Submitted by Apple has upgraded its Mac Pro desktop with a pair of 3GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It can have up to 16 GB of RAM, although it isn’t cheap. Apple has already published benchmarks.
Apple Announces Octo-Core Mac Pro
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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68 Comments
2007-04-04 10:27 pm
2007-04-04 10:48 pm
2007-04-05 4:13 pm
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2007-04-05 5:11 pm
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For probably the first time I could have more processors than I have processes…
Does it run Vista?
Also: That is a very tightly packed case. I’m expecting heat to be a problem… Apple III all over again? If I do get one, I’d have to find some creative way to keep it cool…
Edit 2: This is on the front page of Apple.com now.
Edited 2007-04-04 17:36
I’m sure it will run Vista with Bootcamp (if Vista supports Quad Core).
What makes you think it might have heat problems? It has the same configuration as the Dual Core System (2 Processors) plus additional cores.
XP I know supports 32 cores. It can support up to that many using a 2 processor license as long as your box has two physical processor dies. It doesn’t really matter at this point how many cores your individual processors have, they just have to be under 16 cores each.
It will run Vista *NATIVELY!* You can thank Apple for their EFI firmware update for this! Just slap the Vista DVD in the drive, reboot, and hold down ‘C’. Repartition and reformat the disk for 100% Windows Vista!!! Get rid of that crummy old MacOS X!* Who needs it?** Apple stole everything from Microsoft anyways, right?***
Pay Apple’s prices to run Windows Vista! Wheeee!****
*Heavy sarcasm enabled.
** Ditto
*** Ditto
**** Ditto
It’s kind of sad that an eight-core Mac Pro requires significantly less cooling than the late-model, dual-processor PowerMac G5s, which required fans and liquid cooling.
Edited 2007-04-04 17:52
It does, but it does not well, because the drivers are still beta.
Most of powermanagement is said not to work, so expect a lot of wasted energy with 8 cores.
Now if only I they could cram this in a laptop, keep it cool, and have it have good battery life ’cause I am not going back to a desktop 😉
That’s pointless. Very few people are going to have ligitimate use for 8-cores at this moment. Unless you’re doing your 3D Rendering, gene sequencing or video editing, you will simply never do anything worth 8-cores today on a web/email desktop.
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Very few people are going to have ligitimate use for 8-cores at this moment.
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Agreed. No drool here. Seven expensive cores sitting around unused is more likely to make me feel sickish than to drool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… “when software is written to take better advantage”… I know the mantra.
When “software is written to take better advantage” we are going to see a minimal difference in performance combined with a hell of a lot more bugs. Bugs which are a lot harder to track down.
Edited 2007-04-04 17:59
You have to realize that Mac OS X itself supports multithreading and multiple CPU cores. If an application for the Mac does not have multi-CPU support (very few) then the OS handles the splitting of core responsibility. If you look at a majority of Mac applications, you will notice that they can already take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores. In fact, for most developers for the Mac, usually it’s just a matter of clicking a checkbox in XCode to recompile an app with multi-cpu/core support.
I agree that on the Windows side of the fence, this is for the most part totally opposite. You have to buy a separate version of the OS or buy a separate build of an app. What a mess!
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You have to realize that Mac OS X itself supports multithreading and multiple CPU cores. If an application for the Mac does not have multi-CPU support (very few) then the OS handles the splitting of core responsibility. If you look at a majority of Mac applications, you will notice that they can already take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores. In fact, for most developers for the Mac, usually it’s just a matter of clicking a checkbox in XCode to recompile an app with multi-cpu/core support.
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So the magic checkbox automatically rewrites your code to be multithreaded? Why, that is just soooo cool. I had no idea MacOS X was that advanced.
The rest of us just may as well give up.
