You decide over the realness of this: “Without giving much details, those captures shows MacOSX x86 running on a 4 physical CPU-based MacIntel with Hyperthreading enable. One can clearly see 4 physical processors recognized while 8 logical processors are recorded by the CPU monitor.”
If this is real things are going to get real interesting when Apple starts rolling out the next generation of products. Of course this could just be some smuck getting happy with Photoshop.
That’s schmuck, you “smuck”. Jesus…
If there’s an actual machine that supports it, and If it has sse2 it’s very probable that you can install a patched 10.4.1 x86 dvd (the original one that came with the devkits).
Now if it had 10.4.2 then it would certainly be a fake.
Even athlon boxes have been proven capable of running the devkit 10.4.1.
Can anyone else see a dancing man towards the bottom left of the four processors?
While this doesn’t mean its fake, it could be there just as a watermark so no one else claims the screenshot as their work, it makes me question if its real straight away…
The watermark is the hardmac logo, to ensure they receive credit for releasing the screenshots.
You mean bottom right, it’s next to text that says “MacBidouille” that’s on the left. Looks like a watermark from hardmac.com.
Wouldn’t it more likely that it’s two dual core processors with each core having hyperthreading enabled? I can’t get the pictures to load, so i can’t see the screenshot, but I’ve seen some shots of an intel presentation where that configuration showed eight processors.
I think that I’ve read before that deep inside OS X the ability for more than 2 processors. Anyone else hear that before?
Good news news though!
This could be 2 Dual Core Hyperthreaded CPUs. These are supposed to be reserved for the highend.
Kinda hard to form an opinion: the damn link wont fully load. That page is soooooo slow, I let it set and load for 20 minutes and nothing. (600 bytes sec. !!) and nothing. *sigh*
Oh well, I’ll try later.
Either way, we know that the port to Intel isn’t going to mean Apple dropping 20 years of having the fastest and the most powerful hardware at time of launch. Even the G5s blew everything away when they came out.
To be honest a QuadCPU machine isn’t all the absurd.
Quad Xeon machines have existed for years. Load the OS X developer preview on such a machine and you’re done.
Of course, that has nothing to do with the real question: What Mactel machines will Apple actually build?
I mean, why wouldn’t it be real? What’s to prevent Mac OS X from running on 4 processors?
Besides, didn’t we see something earlier about Mac OS’s basic issues with MP machines in general? Running in to a lot of locking and contention issues?
Maybe they’re working on that as well…
Money is what’d stop it from happening. It’d cost a fortune and wouldn’t offer much of a benefit as there’s not much software out there that can take advantage of eight logical CPUs. Personally I think it’s a fake, but I guess we’ll all see on Wednesday 😉
a person that sinks that much money into that many CPU’s has either a need for it – graphics rendering/video editing etc… or just has a lot of money to burn and like a gear head likes a hot rod.
What I wonder though is what’s the big deal? So the Mac can support multiple proc’s big deal. What am I not getting?
PostgreSQL and MySQL could sure take advantage of a quad SMP system. Rumor is big companies use this “SQL” thing. Maybe Apple is trying to make a “product” they will like.
However very “clever” of you to comment on my “remark”.
A quad-processor system does not make fiscal sense in the current market, that was my point. You don’t get enough of a performance hit to justify the cost (not just the cost of two extra processors, but also the cost of a redesigned motherboard and cooling system). Further, the trend in computing is to increase the number cores per CPUs, not to increase the number of CPUs per computer.
In any event, PostgreSQL and MySQL have enough trouble taking advantage of the existing two-way SMP system due to the design of MacOS’s threading: going four-way would be solving the problem from completely the wrong end.
Anyway, there’s only one more day to go!
If linux 2.4.x kernel could support up to eight processors (2.6.x can handle much more processors) then I see no reason why the Darwin Kernel(based on BSD and used in MacOSX) couldn’t take that load.
darwin stole code from fbsd 4.9 which at the time didn’t have proper support for more than 1 processors.
Um OS X runs the Mach kernel and BSD userland which has nothing to do with its ability to run on multi CPU machines.
as has been said before……
os x is a mach kernel with a bsd layer that sits on top of mach
so unless apple have implemented a severally crippled mach kernel then this should be possible
2 physical cpu packages
2 cores per cpu package
2 virtual processors per core aka hyperthreading
(2 x 2) x 2 = 8
ah yes i seem to forgot that for a moment. You are indeed right, unless apple implemented a severally crippled mach kernel, OSX should be more than capable of 8 registered CPUs
Mach isn’t the problem. Being able to schedule processes on multiple processors doesn’t help when you have a global lock that ensures the system layer is only running on one of them at a time.
