesty.
7300 is pretty low end stuff.
How about updated NVIDIA 8800 class video cards?
I don't see the average consumer being smart enough to lobby for multi-threaded software....?
I don't see the average programmer experienced enough to write multi-threaded software...
that would be some sort of freak of nature. I wouldn't eat it.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
probably best to install gentoo on it and compile everything yourself
Yup, the machine manufacturers are completely culpable in this!
Just out of curiosity, does the fact that just going to the Apple website make me tingle a little make me a fanboi?
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
The de facto video editing app for professionals these days is Adobe Premiere. In fact, since Adobe Creative Suite 3 has support for universal binaries, the latest iteration of Premiere will be again be available on OSX.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
No sign of 8-core machines in the UK Apple Store. Just a glitch or are we going to have to wait a bit longer over here? Lets hope Apple doesn't make us wait as long for their 8-core machine as Sony did for theirs (the PS3).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I'd like to see Apple offer an upgrade from a 4- to an 8-processor machine too. I'm not taxing my quad at the moment, but it'd be nice to have official acknowledgment of this upgrade path. (Yeah, we could DIY, but a lot of people would feel better modding a high-end machine in an official way.)
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.
ab
They want almost $380 just for 1GB RAM for your average IBM or HP blade server. In this realm, parts and upgrades have little to do with cheapo desktop components or pricing.
Audio/Video mastering, analog to digital conversion, large format image processing.
But seriously, unless you're gonna keep all 8 cores cooking a lot, or you do a lot of seriously high-end video work or something else where speed above all else matters, they'll be a waste. And they cost $1500 more than the standard (2.66 GHz) model. So, for $4,000, you can get a 3 GHz 8-way Mac Pro. Or, for $4,400, you could get two 2 GHz 4-way Mac Pros. Most people could probably get more done with two good machines than one great one for (roughly) the same money.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Wow, that's just amazing," He said, looking up from the, from 16 core, 65G RAM Linux box he's working on today. "An OS that, in at least one area, isn't artificially crippled for marketing reasons."
Now somebody who has serious hardware is going to chime in...
PS: I do like OS X. It's quite a nice client.
I just interviewed with a small growing company. Every single desktop they had were Apple..... Considering they could have had *just as good* for cheaper that did the same thing ... I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do....
I wonder, since they are a small company, how big was their IT department? I run a small S/W consulting company (me, a few subcontractors, support folks for large projects), and we use Apple for pretty much everything except when a client requires something else. We have no IT guy. We have no virus scares. We have no FAQ for how to connect to the shared NAS box.
Sure, we could buy cheaper hardware, but then we'd have to worry about it and waste billable time dealing with the associated pain points. I can say that, for a small company, an Apple/OS X infrastructure is definitely cheaper in the long run.
The first thing I did this morning was price a machine versus an equivalent machine from Dell and found the Mac Pro, despite having slightly faster processors (since Dell only offers 2.66GHz quad-cores) was actually a few hundred dollars cheaper. I believe that you have made the assumption that Apple is automatically more expensive, always, than their competitors when that is not always the case. In the case of the Intel-based Mac Pro machines, they have often been competitively priced against Dell etc. You should stay open minded about these things. Otherwise, you're just as guilty as Apple zealots of making blanket statements.
Ok, now it's officially "wicked fast"* .
* Points to who remembers the turd this was originally applied to.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You've got $3,600 in displays alone - that's more than 1/3 of the price. Also, Apple is notorious for overpricing hard drives and memory. Buy the fastest CPUs and get everything else from someone else, including the displays (get'em from Dell), and you'll save 20%+.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Some people consider having less computer hassles (things "just work" out of the box) and lower IT employment costs a better investment than cut-rate PC with higher hassles per seat and higher IT employment costs.
Because everyone knew they were coming eventually.
Now, a single-socket, dual-core Mac Pro (or similar), *that* would be news.
The entire company is high end IT except the single HR person. It's a custom hosting/access company. There are no techs that fix your computer and customer support comes from the engineers. If you couldn't fix it yourself, you wouldn't be there.
I don't any more, but I ran a 32 node SP2 under AIX 4.3 as a personal machine for a while (it was in, ahem, testing mode, for a month before the unwashed masses were allowed onboard). I'm sure your Linux system would make a nice staging ground to test programs before they were sent to run for real. :~) Having been the herder for that beast, I'm more appreciative of the joys of smaller machines at times. At least they don't come with a boa-constrictor for a power-cord that has to be hard-wired into the bus-box.
Quite seriously, who makes your box? Sun, SGI, Cray, or home-built?
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Note that RAM and drives purchased from Apple are covered by their extended 3-year warranty. (And I always buy this... it's worth the peace-of-mind.)
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
really? Please provide an example of something "just as good for cheaper that did the same thing".
I like microcars
Come on, it took GOD a whole week to make just this puny little planet and you complain that it takes several days to make a whole Galaxy!
In my days, we had to ... oh never mind.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Offtopic? This is definitely on topic. Where'd my mod points go?
Because a Mac Pro is a workstation. Sun's machine is a server.
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.
I find this an overused second rate excuse to cover up for a lacking IT policy/management. My computer just works and works pretty damn good and I'll be damned if it's not running Windows XP. 90% of our problems come from failing hardware.
You've got to come up with something better. If your IT department had a brain, you won't have so many problems. Stop letting your users install idiot apps like Wallpaper changers and screen savers off the internet and you won't have so many problems.
...with a 40 MHz 68030! I'm typing this missive on mine right now!
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
Speaking from personal experience, Gentoo on an IBM pSeries 570 is no slouch.
"emerge samba"? Don't blink. It took 12 seconds.
Well it takes advantage.
:-(
Macs have been shipping with dual CPUs since 1999. Nearly every piece of Mac software is multi-threaded in some way. And it would be pretty crappy coding practice to assume 2 CPUs when making an application "thread hot," because typically you'll just spawn as many threads as you need and let the OS deal with it.
So I would expect many applications would use mulitple cores. The OS itself can also leverage mutiple CPUs... and given that it's typical that 75-200 applications are running at once, more CPUs will be better.