Except that I smell a bit of bullshit here. 😉
Edited 2007-04-05 02:09
Yeah, but can you blame him? First, they added a single checkbox to have your app run on both Intel & PPC in Tiger (which for many small apps was all that was needed), then a checkbox to have your app run as native 32 & 64 bit in Leopard… it doesn’t sound so far-fetched. 🙂
And to a limited extent, that “checkbox to make an app multithreaded” sort of exists in Tiger, although rather than a checkbox is a single line of code to enable multithreaded OpenGL, which depending on the type of app can make a major performance difference. There are also several multi-processor aware libraries provided by the system, so if you use them in your app it benefits from extra cores “for free”.
In fact, for most developers for the Mac, usually it’s just a matter of clicking a checkbox in XCode to recompile an app with multi-cpu/core support.
So you can code away without threading your application or anything and a magic checkbox does the rest huh?
Somehow I don’t believe that. I think in reality you likely have to thread your application correctly and this check box probably applies some compiler optimizations for applications that are targeting multi processing systems.
agree that on the Windows side of the fence, this is for the most part totally opposite. You have to buy a separate version of the OS or buy a separate build of an app. What a mess!
Well first off I’ve never seen an application for sale in which you have to choose a multi-cpu version or not. There might be some high end software that is sold this way strictly to milk customers for licensing money but there is surely no technical reason to do so.
Windows will make an effort to split the load of your application between processor cores or cpus if you have multiple threads of execution.
Not pointless you have to remember that this system is designed for creative professionals. The dual core system is still available this is not the standard system. Apple has released this system for their core audience “Creative professionals” It is even noted as being optimized for CS3.
So since that is the case a lot of people in the Creative Industry will love this system. As well it will make a great tower server for Leopard Server.
And the important thing to Apple is those few “Creative professionals” end up numbering in the tens of thousands if not hundred of thousands of buyers.
Suddenly you are talking hundreds of millions of dollars in sales with a very healthy profit margin to boot.
True.
And with Apple buying exclusivity into the applications these creative professionals use (Logic being one such example), it seems pretty clear that Apple are going to dominate this side of the market (where as Windows is getting increasingly awkward with creative software what with DRMs and removal of ASIO layers)
Slightly off topic I know, but maybe Linux will use this chance to overtake Windows on the PC side of creative, profession design. Rosegarden is gaining in popularity and JACK is reportedly better than ASIO)
It’s not aimed at desktop users though – it’s aimed at professional studios (like music studios who want replace their expensive hardware synths with VSTi’s).
A system like this would effectively be like having a studio worth several thousand £ into a single unit – freeing up space in the process.
Edited 2007-04-04 18:05
“That’s pointless. Very few people are going to have ligitimate use for 8-cores at this moment. Unless you’re doing your 3D Rendering, gene sequencing or video editing, you will simply never do anything worth 8-cores today on a web/email desktop.”
In a year, you’ll need that much CPU power just to display a “Web 2.0” web page. 😉
Not pointless at all. But you are correct, people doing web/email on a desktop won’t use 8 cores. But that’s not who Apple is marketing these machines towards.
You don’t need it till you need it. But when you need it you REALLY need it. I have been running my dual-CPU BeOS machine fine for the last couple of months, but this week with all the changes going on with Haiku – the addition downloading and compiling is pegging my CPUs and slowing down my web browsing – I would not mind a 8-CPU machine at all.
And as for the tasks you listed, some of that work is very important with lives at stake on the results, I am sure a number of researchers and engineers are very glad to see 8-CPU machine on the market that they can afford/request.
seti@home
Yes, and Folding@Home.
watching 6 videos, listening to MP3s and typing a paper.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
well… ok, that would be pointless… but still!
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watching 6 videos, listening to MP3s and typing a paper.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
well… ok, that would be pointless… but still!
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OK. So we’ve found a buyer. Contact Commander Data and have him report to my ready room. 😉
They’re too expensive to be worth it to many people today. Obviously anyone who’s going to profit from the speed may be interested, but most home users don’t really get money for working faster and most of them wouldn’t work any faster on this hardware anyway.