Science fiction.
how well photoshop and of course some of apple’s high end apps scale? Also, that much processing alone is only good for parallelizable, intense compute-bound tasks. If that were something Apple would produce I’d think they’d also be moving to pci-e and bumped-up HD performance also, no?
Personally, if that shot was real I’d say that was a dual Xeon with hyperthreading enabled. Nothing fancy at all.
Anon
Personally, if that shot was real I’d say that was a dual Xeon with hyperthreading enabled. Nothing fancy at all.
bzzzt… you lose for not even looking at the damn screenshots. otherwise you’d have seen the 8 logical cpus in the cpu monitor (4 procs with HT)
“Science fiction.”
Like Verne when he imagines a man on the moon? 🙂
Look at the CPU monitor. Those of you who keep saying a dual with hyperthreading, it is clearly (allegedly) depicting a 4-way with hyperthreading. Hence, the 4 processors and the 8 CPU’s in the CPU monitor.
So, please stop saying that it is a dual proc with hyperthreading enabled!
I personally don’t believe it, but it would be cool. Don’t know what I’d use it for, faster web surfing, I guess…
A two-way, dual core, hyperthreaded machine would display as 8 logical cpus, 4 physical, 2 chips.
Imagine if Linux is installed on this machine… everything will fly…
They already do that frequently.
Possible. I was amazed when it recognised my dual opteron. If it recognises dual core AND hyperthreading then there you have it – 8 way (sort of). BTW, Linux has been running on fancier hardware than this for years – nothing to imagine….
good old days
http://befriendly.9online.fr/pulse.gif
And it supported up to 8 processors. I ran it for a long time on a dual processor system and it was sweet. That was one of the reasons when I switched to a Mac I got the dual G5 model.
I would guess its fake. Think about it how many quad CPU intel machine are out there that Darwin runs on? let alone some preview release of x86 OS X.
Let’s see the photos of MacOSX running on a Quantum Optical 6,8 Ghz computer!
Apple does use a modified GNU developer toolkit, which also got Linux and BSD on the same style of hardware. Most likely these quad-cpu boxes will be part of Apple’s server and render farm products.
Since when do Pentium 4s have dual proc capability and beyond. Last I knew intel killed off Dual procs when they came out with the P4 and reserve such ability to the Xeons.
Even only certain AMDs offer Dual Proc configs unless you get into the Opeterons.
There currently is no such thing as a dual processor P4 box, so a quad processor box is even more unlikely.
If this was an Xeon box, which does have such ability, it would recognize the CPUs as such.
Also what on earth would a person be doing while taking that screen shot to have all those proc. working so hard. Unless maybe its an app generating the fake screen shot real time to make it seam more real.
I also doubt Apple would have such ability in this build of OSX. They wouldn’t put such a patch in there till needed with a model coming out.
There are dual-core P4’s, and there is also hyper-threading.
Yes, but P4s aren’t multi-CPU enabled (as in more then one socket proc, so they would only be able to get 2 physical cores with a P4 if they were using a dual core model, not sure what speed such procs run at). Xeons are able to go multiple cpu, just like PIIIs and Pent-Pros though.
I also find the look very questionable.
For one, Apple wouldn’t put the intel labeled image in there (unless this was just tentative). It will be G6 or what ever they decide to call intel macs. One of course could say they wouldn’t put such things in a dev released build. But at the same time, they wouldn’t put this kind of support in there either.
The menubar icon is still a G5 icon.
I would expect the CPU to be identified by type P4, Celeron, Xeon…. Not “genuine intel”
Then there is always the quality of the screenshot. Really low quality. If someone had this working. They would put one high quality shot up. This quality just means your trying to cover up photoshop blemishes.
Some seam to think this came from inside apple. No way in heck that happened. So this is a dev box in apple? Yeah, how long would it take apple to narrow down the list of people with access to it. Even if it was a box in the works, I doubt it, since they need to get just normal intel macs put together first. Such a computer would be years down the road after the first release.