This isn't like Windows where 99% of all desktop machines had a single CPU until last year. Nearly all games were written single-threaded until this past year... I know because in 2000 I bought a dual 733 MHz PIII machine, and it was slower for games than a single 800 MHz P3. And it cost me a LOT more
This boils down to the whole TCO argument. You can get cheaper hardware than Apple if you shop around, especially since Apple does not venture into the low end of the market. But what does it cost you to administer those desktops? If they are Windows, it costs a lot more. Also it depends on the company. If it's a graphic design/print business, they prefers Macs. Now you could have a mixed environment but for a small company it is probably easier to stick with one OS.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes, Mac Pros are cheaper than the equivalent Dell machines. However, this is practically the only case where this is true. 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. Maybe the prices have gotten closer, but they're still not even.
Well, maybe they don't want their employees wasting company time "fixing it themselves" - they'd rather just not have it break in the first place.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Funny and insightful, unfortunately, no karma for you. In today's common programming languages, you're definitely right. For multi-threaded software to really take off, there need to be popular programming languages that make it idiot proof.
But I'm fine with my tingling...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Apple RAM has actually gotten a little bit better too. If you go to Crucial and price out the ECC stuff you need it's not that much cheaper. I haven't done the complete system build yet, but from what I can tell the quad core 3ghz procs are super expensive even when buying OEM from pricewatch. I wonder if someone sat down and did the DIY quad core xeon with ECC ram, etc... how much cheaper it would be compared to what Apple is offering atm.
:)
HDs OTOH, Apple still needs to get with the program
A beowulf cluster? How about an XGrid cluster instead? Believe me configuration is a doddle...
~Pev
Reasons which may or may not apply to the company you applied to,
1) AppleScript
2) QuickTime
3) Quartz
4) They like Aqua better than KDE/Gnome/whatever.
5) Macs are some 3-5x cheaper to maintain and last twice as long.
The good news for you is, the world is filled with people who only think of purchase price and are incapable of long-range thinking.
You will find a job with them.
Now, I'm going to install SAMBA on this Windozer so I can share files....
refurb. Saved a ton. Bought it for video editing for a small business and a local ministry.
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.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Maybe a certain company has a new release of its video software coming out that takes better advantage of the 8 core machine.
Well, gee -- they're the growing company filled with technical people. Maybe they actually know what they're doing and you're the one who is missing something.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Maybe they like OSX better than Windows? Maybe the cost difference wasn't such a big deal? Maybe a lack of windows maintence saves them more money in the long run. Let's just say for the sake of argument that you could get a comparable Dell for $500 less a piece. And say they have 20 machines. That's $10,000, which is a sizeable chunk of change, but in the grand scheme of things is not a huge deal for even a moderately sized business.
At my job, we have about a dozen windows workstations, an off-site computer tech service, and me doing some of the basic tech support since I'm fairly computer savvy. I spend a lot of time fixing computers, and the computer tech guys generally get called in to fix stuff/install stuff/whatever when it's something that I don't have the time/knowledge to do. Knowing the hourly rate that we pay for those techs, and the hourly rate that my boss bills my time out to clients, if $10,000 extra up front could cut the amount of time/money that we spend fixing the damn machines by half, we would make that money up in a year easy.
Sadly, we're stuck with a pile of windows only software for various reasons, and my significant portion of my job will continue to involve fighting with windows.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
I said it before and I'll say it again: the one safe way to do multi-threaded programming is forking and IPC.
Imagine a single Beowulf machine of this!
Yes, Maya is on the Mac - but you'll be hard-pressed to find many companies using Maya on said Mac.
w ww.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm%3FNewsID%3D14619+ macworld+maya+mac+sales+autodesk&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd= 1&gl=us
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:pfgF8E0i5C8J:
20% of Maya sales are the Mac version, according to Autodesk. (Google cache since Macworld UK is apparently down.)
The coolest voice ever.
That's just... wrong. If you have a 570 lying around to run gentoo on, you should at least be typing, "emerge written_language", or "emerge photosynthesis". Oh wait, sorry, that's a 590 I'm thinking about.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself.
I think you meant "Never buy anything from Apple that you can install yourself".
However, do be sure you to check part specs; random Yum-Cha RAM often won't meet the tight tolerances required for Macs, and may outright fail to boot. I ended up with some perfectly good PC-133 for my Windows machines when first learning this. I'll agree with you about buying the hard drives elsewhere, and add that while the warranty from Apple or whoever covers the drive, it doesn't cover the data; for every hard drive I put in, I get another to back the data up to it. (Yes, I am paranoid. I also haven't lost more than three hours of data since 2002, despite 16 different hard drive crashes and three careless "I didn't really want to delete that!!!" users on the mix of Windows and Mac computers I take care of.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I like my warrenty intact.
Apple is no different then any other hardware manufacturer.
Cars: It cost more to have the Dealer put in a high performance chip.
PC: it cost more to get Dell to put in RAM and Video cards.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, one of my co-workers is moving to an Apple machine. I thought her logic was pretty flawless. She needs software that only runs on the mac, and since the mac can run Windows as well, it is the only machine capable of doing everything she needs.
I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do; especially for a small company.For some reason I think you did not do a cost benefit analysis on the needs of the company where you were interviewing. As such, you're sort of talking out your ass aren't you? I mean you're assuming it is more expensive, but you don't have any facts to back that up. Apple is one of the approved vendors for laptops where I work. The other is Lenovo. The Apple machines are a bit cheaper, not more expensive. They are winning the reliability battle too, although it is a close thing. They seem like a very good choice for our medium sized software development house.
Sure, I will get modded down by Apple zealots.A zealot is a person with strong, irrational beliefs. You haven't shown any reason or evidence in your assertion that the Mac is a bad choice, only expressed an opinion. Perhaps you deserve to be modded down, not because people irrationally love Apple, but because you've not presented any evidence for your dislike of Apple products.
here in Europe is the end of the workday, so allow me to relax by unleashing my pedantry and let me tell you that was the brilliant Anand the performer of the stunt you are mentioning. cheers
Indeed, I just verified. Dell Precision 690 gives the ability to add a second quad core processor.
They've had quad-core Xeons (aka clovertowns), but not at 3 Ghz. As far as I can tell Apple is the first to offer 3 Ghz Clovertown chips in their machines.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
You have 14 days to exchange the machine for the newer one at an Apple Store and pay just a restocking fee. Better get on it!