And I can definitely second you. I’ve made the notebook switch recently and I don’t want to go back. Although I would like to get a nice widescreen LCD so I can use an external (better) keyboard when I’m at my desk.
I’m drooling on my keyboard…
the sad thing is that one of these bad boys with 8GB of ram is worth more than my car!
With this thing, though, you wouldn’t need to drive all that much.
When I’ve created quotes from Dell and HP I can always choose many software titles to be installed. With apple I can choose:
iWork — OR –aperture –OR — Logic express — OR — final cut express
why can’t you just buy them all preinstalled?
Phone them, I’m certain they’d accomodate you, and possibly even change their website if it ended up in a sale.
Installing software on OS X is so easy they make you do it yourself. 🙂
I’d guess it’s a simple oversight; everything else was a radio button, that the coder must have accidentally defined the software section as radio-type as well.
Yeah that is a monster:)
would love to get my hands on one of those!
“at LEAST ONE 30″ apple cinema HD display”
I found it surprising that a Dual CPU Quad Core 3GHZ Xeon will only perform 1.4x better than an old 2.5 Ghz Quad G5 setup.
If I was Apple I would have picked a different benchmark result because that is hardly flattering.
“I found it surprising that a Dual CPU Quad Core 3GHZ Xeon will only perform 1.4x better than an old 2.5 Ghz Quad G5 setup. ”
That’s because you are looking at the wrong graph 😉
See my precious post (summary: that graph shows the Dual CPU Dual Core model, not the new 2xQuad Core model)
Yeah, I noticed that too….kinda weird huh?
Only a few of those benchmarks showed the 8 core setup.
Some of the ones that did truly shined though (modo, Maya, Cinebench).
Yeah, the G5 is a seriously anemic processor, eh?
(NOT!!!)
AltiVec is a heck of a SIMD instruction set. Those programs use it EXTENSIVELY, and their implementation is bound to be more mature than SSEx ones, if only because Intel is rolling out the 4th major revision of SSE already with its newer processors (Penryn), whereas AltiVec has remained remarkably unchanged since its introduction. Not to mention how Apple tuned their version of GCC quite a lot to grok AltiVec, and with Tiger they were already pushing the autovectorizing version of GCC while FSF was still pretty shy about it.
At least they’re not bending the numbers as everyone and their pet usually claim Apple does. And it somehow justifies the investment people made on those G5 towers, as well as justifying Apple’s continued support for the PPC machines. Please, don’t underestimate them. They’re still quite competitive in some workloads.
P.s.: What’s up with the ‘[ q ]’ thing? It’s not working for me, at least not on OSNews v3.
Edit: the PS.
Edit 2: uh, when I log in, it works. When I don’t, it doesn’t. Weird.
Edited 2007-04-04 19:01
Please, don’t underestimate them.
Thats what I was really surprised by. Intel’s new architecture is very good but it seems that the G5 was good in its day. Its a pity that we never got to see a G6 – a derivative of the lastest Power CPU running Mac OS.
You don’t need an app threaded 8 ways to take advantage of an 8 way processor. Open up Activity Monitor, Task Manager, or run `ps aux` and tell me you have less then 8 processes running which aren’t in a wait state, i’m guessing you have far more then 8, and that’s before you every start an app.
The OS isn’t just going to schedule one app across 8 cores, its going to try to keep every core busy by scheduling up to 8 apps across each of those cores. That means when safari is giving a crappy JavaScript 100% of the processor because of tight setTimeout loop, that can be chewing on one core, while photoshop is eating up 2 or 3 more, and iTunes, launchd, WindowServer, HandBrake, etc, still have their own core to run on.
Sounds pretty sweet to me.
The only drawback I can see is that with so many cores, average idle times across each core are probably higher then on a lower core box, meaning you’re not getting as much value out of your hardware. If that’s the case I’ll send you some work, because I’m short on cycles at home
Good point. Opened Activity Monitor: threads: 155. Processes: 48.
