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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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!
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.
acrobat
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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.
Requiring admin privs for their software to run. Dmitri Sklyarov. Making Acrobat Reader bloated and slow.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Most productions studios I deal with (5 in michigan and chicago) all have transitioned away from AVID to apple/Final Cut. Production speed and quality went way up, Costs went way down.
Avid is great but they are way behind because they are not moving fast enough. If you are still shooting on antique Betacam or digiBeta I can see using Avid or a Sony Digi suite. but most are over on DV as you get damn near same as digibeta off of a good DV camera and lenses. And once you hit that DV world all that special hardware that makes avid king becomes irrelevant.
I can replace a single Avid suite with 3 FCP suites for the same price. Kids are coming out of college with FCP experience and preference and only minimal Avid exposure and typically older avid exposure.
I have seen guys whip out a 30 second spot from encode to final in 1/4th the time it takes on an Avid using FCP.
don't get me wrong, I love avid, I cut my teeth on it. But it's becoming more and more a FCP world every day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'd love to know how you did that, especially as I can't even find the quad-3.0 Xeons on NewEgg. The closest I can find are the quad-2.66s, which are $1,189 each. And at two of those, you're already at over your stated $2000...
Or did you mean to compare to the "base" Mac Pro? Which isn't $4000, but is $2499 (seeing as it only has two dual 2.66s)?
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
...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"
Sorry, bud... But if this is a design house, I hope they have someone that can spend their time sourcing parts. If it is a freelancer spec'ing out their own machine, they are doing themselves a disservice by not spending an hour looking around for alternatives. Just to point out how bad the price gouging is...
Apple 16GB (8x2GB) FB-DIMM 667 $4499
Newegg 16GB (8x2GB) Kingston (KVR667D2D8F5/1G) FB-DIMM 667 $2392
Apple 750GB SATA 3GB/s $$499
ZipZoomFly ST3750640NS 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s $299
Apple Warranty 1 Year
Seagate HD Warranty 5 Years
Kingston Memory Lifetime Warranty
So at the least buy a bare bones Mac Pro and add your own parts, you will save a ton.
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...
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.
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