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
It's the story of my roommate's company. It's a small company related to NASA and NOAA. One of their employee's notebook got infected with some kind of spyware, and a hacker did something bad at NASA via that computer. Several days later, FBI came, interviewed every body in that company and other people like janitors, and confiscated several computers. Then the boss decided that they would be Mac and Linux only. And because the IT guy doesn't want to install Linux on brand new computers, they essentially only buy Macs since then.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I'm sure I'm feeding the troll, but why do you need Netscape pre-installed, and why do you want Safari to not be present? What, can't you install it (or remove it) yourself?
Heck, a 590 might even be able to handle `emerge KDE` or `emerge openoffice`!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Previous version of OS X were absolutely HORRIBLE at threading. Does Apple plan to fix this problem? If not, why would anyone bother with an 8 core Mac when the operating system can't really handle the extra cores, or do people plan to buy these and run Windows or Linux on them?
Which one?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
This is apple.slashdot and the usual rules do not apply. Mod points here are to be used to mod down when a comment upsets someone, or is not explicitly positive about Apple or one of it's products.
They may be used in a positive manner for posts along the lines of 'omg I luv apple' and 'mee too' etc.
As always you can get a similarly configured Dell for much less.
Funny you say that, because when I bought a MacPro two months ago the indentical configuration from Dell was AU$600 more expensive.
Blank until
Ridiculous! This is what Apple should have been providing from day one. I can't believe they are trying to charge a premium for twice the bitrate ^H^H^H^H^H^H^ number of cores.
If not, then the video card deficiencies are still very much a big deal -- I know that if I could afford one of these, I'd sure as heck want to stuff dual 8800s into it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
20" down from $699 to $599
23" down from $999 to $899
30" down from $1,999 to $1,799
If anyone from Apple is listening, I'm sitting here looking at the Apple UK web site and seeing no 8-cores and a $3,060.39 price tag (at today's exchange rate) on the 30" Cinema display. I guess you don't want my order today?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The only real concern is the RAM and Graphics:
since the MacPro uses those expensive FB-DIMMS with custom super-strength heatsinks. At least Crucial et. al. do suitable RAM now, a bit cheaper than Apple, but not so cheap that you'd want to chuck the 1GB supplied. The latter is a pain if you're shooting for 8-16GB and/or worry about the complicated bits of advice about balancing RAM between channels.
Apart from that, go buy cheap(er) standad SATA drives and monitors.
The graphics card range seems sensible for "pro" use but a bit sucky for games purposes - but since that generally means "windows games" I can see why Apple isn't falling over itself to support this. Anyway, the ball is in Nvidia/ATI's courts to produce more EFI-compatible cards.
I agree, though, there is a hole in Apple's range the shape of a mini-tower with a single CPU socket (i.e. up to quad core) a couple of PCIExpress slots and space for an extra hard drive or two.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...in hopes that they would finally offer a more "standard" RAM and hopefully a 8k Nvidia card. (This mac uses weird slow RAM that is very expensiveEvery machine running this generation of Xeon processors needs the type of RAM Apple uses and calling it "slow" does not really help your credibility here.
I thought it "might" be possible to upgrade the video card myself, but found out you can't do that.Umm, you can't? Since when? You've been able to swap the video cards in Apple's towers for about 8-10 years now.
It makes little to no sense to me that Apple chose to not use the same freaking graphics cards as a standard PC.Apple uses standard video cards, but as usual are a little ahead of the curve. Not all cards support EFI yet, since Vista is the first version of Windows to support it on the desktop properly. You're probably one of those people who complained about Apple's nonstandard choice of using USB for keyboards and mice instead of PS/2. Now many years later the bottom end of the PC market is finally catching up but my 8 year old mac is still working fine because they included USB and firewire instead of what was "standard" at the time.
Apple, you almost had a Windows/Linux user switched, but your RAM and Video card selection lost you one.Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss.
no you are wrong, they've had dual quad core systems for quite some time . I visit their page regularly since I buy dell's regularly.
It would be sweet to have this 8 core processor, but whats the point if you are bottle-necked by video cards that right now wont be able to keep up with these?
Rendering in Luxology's modo will peg all 8 cores (or 4, or whatever you have). I, for one, am grateful for more cores as the apps I use (modo in particular - XCode too) can and do use them all. If anyone wants to see all cores pegged, go grab the (unrestricted) modo eval version from Luxology's site and try yourself. Incidently, I notice that modo is also the top app on Apple's performance page for the new machines.
*shrug*
I'm working a business plan for a decent sized company, and our plan is to go all Apple, because iMac as "office" style workstations are not substantially more expensive than a similar setup from Dell.
Beyond that, why would we want to use Windows when we can use OS X; not to mention that the Apple business reps will help you out a little bit on price of you go to decent volumes.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I still have an Mac IIfx. It even boots still.
And at the time, it was truly a wicked fast machine.
As more support, I was recently tasked to compare Dell laptops vs. a MacBook. Suffice to say, Dell doesn't sell anything that includes Bluetooth *and* integrated webcams. This is a classic comparison that many have brought up, and many more have tried to skew. PC users tend to remove features as "unnecessary" to get the Dell's price down. But if you leave nothing out and do a feature-to-feature build of both machines, the Mac comes out as equal, if not cheaper.
It might have something to do with Macs breaking down a lot less often and not having to worry about antivirus/antispyware. When I was interning at Central Washington University's computer support services, I found there was ONE Mac tech for all of the 700-800 Macs on campus. A few others would poke at very simple issues, but he got anything more than that. On the other side, there were EIGHT PC techs for the 2100 or so Windows boxes on campus. You do the math. The head of CSS loved the Macs and wished more departments would use them because they required so much less maintenance and held their value longer. The campus is busy trying to flush out any P3 computers they have so they can eventually upgrade to Vista (be a while considering some nasty compatibility snags they found in testing it). They're still using low to mid range G4 computers all over campus and probably wont upgrade them for a while because they have no need to. Not to mention the campus was spending $21k a year for antivirus license renewal. Your statement here shows a surprising lack of thought and investigation into why someone might want Macs for their businesses instead of Windows (or even Linux, although that's a very different arena) boxes.
And while this is more of a personal anecdote, my brother is a video nut and is very good at filming/editing. He's used a variety of software, but refuses to use anything but Final Cut Pro if it can be helped.
Those are the kinds of application that should be taking advantage of the hardware, it's true. Whether the software implementations are actually written to do so, and to do it well, is a different question entirely.