I think reality has just way to much stacked against this. But seeing how nuts people have been going over what is coming wednesday, I think someone knew they could feed people anything.
Also, has anyone confirmed people getting the actual developer released version of Tiger to work on non Developer boxes, and boxes with different hardware from the developer boxes. My understanding is people have only managed to use parts of darwin, or lied.
>>For one, Apple wouldn’t put the intel labeled image in there (unless this was just tentative). It will be G6 or what ever they decide to call intel macs
me: You don’t know that at all.
If this was an Xeon box, which does have such ability, it would recognize the CPUs as such.
So instead of saying
4 x Genuine Intel (c) CPU 2.79
What would it say? Nowhere in those screenshots does it say they are P4 and not Xeon.
As for the processor usage note in the second one the list of processes stream_d which use 99% processor usage and there are 8 of them, using 3667MB of memory.
I’m no rabid Apple fanatic, never owned a Apple in my life, I use Linux and Windows. But I must question everyone who says this is a fake. Why does it have to be a fake, Linux can do this, OSX is a Unix variant it should be able to as well. This is not a fantastic show of computing prowess (that would be 64 cores) this is fairly normal.
Its not a question of if this can happen. Its a question of in this instance is it happening and I say no.
Apple can get OSX to do anything they want. In time there very well may be a box out there. Its more of a question if someone faked this, since it’s doubtful the released build is capable of this at the moment (as in apple didn’t enable it). Furthermore intel is probably working with apples chipset/mobo devs to produce hardware that does what ever they want. Its unlikely intel macs will share sockets and such with regular PC motherboards.
Apple could have a 64 way Xeon box with OSX running on it far as we know. But there is no way in heck such info would get out. Has such a screenshot or otherwise blatant info ever been leaked from there, I don’t think so.
The shots just don’t look right, low quality, shifted pixels.
…this appeared on the same day Intel launched the dual core Xeon?
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122962,00.asp
I’m no expert, especially in graphics design, but it appears that the CPU screens are not perfectly spaced. Far be it from me to notice that there is a 1 px difference between every 2nd CPU monitor in the group of eight. I would think that the logic for a CPU applet would have even spacing all around.
Nonetheless, I could be wrong. Either way, I’m eagerly awaiting the new Intel Macs!
So instead of saying
4 x Genuine Intel (c) CPU 2.79
What would it say?
If that is indeed the the SMP-capible Paxville dual core Xeon, that’s exactly what I’d expect it to say. The chips are shipping in 2.8GHz configurations initially.
Intel has been bosting about how they are going to more than double performance per watt and all that jazz – maybe this is a single cpu with 4 cores and hyper threading! ;-P
dual cpu system, with dual cores.
I personally love the casual ticked hyperthreading option it’s like..
[X] Because we can
That being said I don’t think it’s outlandish at all to imagine that Apple have 4 way macs under testing, afterall they did push for dual cpu desktops with the G5, and OS X is supposedly designed to scale fairly well. I’d be interested in what they plan to charge for such a thing though.
Realisticly I’d say that Apple are aiming to do more small machines like the Mac Mini, and the new generation of multicore pentium-m machines would fit nicely with their stated reason for moving to intel, performance/watt ratio. Maybe it’s a CPU scaling experiment because currently we aren’t getting 4 intel cpus (even dualcores with smt) without serious heat development and that just doesn’t fit with what they said about the move to intel. So I’m going to say it’s not at least intended for deployment.
I think it’s geared towards a Xserver deployment.
But it’s a logical choice and nothing new,you can easily assemble a quad opteron box too.What’s more important i think how well the OS’s itself handle threading.I think that’s exactly what they tested.
Intel and Apple will give people a reason to upgrade to Mac-Intel then staying with G5s.
I would imagine one of these systems would work with multi-layered 4k video in real-time. For the money Shake would be winner on one of these, including Combusion.
Of that “About This Mac” dialog box you will notice that none of them have the line “Startup Disk Macintosh HD”. Especially ones from the videos Apple played. Also the stats should be all bold but in this one they are not.
So maybe it is a fake after all.
google images for intel OS X
“Startup Disk Macintosh HD”
It’s new in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. It only appears if you have more than one partition/hard drive, even if there aren’t any other system installed.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t312379.html
As for the stats being all bold it depends on which screenshot you look at.
I don’t get what’s so special and sci-fi about a quad intel box… We got a few quad Xeon servers here, and all of them was bought about a two years ago.
