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8-Core Dual Xeon "V8" Test Rig Performance
MojoKid writes "Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses
of a rig in their booth dubbed the
V8. It was essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted
with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores — hence the
"V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's
5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial
memory. HotHardware has
a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with
preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon
powerhouse."
Mac Pro doesn't support PCI-X cards, only PCIe. This is one downside compared to the Dell 690, which is one of the closest analogues in the Dell line. The 690 supports PCIe and PCIx.
I suppose for the price difference, you might be able to afford to replace even some of the very expensive PCI-X cards you might hypothetically have and might still be less than a 690 with thee most similar specs. One thing I do like about non-Apple workstations is that you can buy with one socket populated now, and buy the second CPU & heat sink later when the chip gets cheaper and when more of your software supports more cores. With Apple, all systems are sold with both sockets populated, so the original purchase is a little more prohibitive, and any later upgrades are harder to justify.