“Apple Computer is prepping a lavish new version of the Mac Pro that will boast nearly twice the brawn of existing models and form the centerpiece of the company’s high-performance professional desktop line,” Kasper Jade reports for AppleInsider.
“People familiar with the Mac maker’s plans say it plans to drop jaws and strike awe with a new king of speed, a super-charged Mac Pro featuring a total of eight cores of processing power. The systems, which resemble the quad-core Mac Pro externally, will house two of Intel’s forthcoming quad-core Xeon 5300 series ‘Clovertown’ chips inside is chassis, those people say,” Jade reports.
Jade reports, “Those familiar with the company’s plans have indicated an introduction could take place any time after mid-Nov.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
Related MacDailyNews articles:
AnandTech upgrades and tests Octo-Core ‘Clovertown’ Apple Mac Pro – September 13, 2006
Intel reveals first glimpse of quad-core ‘Clovertown’ chip coming later this year – February 11, 2006
I’ll take one !
Ouch! My jaw just dropped.
Show benchmarks converting video files to DVD or authoring in iDVD compared to older Macs.
This would get attention as most people would never use this power in day to day stuff.
Nice if it came in a gleaming ultra-black case, with glowing blue-violet LEDs.
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Finally, something to run photoshop at the same speed as my PowerMac.
Smoke and mirrors! OK, maybe not the usual smoke, unless you are a drag racer at heart, and not the usual mirrors, but still …
Can you name a half-dozen significant programs that run better on a quad-core than on a dual core? I can think of one – and it cheats. BOINC will spawn as many processes as it finds available cores, but each process only uses one core.
So … what will you do with this monster that you can’t do with a quad-core? Bragging comes to mind. Back when the first dual-processor PowerMacs were introduced the story was pretty much the same, if a bit less complex. You could have software running full tilt in the background while you played a game in the foreground – and each got a CPU’s full attention. Years later some of our software will recognize, and make use of, a second core … but a third? Fifth? Eighth? BOINC – and it’s faking it.
The industry still needs to fully realize the utility of Dual Core and has barely begun to respond to Quad Core, Eight is premature – except for bragging rights.
Pardon my ignorance, but does having many cores operating at the same 2.x Ghz speed really give you multiple increases in speed? Does the software have to be written to take advantage of multiple cores? If, for example, I am using iMovie or iDVD to render movies or create DVD images will my speed be 8x better than a single 2.x Ghz processor machine?
It seems to me that Intel hit the wall in speed and is now just adding processor cores – at what point does this not really give an advantage?
JohnE : LOL!!!
John, if I’m not mistaken, I remember reading a benchmark that showed that the quad Mac Pro runs Photoshop at the same speed as the PowerMac even under the Rosetta layer.
Forgot to mention … sign me up for more bragging rights.
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Everyone altogether now…
“Won’t you take me to….Clovertown?
Won’t you take me to….Clovertown?
Talk about, talk about, talk about moo-ooo-vin!”
Am I asking too much for a little Blu-Ray hardware and software action?
DLMeyer, Arent Apple Pro apps optimized to take advantage of quad-cores? I thought they were… Logic, final cut, Aperture, etc. etc.
Can you name a half-dozen significant programs that run better on a quad-core than on a dual core? I can think of one – and it cheats. BOINC will spawn as many processes as it finds available cores, but each process only uses one core.
I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.
What you describe is exactly correct – it’s got absolutely nothing to do with “cheating”.
In order to actually exploit multiple available cores and to avoid useless overhead at the same time, you need the same number of parallel execution threads. Not more, not less. One thread can run on only one core at a time – that is exactly what a thread is!
Any multi-core and/or multi-CPU enabled application will use pretty much the same approach. And the better media and rendering applications on the Mac do exactly that.
Twice the brawn? Let’s first see the results of a head-to-head competition between dual and quad core machines before making bold pronouncements.
RealUsability, the answers are “yes” and “no”. If you are running just one thing on your system you may, or not, see a speed boost after two cores. Worst possible case would be your user process on one and everything else on the other. Most people have something running “in the background” … a browser plus email plus maybe TextWrangler. Suddenly your single-core app gets a little more head-room as these sit around on one core while system stuff uses another and your app a third.
Not everything is “worst case”. iMovie may not benefit significantly from extra cores, but I expect its big brother – Final Cut – either does or will. Same story with GarageBand and big brother Logic. Apple’s Pro Apps should be leading the way here – it has the most to gain from having such programs available – but Unix apps have been doing this, on servers, for years.
Most of us, though, will see no appreciable gain in going Quad and fewer still can justify an Octo-Mac. But, a decade ago there was little benefit in going Dual, now it’s really starting to make sense.
Gimme a Quad-Core MacBook Pro… PLEEEEEEASE!!!
For some reason when I read this with all the talk of amazing speed, I thought of the Mac II FX.