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of serious maths software today really doesn't take advantage of parallel processing at all, and even the software that does run multiple jobs concurrently typically does so relatively inefficiently in terms of both overheads and even distribution of work across processing units.
Getting this right is a hard problem, and it's going to take a lot more than hardware support to do it. I'm betting we won't see the benefits, other than in a few higher-end applications for things like graphics and CAD, for several years, and possibly not until some more serious parallel programming techniques and even languages have entered the mainstream.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I agree about the Mini being crippled by its graphics processor. Otherwise, I don't think it's a bad little machine. I bought one to play with it when it first came out, and it was adequate for your basic web surfing, emailing, and Microsoft Office type tasks. It ran Quicken and/or Quickbooks without a big problem, and ran the little games from companies like Popcap just fine. The main purpose for it was really just to offer an entry-level Mac that let Windows users buy it as a second computer to experience OS X. It also serves a niche market of hobbyists who want them to install in their cars, as home media center boxes, and so on.
I think the iMac also serves its marketplace pretty well. There seems to be a lot of resistance to purchasing one, simply because people have a mindset that an "all in one" computer + display is an outdated concept. Truthfully though, the iMac is *ideal* for many home and small office users, because lack of space is a big problem for them. It eliminates the extra clutter of another power cord, a VGA display cable, and audio cable to go to a display's built-in speakers. And the often cited lack of "expandability"? I used to think that way too, until I realized (when I bought my first PowerMac G4 tower), there's practically nothing you need to put in an expansion card slot on a Mac anyway. You *could* add something like additional USB or firewire ports with a card, but why not just do that with a hub instead? As LANs get more common in households, the worries about packing a system full of hard drive space disappear too. (The future is all about network storage. Even Microsoft has a stand-alone "home server" appliance coming out later this year that will do this for people in a nearly "plug and play" way.)
I don't think Apple will re-release "The Cube" because the Mac Mini was probably the future of that product line. I would like to see some sort of Mac Mini-Tower though. I'm thinking it would be a small version of a Mac Pro with, perhaps, a Core 2 Duo CPU powering it, and would use the same graphics cards as a Mac Pro.
I don't see the average consumer being smart enough to lobby for multi-threaded software...
I don't see the average programmer experienced enough to write multi-threaded software...
I don't see why this isn't modded (Score:5, Insightful).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The key is 3 Ghz. Try to find a Dell with two Intel quad core chips running at 3 Ghz. You won't find it. The fastest they offer (as of this morning) is the E3555, which runs at 2.66 Ghz.
Intel doesn't even mention that such a chip is available yet - presumably it will be called the E3565.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
That should read 'E5355' as the fastest one at Dell, ant 'E5365' as the probably part number for the 3 Ghz clovertown.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
The key is 3 Ghz. Try to find a Dell with two Intel quad core chips running at 3 Ghz. ahh you are indeed correct.
It would be imprudent to say that Macs never need fixing, but in my experience they need fixing a lot less often than PCs. I'm de-facto tech support for four computers in my family: my dad's destkop and notebook (PCs), my brother's desktop (PC), and my mom's desktop (iMac). When I get a long-distance tech support call from one of them, guess which computer the call isn't about? In the year since I got my mom her iMac, I've had a grand total of two issues. The first time our neighbor's wifi network was interfering with ours, and the iMac happened to get affected because it was the furthest from the router. The second time my mom dragged Safari off the dock by accident and couldn't figure out how to get it back.
In comparison, I get about one call a month for the PCs. This month I got two: my brother called complaining that his computer was being slow for no reason. I had him reboot it, check the fans, check the case temp, check for CPU throttling, check for a CPU hog, nothing fixed it. After about an hour, the problem just went away. Before that my dad called complaining some piece of spyware kept popping up (ironically it was posing as a "PC protector" utility). That one actually had to wait until I visited the house about a month later, and involved reinstalling the OS (which was faster than running all the spyware removal tools I would've had to).
PC's are fine if its your own machine. They're a little high maintainence, but reasonable if you're a knowledgeable user. However, if I'm going to end up doing tech support for a neophyte*, I want to put something in front of them that can take some serious abuse (that sometimes borders on active sabatoge). A Windows machine is just not suitable for that.
*) I use the term "neophyte" broadly. My dad first started using computers when WordPerfect for DOS was a hot new product. However the maintainence requirements of a modern Windows machine are completely alien to him. My brother knows a decent bit about computers, can program a bit in Java, but mostly he's a gamer and so anything complicated is over his head. And my mom --- she thinks Google is the internet.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I left South Park off my previous list - Maya on Mac - for those of you who can't figure out what a machine like this is good for
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/southpark/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
No, they're $29 now. Though personally, I'd go for a Kensington Slimtype or a Matias Tactile Pro.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Dude, everything breaks. Hard drives aren't better because they're in Apple machines. They're the same ones you find in PCs. Many of the other components as well (mobo: Intel, graphics: ATI, CD/DVD: Matsushita, etc). Unfortunately, the reality distortion field does not apply to components.
An 8-core 2.67 GHz model from Dell runs $4907 with no monitor. For roughly the same price, you can get a Mac Pro with 8-cores at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM (4x as much as on the Dell), 500 GB SATA disk (2x as much as on the Dell), and a pair of 7300GT graphics cards.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
First, as I said I am an Apple and Linux fan.
You say that every Xeon of this generation needs this type of RAM. You may be correct, but go to NewEgg and buy RAM for a Xeon and then go buy it for a Mac Pro. There is definitely a difference in price. Also it appears that apple has some tight standards.
weird memory in mac pro
I mentioned upgrading the video card and you say that you have been able to do that for 8 to 10 years. You imply that you can put in a new(er) Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and it will work. It won't! You cannot put in a 8k series Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and get it to work in OSX. Toms hardware also has an article on this, and I believe they mention that it actually worked if they booted Windows on the Mac. This tells me that it is just an OS thing and something they should have fixed. You have 3 different video cards that will work and be supported on this Macintosh. One slow Nvidia 7300 and an older ATI card and a non gaming, expensive Nvidia card. All suck bad compared to the higher end cards that have been out for almost two years now.
"Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss."