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You don’t need an app threaded 8 ways to take advantage of an 8 way processor. Open up Activity Monitor, Task Manager, or run `ps aux` and tell me you have less then 8 processes running which aren’t in a wait state,
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It is rare for more than one of them to require substantial processor at any one time.
I have a pretty good perspective on this since I administer “desktop servers” running Gnome desktops via XDMCP for dozens of users. I have one machine with about 50 real users. It’s a dual 2.8GHz Xeon box.
We do make good use of both processors sometimes. Other times not. I sample the output of htop fairly frequently, and I don’t think that we would benefit much, if any, from another processor.
And that’s with 50 Gnome users doing all the normal business desktop stuff.
People who think that multiple cores are going to help the average desktop user are just buying into the hype. And Intel and AMD are laughing all the way to the bank.
Edited 2007-04-04 19:13
But all those threads are waiting. Without running a compute-intensive app like Photoshop or Final Cut you’d be lucky to get 2 threads running at once.
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But all those threads are waiting.
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Indeed. I have several apps and applets running on my Gnome 2.18 desktop. And “ps aux” shows that exactly one process is runnable at the time it was run. And that process was “ps aux”.
Edited 2007-04-04 19:47
From this page:
http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html
Recommended Mac Pro Film and Video Workstation
* Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors
Quad-Core Dual-Core? WOW! 🙂
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OK, seriously: The 1.4x faster Final Cut Pro figure in the graph on that same page refers to the old quad-core Xeon vs. the quad-core G5, but some people (in this site and others) forget that the “Quad core” model is the one with 2 dual core processors. The new one is, in those same terms, an “Octo core”, two quad core processors, and the score is not in that graph. Check the graph below that one:
Baseline: G5 Quad 2.5GHz
modo
– Mac Pro Quad Xeon 3.0GHz – 1.9x
– Mac Pro 8-core Xeon 3.0GHz – 3.1x
Maya
– Mac Pro Quad Xeon 3.0GHz – 1.4x
– Mac Pro 8-core Xeon 3.0GHz – 2.6x
Cinebench
– Mac Pro Quad Xeon 3.0GHz – 1.3x
– Mac Pro 8-core Xeon 3.0GHz – 2.0x
PowerMacX,
Thanks for the link. The system would look great in my LAN. I just wish Autodesk would speed up their 64-bit port of Mental Ray for Maya on OS X but I guess they’re waiting till Apple releases Leopard.
Do you know if this workstation is liquid cooled? What is the decible level during benchmarks? How much heat does it generate?
They’ve lowered the price for Cinema Displays too. 30″ is now more or less affordable.
I bought my Mac Pro last year, to replace my then aging P4 PC.
The machine then was overkill for what I used the machine for (games and development).
But I found when looking around a lot of the machines I was looking at were capped at 2G of RAM, and I wanted to START at 2G and grow from that.
With the expansion to 16G, the Mac Pro gave me the depth I felt I would need in the future. Yea, 4 cores was “overkill”, but it too gave me depth to grow in to later.
Now, it is not uncommon to run development and demo application servers along with my Java dev tools, along side with one or two Parallels instances with Windows and Solaris or Linux for testing and what not.
I’m about ready to spring for another 2G of RAM, to boost it to 4G. But the Mac Pro eliminated my old PC and its companion Sun server I was using. This basket can handle all of my eggs with ease. If I later add an Apple TV unit, it will handily serve that thing without barely a blip on the radar.
Yea, it’s a single source of failure (if I lose a power supply or something or have to reboot the core OS), but that capability is simply not that important to me.
I still have 3 drive bays and can readily cram 2TB of disk in to this beast, along with Yet More RAM, and it’s my understanding that the stock Mac Pro will work with the 4 core chips, so if I ever feel the need I should be able to grow that as well (plus the jump from 2.6 to 3.0Ghz).