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/stats/mac_iifx.html
DLMeyer,
I got my iMac core2duo up to 98% capacity by telling the bioinformatics program I was running that I had 4 processors. Even then it took about 15 minutes to compare all proteins in a bacterium to all proteins in a yeast. Bioinformatics is an inherently parallel process, so it is a natural fit with multi-core processors. I would imagine that other things like video encoding would likewise work well in parallel. You are correct, however, that typical home activities such as Email, web surfing and word processing will not benefit. They no longer benefit from any of the speed increases any more, because those activities are limited by the user rather than the machine. This upcoming quad machine is obviously not designed for the casual home user.
By the way, I tried to find a simple explanation as to why I had to refer to my machine as having 4 processors for it to run at full capacity. The name core2duo implies something 2×2 is built into the processor, but I would appreciate a simple explanation if anyone has one.
Ta
By the way, I tried to find a simple explanation as to why I had to refer to my machine as having 4 processors for it to run at full capacity. The name core2duo implies something 2×2 is built into the processor, but I would appreciate a simple explanation if anyone has one.
How much load did it cause when indicating only two CPUs/cores? If it was much below 200% (or 100% of total load), the application may simply have been buggy.
Your dual core does indeed offer 200% performance of a single CPU or core (minus overhead as always) and will fully profit from multi-threaded applications.
By the way: “Core 2” indicates version 2 and “Duo” indicates that the physical CPU contains two execution cores which can work in parallel.
So still “just” two cores in total, but two very powerful ones!
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The other piece of the puzzle was talked about awhile back and had to do with a much more efficient thread farming achitecture in Leopard. According to that article Leopard will be able to make very efficient use of many cpu cores even when the applications don’t have any multi core optimizations. This is in contrast to Tiger which makes very poor use of more than 2 cores unless the app itself is hand optimized to do it’s own thread farming accross many cores.
This is all part of Apples strategy to force HP, Dell and other PC builders to cut their high end profit margins. Without the big margins on the high end kit, most of these guys will have to raise prices on the low end “loss leader” systems to stay in the black.
Because of the iPod, Intel Macs and a great OS Apple can really start playing hardball with the other PC builders.
HParker, I’m not sure if they are currently designed to take good advantage of Quad Core or if they are merely Quad-enabled, but we can expect the Apple Pro apps to lead the way here. Hardly half a dozen of them, though, even if you count Express and Pro versions individually.
ping, wrong. BOINC has a “manager” that runs on one core and spawns individual core-bound processes. That’s a “cheat”. They are individuals, each with much of the same overhead. They are not multiple threads working towards the same goal. Sure, there is some savings in that there is but one task manager, but the jobs it spawns are not multi-threading and no linked parallel processing is involved – each task is self-contained and need bear no relation to any other. When you have a proper multi-core, multi-threading job running, it splits off bits of itself that are part of the whole but that can be resolved separately.
Let’s use iTunes as a descriptive example. You want to rip a CD while playing it. iTunes already has a library manager thread running, and an inactive player thread. It starts a reader thread, which starts and feeds a compression thread, which feeds the library manager thread which activates the player thread. The reader thread quits once it has cached the contents of the disk, the compression thread quits when it has compressed and written the last song, and the music plays on.
The BOINC software reads in a work unit from an off-site manager and assigns it to a core. That core processes that work unit, spawning no threads to do portions of the work, and reports back for a new assignment when done. While I have medical research processing on both CPUs, I could have that on one and SETI on the other – neither spawning to other cores. Or I could have four projects sharing time on my two CPUs, each taking a configurable amount of BOINC’s ‘share’. While this is a fairly efficient process and makes good use of multiple cores, it’s still multiple single-core processes running on a multi-core system. None of the individual programs running are multi-core in and of themselves.
Paul, that’s strange! When I run Folding@Home – a different core-bound medical research project – it takes every available cycle from the core/CPU it is running on. I have to run a second copy to get it to use the other CPU, then it takes anything available there. As it runs with a +20 priority, this means that anything else gets ‘first dibs’ on the next CPU cycle, but I’m running at over 99% for each core 24/7. That may well be “over 99.99%”, but my stats are not that precise. Anyway, ping explained the naming of your CPU and I can’t explain why you need to lie in your configuration to get it to do the right thing.
Dan, excellent points, all. Well, I’m not sure how much the iPod figures in the strategy, but Dell and HP are certainly going to have to re-configure their pricing strategy now that Apple is obviously in the same workstation market with them. Apple’s margins are high for the whole industry, but not as high as Dell’s or HP’s in the workstation niche. Both will now have to reduce their losses in the commodity end, making both the iMac and the Mac mini more attractive choices for more people. That or suffer lost sales in the high end, and lost profit there.
“Nice if it came in a gleaming ultra-black case, with glowing blue-violet LEDs.”
Because, apparently, you have no taste?
And how does ultra-black “gleem”?
ping, wrong. BOINC has a “manager” that runs on one core and spawns individual core-bound processes. That’s a “cheat”.
I can’t see a real point there.
You may have personal preferences regarding details of the thread and process organisation of multi-threaded applications (and yes, even multiple threads spanning multiple processes ultimately working for one application qualify as such), but the essential point is whether or not applications make effective use of multiple cores in practice.
And several applications do in fact do that already – unsurprisingly they’re the ones which actually have a chance of saturating a single core.