Guy I am with you on Apple pushing new standards! Firewire2, USB2, DVD, BluRay, heck all would be great. That is great, just give me a $4000 machine with a video card that isn't two freaking years old, and no real method of upgrading. It is a sad day for Apple when the Linux community has better support for Nvidia that Apple does. Yes I know that Nvidia releases Linux drivers, but even the FOSS drivers do work with 7900 and newer cards. Think about that, the 7900 has been out for two years now and that card freaking smokes the 7300 that is in the new Mac Pro.
Lastly, I wish Apple well and no ill feelings, I will enjoy my new fast machine and hope that they will continue to support Java for the next 10 years.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Of course the hardware is just as susceptible to breaking. I've had bad RAM and a hard drive issue on my eMac. However, I'm guessing if you measured how much time the IT dept in a Windows company spends preventing and dealing with viruses and malware vs the IT dept in a Mac-only company... Even with the odd hardware issue (which certainly won't be *more* than with PCs), you're saving time and money.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Because you're a troll, I won't bother trying to post a full comparison.
Just be aware that adding a second 2.66ghz Quad-core chip (not even the 3.0ghz that Apple is selling) to your Precision 690 adds $1600 to the price. So a base 2.66ghz 8-core workstation from Dell is $5000. I'm sure you can get the slower Dell closer to the Apple price if you dump the RAM below 1GB, ditch the OS, and so on.
It's the payback for making us put up with this Windows shit at work all the time. Going home to a Mac is a breath of fresh air.
"I can't understand why someone would buy an Apple for anything... I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do"
I guess you're not getting a job there. Seems like they know something you "can't understand." No Apple zealotry (down mods) required, it's your life, ie: maybe "just as good" isn't "just as good"
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Okay, on NewEgg medium quality (crucial) RAM for the new Power Mac runs about $80 cheaper for 2 Gb. So if you don't like it, buy your extra RAM on NewEgg. What's the problem? Or were you assuming everyone uses crappy low quality RAM which is probably the number one source of computer crashes, but most people don't ever figure that out.
You imply that you can put in a new(er) Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and it will work. It won't! You cannot put in a 8k series Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and get it to work in OSX.Umm, most video cards work just fine. I always check before buying one, but I've never, ever had a problem. Some of the cards that are coming out now do not support EFI, and fail back to BIOS compatibility, which may work with Windows, but not OS X (who never used BIOS). In general, however, any video card you buy will work fine.
You have 3 different video cards that will work and be supported on this Macintosh.Just because Apple only ships 3 from their store does not mean other ones do not work.
... just give me a $4000 machine with a video card that isn't two freaking years old, and no real method of upgrading.You pull it out and stick another one in. It's not that hard. Macmall.com lists 136 different PCI Express graphics cards compatible with the new Power Mac. If you want to blow $6K on a graphics card, go right ahead. About the only cards that don't work are the Nvidia 5500 series because of some driver problem they haven't worked out yet.
In addition, I don't even think you can build yourself for less. The 2.66 GHz costs $2,400 for two chips (3.0 not on the street yet, probably around $3K). Add $350 for a power supply, probably around $400 for a mobo, and you're already around $3,750. Can you build the rest for $250?
Feh. Don't play pissing contest, I have a 160 core 4.1 TB SMP system at my disposal. Big deal. The point is that this system is (reasonably) affordable to small businesses if not individuals. It's a desktop system in a normal sized reasonably attractive case, that doesn't sound like a jet engine when it powers on.
Lots of people have big boxes, but this is something powerful for apps like video editing and large scale photo editing that need a lot of horse power, but preferably not in a machine room.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I still have a IIfx too... it's used as a small bedside desk, though. ;)
The bottom line is, this week Apple is getting some great media attention due to new features / products (Google Desktop and new powerful workstation). Meanwhile, Microsoft has gotten bad press (bad Vista review and ANI security flaw). Apple continues to gain mindshare among influential consumers and professionals. I have already referred a couple co-workers to check out Apple.com for their laptops when they asked me for advice on new purchases for themselves and family. Monopolies are counteracted by converting one customer at a time to the competition.
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
The capstone to those is this simple truism: "Reasonable Limits Aren't."
They must be seriously short on imagination. Right now I'm away for the Easter, but let's say I want to watch a movie from my media server back home. Let's further assume it's Casino Royale on DL-BD (50GB). Let's also assume this is an impulse decision, so I want to stream it live. What do I need for that? Oh, about 50-60MBit sustained bandwidth.
What if I buy one of those new AVCHD cameras using and want to do some realtime HDTV editing. Hell, a 3GHz processor is struggling to *decode* 1080p h.264, far less encode it. Anyone know what the framerate would be on this octo-configuration?
Oh yes disk. I'd like to store a medium collection of 200 discs like that on my media server. That'd be 10TB please. Also I'd like games with photorealistic graphics, I'm sure a hundredfold increase in GPU power could be used there.
Maybe it was lack of faith in the technological progress. I started out with a machine with memory measured in kilobytes, now it's gigabytes. If someone told me that in 30-50 years we'll have petabytes (that's 1000s of TB), I wouldn't believe it. But if it can happen, and happen cheaply... I'll find a use for it, no doubt.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My company is 80% Windows, 20% Mac. We spend 0% of the time eliminating malware. Everyone is required to use Firefox, except in special cases (like intranet apps). I was worried that this number would go up once we removed our ageing web proxy. It hasn't.
Macs are certainly easier for the end-user, but they are most definitely not easier for the administrator. We use radmind here, and that made rollouts and patches easier, but MacOS/Open Directory's support for the kinds of group policy that are available via Active Directory still do not exist. Apple has the added burden of making Macs easily integratable into AD, which they've only been halfway successful with.
That said, scripting Macs is a breeze, especially since you can start them up and shut them down on a schedule; this is useful if you want to run maintenance jobs in the middle of the night. But Mac hardware-- it's simply gone from OK to worse. The old G4 machines were at least essentially standard PCs with a nonstandard mobo and processor. Newer machines have weird form factors and require special tools. Reminds me of the old days when you needed a 12" long Torx driver to work on your all-in-one Mac. Anyway, parts are expensive and generally not user-servicable. This is a necessity if you have a large installation. It is much more costly to have the company IT worker spending time on the phone with Apple diagnosing the problem (that the IT worker has usually already diagnosed himself), shipping the machine back to Apple for repair and then waiting for it to return, than it is just to pull a commodity part off the shelf for a PC and pop it in. Apple has a lot more work to do if they want the corporate environment.