But it’s nice having a “server room” worth of equipment in a single, quiet, cool tower. It makes development on both a logical and physical level that much easier.
So, software demand is like a gas — it expands to fill all available bandwidth. With the GHz wars slowing down, and the push to efficiency and multiple cores, I see the Mac Pro being a relevant and performant machine for many years.
You said games…and Mac. I would like to know what games there are for a Mac besides Doom based games and Unreal games…nott trying to be a smartass here but cause I am either gonna build my own octacore system or go with a top of the line Dell or the Mac when the Penryn’s come out next quarter.
World of Warcraft and Civilization III/IV are two more examples. What more could you want?
I guess you could start with
http://www.apple.com/games/ as a teaser and
http://www.apple.com/games/articles/ for a bigger list…
then go to http://www.macgamefiles.com/ and find a lot more…
Also realize that if you have World of Warcraft, as someone else stated, why do you need anything else? In addition, WoW is optimized for the Mac with multithreaded OpenGL and has built in multi-core support.
Thanks but WOW is boring mate. Its for geeks and I aint a geek. Give me Battlefield 2, Splinter Cell, Hidden and Dangerous 2, STALKER, FAIA GTR, Far Cry, Flight Simulator X, Cyrsis…etc…none of the weaksauce Opengl stuff. Regardless I am still drooling thinking of that machine.
It’s funny that you bill WoW as being for geeks when it is widely regarded as the most successful game on the planet. Hell, it even gets friends of mine who aren’t gamers (read arts major girls[!!]) hooked on it.
Just proves there are more geeks than non-geeks.
Man, now that is what I call a BADASS workstation. Throw in 16GB of RAM, 2×500 GB 16MB cache SATAII HDs in a RAID 0 stripe and I’m good for not leaving the house in a long time!
Ahh something as pretty as the iPod or MacMini but with real workstation power ?
Okay cool .
But – remember – this hardware is plain old Intel – so nothing special about it – pretty packaging – the OS remains to make the difference .
I guess for those that want to be seen to have a Mac workstation there isnt a choice if it’s this or any other “PC” (which Mac are now as well – I guess the motherboards arent special for Macs .. ?) .
Still they seem to be refraining from producing quad processor systems – might be interesting performance wise .
Recent quad processor dual core Opteron versus dual processor quad core Xeon showed Opteron being equal or faster due to bandwidth & memory reasons (no real clue bout specifics) .
I find the recommended systems on their site a bit – irritating .
For all these different workloads they recommend the same amount of RAM and CPU with varying discs .
Just IMO
Edit : Yeah some of the benchmark improvements do look a bit meager – especially considering it theoretically has double the amount of processing power & also compared to the “old” G5 Power .
This is a workstation – not a desktop – there are more powerful systems than this out there – more powerful workstations that don’t run OSX .
Edited 2007-04-04 19:36
I’m waiting for a $1,500 Mac Pro.
Over that is too much
for low-quality Chinese-made electronics.
“I’m waiting for a $1,500 Mac Pro.”
The CPU’s alone cost about that.
A Xeon X3210 only costs about $700, so Apple could create a lower-priced single-socket Mac Pro.
Who for? The iMac is the consumer grade desktop, and the Mac Pro is for people who need and can afford a Mac Pro. Apple do not need to increase their support costs across the board by adding a new model, for people who can’t really afford what a Mac Pro is designed for, very high end work. An iMac will run Photoshop great, and if you seriously, actually need a Mac Pro for running something, you’re either in a business that can pay for it, or you’re a creative individual who could afford one pretty easily.
This aint low quality at all. $2000 of CPU and a ton of other parts. They put a bit too much quality in the tower though
– Super Thick Metal that weighs a ton.
Foregive my ignorance, but would these be the “overgrown Pentium 4” variety, or did Intel keep the name and change the architecture?
Same name, different architecture.
As I recall, Xeon has been around since the P2 days to separate the regular and server versions of Intel offerings.
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