SiSoftware Sandra
System
Host Name : SERVER2003
User : Administrator
Domain : SERVER2003
Processor
Model : 4x Intel(R) Xeon(TM) MP CPU 2.00GHz
Speed : 2.00GHz
Performance Rating : PR10660 (estimated)
SMT Support : 2 Unit(s)
Type : Standard
L2 On-board Cache : 512kB ECC Synchronous ATC
L3 On-board Cache : 1024kB ECC Synchronous ATC
Mainboard
Bus(es) : PCI USB i2c/SMBus
MP Support : 4 CPU(s)
MP APIC : No
System BIOS : Intel Corporation SSH40.86B.0097.P14.0405141707
Mainboard : Intel SSH4
Chipset : Unknown (1166) Unknown (0011)
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 100MHz (400MHz data rate)
Total Memory : 20351MB
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 100MHz (200MHz data rate)
Video System
Monitor/Panel : Plug and Play Monitor
Adapter : RAGE XL PCI Family (Microsoft Corporation)
Physical Storage Devices
Removable Drive : Floppy disk drive
Hard Disk : MEGARAID LD 0 MEGARAID SCSI Disk Device
CD-ROM/DVD : LITEON CD-ROM LTN526
Logical Storage Devices
1.44MB 3.5″ (A:) : N/A
Hard Disk (C:) : 273.5GB (23.2GB, 8% Free) (NTFS)
CD-ROM/DVD (D:) : N/A
Peripherals
Serial/Parallel Port(s) : 2 COM / 1 LPT
USB Controller/Hub : ServerWorks (RCC) PCI to USB Open Host Controller
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
Keyboard : Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Mouse : PS/2 Compatible Mouse
Operating System(s)
Windows System : Microsoft Windows 2003 Advanced/Enterprise Server Version 5.02.3790
Network Adapter(s)
Network Drivers Enabled : Yes
Adapter : Intel(R) PRO/1000 XT Network Connection
Adapter : Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Server Adapter
Adapter : Intel 8255x-based PCI Ethernet Adapter (10/100)
And yes, the box got 20 gigs of physical RAM
So:
– P4 can’t be
– Xeons can but… with HT?
I think it’s fake.
Actually, Xeon supports HT…
so much whining.
as said, os x is a bsd + mach kernel variant, therefore unix and capable of some serious smp.
picture may be fake, but of course (unless apple is serious f–kwit) os x can use 4 cpus at once.
I personally think they should drop mach and go for pure BSD.
BryanFeeney wrote:
“Money is what’d stop it from happening. It’d cost a fortune and wouldn’t offer much of a benefit as there’s not much software out there that can take advantage of eight logical CPUs. Personally I think it’s a fake, but I guess we’ll all see on Wednesday ;-)”
This may not mean anything, but our dual Xeon Citrix box shows up as having 4 processors in the CPU monitor. I wonder if something similar is happening here.
These are dual core not quad core processors. Since Apple is porting OSX to x86 for 2006 and dual core is currently available on the hardware it makes sense. With Hyperthreading a dual core dual processor Xeon system would appear as 4 physical processors with 4 virtual processors = 8 processors.
A quad-processor system does not make fiscal sense in the current market,
Well depends on where and how big your market is.Here in holland the more you spend the more tax you pay.So for the goverment it makes sence 🙂
Further, the trend in computing is to increase the number cores per CPUs, not to increase the number of CPUs per computer.
I doubt wether managers look that much at trends but rather tend to look more at necessity.What’s really needed and makes sence is the prime.Furthermore some businesses need sheer raw power and might need a quad dual-core CPU sustem.All depends on the mileage and isn’t a fashion show.
thqts m@d!
yat
IIRC, the new Intel processors won’t support Hyper threading for some time… as the architecture is some **kind** of Pentium III on steroids evolution instead of an evolutionary of of Pentium 4’s NetBurst architecture…
Then I would risk it’s a 4 dual [hard-]core system or a dual quad [hard-]core system… the later seems more believable as a quad processor system would generate a lot of heat and require expensive cooling (even knowing that the quad-core system would be really expensive too…).
But, well… why not wait and see? What’s the big deal? For me, it’s more important the OS be really scalable to processors instead and much horse power you put on the machine… =]
( @”is it real ? :-)”: Yeah! Good old days… =] )