Good thing then, that the Mini has a 1.8 GHz Core Duo and supports a 23" HD display, because it would suck trying to do those demanding tasks on anything less. I mean, I remember trying to do word processing and email on my 386/33 with 14" VGA, and it was really, um, ... actually, it was just fine. Never mind. I'd hate to have to deal with your email, I guess.
I'm interested in drawn cell animation. Currently I haven't found anything decent to use. I.e., I'm using Canvas + TheGimp + iMovie + Audacity. It sort of works for up to a minute or so, but that's really pushing things.
I've looked at FinalCut, but nothing I could see indicated that it would work with anything but video, which I don't have. I've got either drawn cells, or cut paper. If drawn, it might have been drawn on a computer, or it might have been scanned in. If cut paper, I might have manipulated it with theGimp or with Canvas after scanning it in. (Frequently I like to remove noise...but for cut paper it's important that the shadows not be distrubed. That changes the entire feel.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why you want Apple RAM... or at least certified RAM:
If you insist on third-party RAM, then at least get it in writing that if you have issues that the third party will replace it until you don't have problems, or take it back if they can't get you RAM that performs in spec. (someone else in this article already posted about how they ended up with some nice RAM for one of their PC boxes when it turned out it was out of spec. enough that it wouldn't work in their Mac).
Most third party RAM that fails qualification does so because it's technically out of manufacturer spec.. For many platforms that doesn't tend to matter much, but for Macintosh machines, this typically means problems like drawing current beyond the power budget on wake-from-sleep (and causing the system to be unstable) or being unable to step-up up from a stepped-down clock rate in the necessary time window when the rest of the system is stepping-up, etc. - things that cause the contents of the memory to end up unreliable, or cause the memory bus to be clocked down, and the system run slower.
Unsurprisingly, IBM Power architecture systems tend to have the same issues, given the way multiple simultaneous in-flight transactions are allowed on the memory bus, after the lines and latches have been timed out by the system. When you tune a system that closely, then the electrical characteristics of the components start to matter more and more.
I can't tell you how many customer reported "kernel bugs" I've personally tracked down to actually being faulty third party RAM.
Short of building in a hardware memory tester, which would be prohibitively expensive (including over/under clocking and under/over voltage/current testing, slow refresh cycles, etc.), there's no way to tell if a memory problem exists, short of running into a problem, and throwing the sticks into a real hardware memory tester (it's an NP incomplete problem if you are running test software in the RAM being tested, since it can malfunction and give you a false "no problem" result).
Certified memory is memory that has been thrown into a hardware memory tester, and certified to be in spec. before it's sold to the consumer.
Other peripherals and add-ons are much less sensitive to close-to-spec/out-of-spec problems, compared to RAM. Feel free to take chances with them long before you take chances with third party RAM.
-- Terry
As far as nodes... so far the biggest cluster I've had root on was 768 dual processor Xeons. That was alright. The density these days, though... makes you feel old, sometimes. And yes, I sympathize with respect to the beast herding :)
Umm, most video cards work just fine. I always check before buying one, but I've never, ever had a problem. Some of the cards that are coming out now do not support EFI, and fail back to BIOS compatibility, which may work with Windows, but not OS X (who never used BIOS). In general, however, any video card you buy will work fine.
As far as I know, Mac OS X only supports some video cards. I did this some weeks ago when moving everything to my Mac Pro, and just dual boot (while I move everything to Fusion or Parallels). My Mac has the GeForce 7300 card and I put a Radeon x1600 that I had in my other PC, just to be able to use 3 screens. Windows recognizes the Radeon and was able to use it without problems, but I was never able to make it work in OS X. I even installed some drivers from the osx386 project with no luck. About this Mac recognizes the card, but I was never able to make it display anything in OS X. I ended up buying a second Mac GeForce 7300.Rodrigo Gomez
http://photoblog.rodrigog
I disagree. That eliminates one class of errors (concurrent access/modification of shared data) but doesn't address deadlocks or livelocks, and it's at the expense of significantly reducing potential performance.
What you're really getting at is the CSP (communicating sequential process) model of concurrent programming, in which the "processes" don't share data but instead pass it to one another through communications channels. Use of heavyweight processes and kernel-provided IPC mechanisms is one way of implementing CSP, but its far from the only way, and it's certainly not the most efficient way.
In many cases, it's much better to use multiple threads within a single process and apply a little discipline to avoid sharing data. Instead, set up queues that work like IPC interfaces. If you want to be really careful, have sender and receiver copy the data into and out of the queue, rather than just passing a pointer through the queue. Of course, the queue implementation needs to be done properly, with the necessary locking, but you only need to implement that once. In practice, you don't even have to implement it once, because there are well-tested libraries available for every major programming language.
CSP is a good idea. Doing it by forking and IPC isn't a bad idea, but neither is it necessarily the only or the best way.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It's still gouging, but not as bad as you think. In order to keep the Mac Pro from sounding like a Jumbo Jet, Apple made its own standard for heat sinks on DDR2 667 RAM. If you get DDR2 667 with normal heat sinks, it won't be able to lose heat fast enough under normal conditions, and will have errors. This isn't FUD, I'd been planning to get a Mac Pro for weeks (just ordered one, too; dual core 3 Ghz) and studied up on the RAM. Any RAM not using the better heat sinks has been tending to cause problems in Mac Pros. If you google it, you will find plenty of accounts of RAM not up to the standard Apple set failing in Mac Pros. However, you can (as I am doing) get 3rd party RAM with adequate heat sinks for reasonably decent prices. Just look around for "Mac Pro RAM" and you'll eventually find stuff that's been tried and tested, but isn't expensive. I found a place I can get 4 GB for less than $500, so I'm happy.
Getting the right RAM 3rd party is a smarter buy than getting it from Apple, but make sure you get the right RAM!
Again, from what I've seen, _be very careful_ getting RAM for the Mac Pro. Make sure it's been thoroughly tested first and had no problems before getting any given brand, and without the proper heat sinks, it seems like you're going to get slowdowns of the RAM and dramatic increases in the use of fans in the Mac Pro. (From what I've seen, though, it's more likely to have errors than just do that, unfortunately.)
