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Apple Launches New Magical Trackpad, 12 Core Macs
theappwhisperer writes "The Magic Trackpad is basically a larger version of the MacBook Pro touchpad, with 80% more surface area for all your swiping and pinching. The entire surface acts as a button, so it's also a possible mouse replacement. And all of the expected gestures are here: two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, fingertip rotation, and three- and four-finger swipes. You can enable and disable gestures at your discretion from System Preferences." They also launched 12-core Mac Pros coming in August.
Scrolling should be a lot nicer. The only couple of things I miss from my MBP are the multitouch scrolling (drag two fingers around to scroll), and the way you could hold down two fingers and click the button to simulate a right click. I've been back using a normal PC touchpad for over a year now but I still like that better than having two trackpad buttons.
A lot of games would still be better with a mouse though IMO, I guess because you use your wrist to control movement while your fingers are free for button control.
which is totally what she said
All but the highest-end iMac are dual-core. The lowest-end Mac Pro is quad-core. If someone is going to drop $5K+ on a Mac Pro with 12 cores, they either have money to throw around or they know what they're doing.
A lot of the time with both laptops and PCs the cores are entirely unused.
So? That is more a problem of application programmers than hardware designers.
Since processing is largely a duopoly of AMD and Intel, both have been guilty of marketing their hardware by highlighting the core numbers.
This does not even make sense. Why shouldn't a company tout the fact that they have more cores on a chip than before? And this is Apple's advertising anyway, not AMD/Intel. The price alone would keep most people from buying the high-end, as it always has. However, for my work in radar signal processing using heavily-threaded applications, this machine would be a great addition to my desktop since I would no longer have to run my signal processing streams distributed over several hosts; one host could do the job just fine.
These have an actual physical click, and tap to click is always off by default on a Mac.
Grand Central Dispatch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
Arbitrarily large numbers of cores? No, not a chance, certainly not on a shared memory architecture like the system in question. 12 cores is probably going to be OK, but when you pass 16 cores you'll start to notice the memory bottleneck; once you are at 64 cores you are basically at the limit of usefulness for shared memory architectures, and you have to be careful about memory access patterns or your software will be slower. Even "embarrassingly parallel" can suffer if the memory access patterns are bad.
There is a reason that almost all of the supercomputers in use today use some sort of NUMA or distributed memory architecture.
Palm trees and 8
Any OS X app that leverages GCD could benefit from those cores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
Although any existing app could also be written to utilize multiple cores effectively, GDC makes it much easier and requires far less raw code to accomplish.
TFA suggests the 12-core Mac Pro is actually a dual 6-core running at 3.33ghz. My last (albeit, budget) machine was a dual-core @ 3.15ghz. You're right that fewer cores = lower clock speed, but I don't think anything over 3ghz is really that bad (especially when you have 6-12 of them).
For some reason many PC laptops ship with touchpads that are quite customizable but include customized drivers that disable much of the functionality and customization that the hardware normally supports.
If your PC laptop has a touchpad made by Synaptics (which many do) you may be able to get multitouch scrolling by downloading the latest driver from here. Even if you have an older Synaptics device that doesn't support multitouch you should still be able to set up a "scroll zone" at the edges of the pad which allows you to scroll using a single finger. I have done this on many Dell and HP laptops and it works great.
That's the great downfall of Apple desktops. They ship MacPro's (which are their big powerful towers) and iMac's (which are All-in-One Monitors built with laptop parts), without anything inbetween. Slotting a bigger graphics card into an iMac is just not possible, and yet there isn't a more affordable tower available than the Pro. If you are a serious gamer, then a Mac Pro ain't much different than a tricked-out Alienware/etc machine price-wise. But if you are a semi-serious gamer with a light wallet, Apple ain't your friend.
Some thread hit on rendering use. However, there is also vast amounts of simulation use. For example, COMSOL Multiphysics (http://www.comsol.com/products/multiphysics/). Also, in the academic world is it easier to buy new computers on grants than upgrade old ones. The "old" computers typically get moved to computer controlled tools (when the tool computer dies).
If only Apple would finally get around to inventing something cool for OS X to do that. It'd make it so much easier for the developer. Knowing Apple they'd probably make it so that it was really simple. Like a few lines of code.
It'd be even more awesome if they could make it open source so that other operating systems could have a chance to use it.
One can dream, right?
If you've just spent $6k on a new Mac Pro, and you *really* need USB-3, just spend another $40 and plug the card in. It's a Mac Pro. It has expansion ports. Use them and feel happy.
... and if you want e-sata, just buy an extender cable for the two extra on-board sata channels in the Mac Pro. That'll cost you the princely sum of $19.
Sure, you can argue it ought to have come with them (and I'd agree, for what it's worth) but the cost of implementing it yourself is hardly the end of the world.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just FYI, Windows 7 has full multi-touch support. (Doesn't guarantee your applications will use it sensibly, but it's there.)
Comment of the year
More cores means lower clock speed, by necessity, because it means more power consumption, so you have to turn down the frequency to keep the TDP the same.
And that's what Intel's and AMD's turbo modes in their newer processors are for - if any cores are in deep sleep (I think C3 or less), their TDP budget can be used by the other cores. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds assuming your OS doesn't shift tasks from one core to the next every few milliseconds for no reason.
Disk images. Use them. You can make a case-sensitive disk image on a case-insensitive filesystem and vice versa. Presto, you can now use your UNIX software and OS X software. Not the most convenient way to do it, but it does work for most things.
And OS X is certified UNIX. There was no lie there whatsoever.
Actually, Apple already posted Windows drivers for the trackpad for 32bit and 64bit.
They're labeled as BootCamp, but I guess they'd work on any PC (haven't tried it of course).
fibre