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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/
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.
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.
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!
No. Installing memory in a Mac Mini does not void the warranty.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
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
Not just ECC DDR-SDRAM, but FB-DIMM. The latter's even harder to get since it's only used for Intel's Xeon line of processors (which the Mac Pro and xServe use, and any workstation or server with multiple physical CPUs (not cores)).
When I purchased my Mac Pro, Apple's RAM was very close to the price of FB-DIMMs locally and not too much more online - it was worth it buying Apple's stuff, have it all installed and having Apple actually being forced to fix it should it cause kernel panics and stuff. Plus, Apple's RAM has larger heatsinks - I think Crucials do too (if you ask for them). I saw a memory test somewhere the revealed the memory can run hot, and you get a number of correctable ECC errors. But if your RAM has the larger Apple-recommended heatsinks on them, the ECC errors drop to zero.
But yes, FB-DIMMs are also why the Xeon platform's memory numbers aren't that great due to their higher latency - for raw memory-intensive stuff, a regular desktop Core2 processor will run rings around a Xeon Core2, even though the latter may have much faster RAM.
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.
Here's another tip.
Look at Apple's "Select Developer Membership." At the base configuration, the difference between (ADC Select Membership + Mac Pro w/ discount) and (Mac Pro w/o discount) is $1... in favor of the membership. Bumping up the Mac Pro to the 8-core version yields $300 savings (ie: $800 savings - $500 membership). Plus you get everything that comes with the membership, including the Leopard Early Start Kit and two free tech support incidents.
If you're a student, the membership price drops from $500 to $100, though you're only allowed to use the hardware discount once ever, whereas the Select Membership lets you buy hardware with the discount once per year (at a price of $500/year).
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
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.
>>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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