Then again, you could probably get away with standard heat sinks if you know how to tweak the fans to run fast enough to keep them from going wonky.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
You added in a later post "The entire company is high end IT except the single HR person. It's a custom hosting/access company."
So you saw a high-end IT company that is Mac-only. Did you consider that they did their homework and decided on Macs for their own reasons? The alternative has to be that they're not smart enough to know what equipment to buy.
Isn't is simpler to assume that Macs fitted their requirements better than any other computer?
Maybe they need to triple-boot their machines, or the OS has features they don't see in Windows? Maybe they prefer less in-house support. There are plenty of reasons a company might go Mac only. Money is one reason they might not (and yes, it's a big one).
What the hell have two overpriced 30" apple monitors got to do with the price of a "fully specced" system? And what kind of idiot buys RAM or hard drives from Apple at their prices?
That's the most useless price figure ever.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Uhhh... last I checked, Windows still comes bundled with IE, and it can't be removed. Where's the lack of consistency?
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
That answers your question right there, doesn't it? High-end IT workstations need to play nice with Unix server farms, not Windows. Macs are a very economical solution compared to Solaris workstations, and very maintainable compared to Linux. Windows doesn't really enter into the picture.
I've been waiting for Apple to refresh and hopefully support SLI (at last...), so I can have a system in the office for development and just boot into Windows for games, but no luck. I would easily have bought one of these systems, in fact I was really looking forward to an announcement this week but have been very disappointed. A single Geforce 7300 is not something I'd use for gaming - hell the two graphics cards in my PC are 7800 GTX's from summer 2005, selling it as new now on a 'pro' system is laughable.
They don't lose out completely, as I'll probably just get a Mac Book Pro now (I've got a couple of Mac's but both G4's, and I'm thinking of giving PowerBook to a relative). I would rather have just paid far more for a nice new do-it-all desktop though.
It was said by others but it bears repeating. You can only have 3 different (old) video cards in your new >2,000 dollar Mac Pro and be supported. Also the memory is significantly more expensive.
Again, I am an Apple and Linux fan, I am just not afraid to admit when one makes a mistake and this was one mistake that cost them my sale. For "me" this was a huge mistake by Apple, for you it was small.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Not really the point. The point is not, can you match an exact mac configuration at the same price. That's completely unimportant and proves nothing. The question is, if you are getting a machine for a job, do you actually need to spend what the mac costs. Or can you do better buying something different and cheaper? In this case, its not can you buy 8 core 3Ghz identically equipped cheaper. Its after you have figured out you are just as well off with something with 4 slightly slower cores, what does that cost from Apple? Same exact thing with a mini. Never mind what it costs to duplicate it. If you want a lowish end desktop with on board graphics, what does a decent one cost? A lot less than a mini. Generally, the way to find out if a mac is reasonable value is to do it in reverse. Figure out what spec you need, then see what it costs you from different suppliers. Apple is almost always more expensive, often much more, because it has fewer models and fewer price points, so you are always trading up and buying more or different than you need. Often, as with the mini, the extra has to do with form factor and not performance. Something similar happens with other consumer goods. If you want a car with specific designer label upholstery, you may well find that you cannot get an identical spec one cheaper than from one particular supplier. It doesn't mean it is good value for you. If you start out looking for a quiet comfortable sedan, you'll probably get just as functional or a more functional vehicle elsewhere for a lot less. The Apple theologians always do it starting from the Mac partly because they are disingenuous and know the above as well as anyone. But its partly because they never seriously consider buying anything but a Mac, so the Mac product line is their standard of comparison. However, for the rest of us, it is not.
Deficiencies of memtestosx...
It only tests memory under conditions that will only allow it to find real problems with bits in the memory. These include cross-talk related problems from adjacent memory cells, actual stuck bits, paired bits, and so on.
It does NOT test the memory for undervoltaging (which you have to test by actually dropping the voltage to the RAM), nor does it test for delayed DRAM referesh (which you could theoretically do on a PC, if you had a PCI card, and it forced an excessive bus-on time).
In short, software testing is not very good for transient failure testing, and it's not a good thing to include in an OS, rather than as a standalone diagnostic program, due to it being unable to test things that are wired down by the OS (unless your OS can relocate physical pages out of the way to allow you to test them, as well, then running a memory tester under the OS itself means that you don't test any of the memory that's wired down to the OS or to the test tool, if that memory's also wired).
Unfortunately, the most common memory failures in Macs occur during voltage stepping, speed stepping, or when other devices cause the machine to exceed its available power budget.
In other words, problems happen when RAM is run right to the edge of (but not over) its specifications.
You can't do most of that on purpose with normal machines, and not any of it, if it's not standallone.
Software memory checking is OK for gross problems - those problems that usually are not transient - but since most memory you buy has passed that sort of testing before it was sold to you, you are unlikely to ever receive RAM with permanent problems, unless you fail to observe proper precautions when handling or installing it.
So go ahead and use memtestosx; you may in fact find a problem... you're just exceedingly unlikely to find any of the problems that typically differentiate Apple-certified vs. non Apple-certified RAM.
-- Terry
You know, I've always considered myself as a geek type. I've built all of my PC's for about 15 years. When tax time rolled around this year I made the jump and bought a 20" iMac. I just love the damn thing, for a few reasons.
It's simple to use, the UI is straight forward, it has a welcome familiar terminal, etc. Being that I've used Linux since before 1.0 came out it also has a lot of tools I'm used to. Things I don't really like about Apple are the high prices, and the mouse sucks also. (I replaced it with a Logitech right away) Apple will get some more money from me next year, when I pick up another computer for the kids. Another thing I'd like to point out to people is that you CAN dig into the OS and install QT, Xcode and a ton of other familiar tools for Linux. This feature I personally thought was a positive prior to purchase.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
When I bought my Mac Mini, the highest-end CPU option was a 1.42Ghz G4 processor. Not exactly "cutting edge performance" or anything. The Core Duo in current models is a big improvement, but also brings a higher price-tag with it.
And I'd say "Good thing the Mini supports Apple's 23" HD display, because other 21"+ LCD panels featuring rotation capabilities *really* suck on a Mac Mini when you rotate it to landscape mode. The built-in video was so slow dealing with a rotated display, even scrolling down on a web page in Safari had noticeable lag!"
