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.

Comments

Re:Cores do not equal power

[leenks]

Grand Central Dispatch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

Re:Cores do not equal power

[betterunixthanunix]

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.