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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?
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?
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.
Yeah, Apple's totally missing the boat. If only they made some sort of "mini" Mac for consumers, or a Mac notebook. They could call that a Mac Book or something.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
...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.
7300 is pretty low end stuff.
How about updated NVIDIA 8800 class video cards?
Pretty much any heavy developer work can benefit from such a system. When you're running databases, messaging applications, appservers, webservers, clients, etc, it can add processes quickly, not to mention the DB alone could use all 8 cores.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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
34486853790
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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
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
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.
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!
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.
OK...
I'm sorry, but is Apple running a "Buy an 8-Core Mac for your grandma" campaign or something?
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
The OS itself is heavily multi-threaded itself. Cocoa also makes it easy to multi-thread an application (and quite frankly, even using pthreads is simple).
The OpenGL drivers are also multi-threaded. A game I play went from ~300 FPS to 500~ FPS when they turned on OpenGL multithreading on the Intel Mac builds.
Apple needs to rerelease the Cube. In dual and quad configurations, with a PCI express x16 slot, 1 x1 slot, 4 ram slots, Firewire 800 and USB.
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.
acrobat
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
But with the popularity of boot camp, they instead elected to go with a card that had working windows and linux drivers.
I want a MBP pretty bad, but I specifically will not purchase anything with ATI graphics. I gave them another chance after years of avoiding them (Radon 9600XT) and it turned out they STILL can't write drivers worth one tenth of one shit.
On top of that, as others have pointed out, the only benefit to that for non-gaming purposes (and this is simply not a gaming machine - there is currently no benefit to having more than two cores in one of those) would be for using the GPUs as coprocessors.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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
Requiring admin privs for their software to run. Dmitri Sklyarov. Making Acrobat Reader bloated and slow.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
As for what connectivity is missing from the iMac, generally RAM capacity, The lack of any type of PCI or ExpressCard expandability. Insufficient number of either ethernet ports or USB/Firewire ports with independent controllers. Which is to say, the kinds of high bandwidth expandability that make a computer useful in the age of digital A/V connectivity.
Your response to this is likely to be that "we", the xMac crowd, simply need to buy Mac Pros and get over it. I think this attitude is rediculously unfair. What we want is not that bizarre, in fact, its the most commonly sold type of desktop machine in the personal computing market. We want a Mac Minitower. A machine, smaller, lighter, and with less expandability than a Pro workstation, but with more than an iMac.
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.
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.
There are still "average" and "general" Apple users too (otherwise there probably wouldn't be a market for Mac Minis, iMacs and eMacs). These users will /not/ be the users to buy such a machine, and these users are /not/ part of a niche market, but rather part of a market that Apple has either drawn away from, or kept away from, the non-Apple market segments.
And there are non-Apple users who will drop 4 grand on a PC for some tasks. Not all non-Apple users are MS Office drones.
34486853790
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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.
>>The de facto video editing app for professionals these days is Adobe Premiere. This is absolutely true -- if by "professionals" you mean "wedding videographers"
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.
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...
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 matters because it means that when the scene gets more complicated and the FPS drops down, you still get smooth animations.
It'd rather see my 500FPS drop down to 200FPS than see my 70FPS drop down to 35.
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.
OK, I'll give you an honest answer. The link you gave is peeing and moaning about how long it takes OS X to start a thread compared to other OS's, but if the thread is doing any real work, it is not going to matter if it took a few more microseconds or milliseconds to spawn it. This is a complete red herring. If you've got a real compute-bounded task that can benifit from mutliple threads, then OS X is going to do fine, the extra time it may have taken to spawn the threads will be completely trivial. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you are doing some heavy duty image processing with an application that can take advantage of multiple processors, the octo-core Mac Pro _will_ be nearly twice as fast as the quad-core Mac Pro.
If you have an application that is spending more time spawning threads than executing the threads, then I would question the software design, but furthermore I would say that if the threads are spending so little time actually processing, then execution time is going to seem instantaneous regardless of operating system. The sole exception would have to be an application that does nothing _else_ than spawn threads.
I don't think Apple is plannng on fixing this problem because they probably give higher priority to fixing real problems.