So wait. You can use Newegg to buy parts for a whole computer, but you can't just buy a video card and RAM for a Mac Pro? Sounds like someone wasn't going to buy a Mac in the first place.
If you want "standard" RAM (FB-DIMMs *are* standard RAM for Xeons), I guess you're using something pre-Woodcrest or a Core 2-based system.
DV and Digibeta are NO WHERE NEAR the same thing. To suggest otherwise is to reveal that you do not work with the two formats extensively. Yes many productions are moving to DV. But only because it is cheaper. The image quality, particuluarly on anything that will be extensively processed is far greater on DigiBeta than DV. Try pulling a decent key with DV! At 270mbit/second versus 25mbits per second, Digibeta contains far more image information and detail and can handle far more secondary processing than DV. Additionally the color space on Digibeta is 4:2:2 versus 4:1:1 on DV. Digitbeta can be 10bit verus 8bit maximum for DV. (sunsets, car grills, anything with a gradient will look visibly worse on 8bit DV than either 8bit or 10bit Digibeta.) Don't get me wrong, DV is great, I've shot plenty of stuff with it. I even like HDV which a lot of people scoff at, but to say DV is qualitatively close to Digibeta is laughable. The same film footage transfered to DV and Digibeta and then played back on match monitor simultaniously would be like watching VHS on one monitor and a DVD on the other. The reason for the move to FCP (which I've used since 1.0) is cost, cost, cost. In the 5e9 channel universe, production budgets have been cut, cut, cut. (audience isn't expanding, but channels are == less money to go around). This is the reason for the acceptance of DV as a production format by broadcasters, not because it's comparable to Digibeta!!! It is orders of magnitude cheaper to cut on FCP versus avid.
Filmo The Klown
... for a non-Apple piece of hardware with almost the EXACT same specs (minus maybe wireless, EFI, and motherboard) about 1/3 the price.
Umm, no thanks, like any good geek, I'll build my own (and yes, I can build my own laptop) In fact, I can just find the SPS numbers for HP parts, order direct at wholesale, and wham! Apple clone in a better-looking shell with a 3-year parts warranty WITHOUT HAVING TO PAY FOR APPLECARE TO DO THE EXACT SAME WARRANTY WORK!
I've worked as a contractor for Apple, HP, Dell, and IBM. It's all x86 now, and get this, all the non-Apple manufacturers can get you Appleish-Spec hardware at 1/3 the cost. Sorry, Apple, no deals from me.
~a humble build-it-yourself geek
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As I stated, I am a developer and I have been a typical white box buyer for years but the new Macintosh systems seems like a good system for me. The RAM issue isn't that big of a deal for me as much as the video cards.
As for the idiot who said that I would be "sticking" with Windows because of a video card doesn't realize that I will be running Ubuntu as my primary OS on my new machine.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Just joined this site to follow this thread (admittedly haven't read all the forum rules). If it isn't against the rules, could you please share your source for "tried and true" 3rd party ram for these new macs? Thanks
Well duh.
Isn't it obvious? If you'd rather spec out and then build the computer yourself, then the Mac Pro, rather, any Mac, is not for you.
Not everyone has the time, buddy.
If you're a mac user, you've invested in mac versions of software, you want a quad workstation (and you're kinda loaded or consistantly bill a decent amount of hours) it's good news. The ability to run Cinema 4D (ILM and Disney may use Maya, but a lot of smaller folks do have other options) with rendering distributed to 8 processors to After Effects to Final Cut Pro or Flash on one machine plus the ability to author multimedia (like director) and/or web work and test on multiple OS on one machine, plus run windows aps you can't get for mac OS in windows on your mac is all very attractive. That may not be the typical large studio set-up, but if you're a small studio or Jack of all trades Mac based free lancer who does some 3D and/or video as part of the services you offer such a beast might actually pay for itself. You don't have to be creating Jurasic Park IV with hours of 3D animation to make use of processsing power. Some mac folks just need a few seconds of animation or even some still 3D art (that you can now afford to ad global illumination and not take 3 days to render one illustration). If you need a PC and a Mac and a workstation, you now have one workstation that runs OS X, Windows, (and I believe Linux). One dell -- one OS, one Mac -- 3 OS. People often overlook that when they compare costs.
Unless you go cheapass, warranties on memory and hard drives will be at least as long as Apple's extended care.
Man, in november I bought a 2.66 GHZ Quad core mac pro w/ 4 GB of RAM, and had bragging rights ever since among everyone I knew for my sweet machine. Now the 8 core version comes out. Not that anyone I know will have one, but crap, I hope they have some sort of upgrade processors us current mac pro owners can buy, I can't afford to buy a top end machine again so soon. Since the chips this beast uses aren't even part of Intel's standard offering, the only place I would be able to buy them is from Apple.
sigh... is this really just a sign that apple is going to be EOL'ing these and re-releasing new displays???
> It's still gouging,
No, it's really not.
I really resent it when people say Apple is gouging for add-on RAM because ALL MAJOR PC MAKERS charge more for add-on RAM than do vendors who specifically sell RAM. It is not gouging to sell something at the same price as competitors. Also Apple has been as good as anyone in building machines with easy access RAM doors so the user can get in there to add RAM. If they have made it easy enough to add RAM to most systems that a high school student can do it and combine that with online shopping it is hard to see what's stopping people from purchasing RAM in precisely the way that suits their needs.
I'm sure Apple would love to just put the maximum RAM in every box but that is not how the industry works either because you would no longer have a $599 machine and the user will not get it that the Gateway has 256 MB and the Mac has 2 GB. If you don't like how this shit works, do not blame Apple, simply start your own maverick PC company and change the rules. Apple is alone against the Windows hardware cartel and they are doing enough progressive shit as it is.
8 will do for now.
Ah, changed my mind. I callled Apple and asked if I was stuck or what. They said I was within the 14 day evaluation period, and let me RMA the machine. I am really happy about this as in the long run, I will get more done with the 8-core machine. I think Apple was grand about it.
That's true, it was only a "turd" in the sense that I didn't have one. :)
I did later buy a IIci, which was almost the same thing, but in a smaller form factor.
I remember when the Power PC came out -- and suddenly the fastest 68000-based Mac was the emulation mode of the Power PC chip, so enormous was the RISC-based upgrade.
One IIfx reviewer did say, however, that "It's not wicked fast until I say it's wicked fast!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.