Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro 628
ivan1024 writes "The Apple website is announcing the availability of an 8-core Mac Pro. The machine will ship with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 processors. Older models with the Dual-Core chips remain available. Base model with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors start at $3997, (albeit with unacceptably minimal RAM or HD space; fully spec'd with dual 30" monitors and tons o' RAM/HD still over $10K... bummer)"
Advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Insightful)
that is what hose computers are designed for. Apple pretty much owns video and TV production now.
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Never really understood the latter being there.
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
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a good chunk... (Score:3, Informative)
Similarly, for editing/post, there's a ton of flint/flame/inferno/etc./etc. out there which are nowhere near Apple.
And that's completely ignoring everythin
Re:a good chunk... (Score:5, Funny)
20% of Maya sales are Mac (Score:4, Informative)
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:pfgF8E0i5C8J:
20% of Maya sales are the Mac version, according to Autodesk. (Google cache since Macworld UK is apparently down.)
Re:a good chunk... (Score:5, Insightful)
Avid is great but they are way behind because they are not moving fast enough. If you are still shooting on antique Betacam or digiBeta I can see using Avid or a Sony Digi suite. but most are over on DV as you get damn near same as digibeta off of a good DV camera and lenses. And once you hit that DV world all that special hardware that makes avid king becomes irrelevant.
I can replace a single Avid suite with 3 FCP suites for the same price. Kids are coming out of college with FCP experience and preference and only minimal Avid exposure and typically older avid exposure.
I have seen guys whip out a 30 second spot from encode to final in 1/4th the time it takes on an Avid using FCP.
don't get me wrong, I love avid, I cut my teeth on it. But it's becoming more and more a FCP world every day.
Re:a good chunk... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or did you mean to compare to the "base" Mac Pro? Which isn't $4000, but is $2499 (seeing as it only has two dual 2.66s)?
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Really. I call BS on this one.
Show links to 3 GHz Quad-core Xeon Clovertown CPUs (these can be used in pairs) and a motherboard that can support a pair of them.
Just the dual-core 3 GHz versions of the Xeon (5160) run $871 [newegg.com] each ($1742 a pair) at New Egg. It is very doubtful that you could find even a pair of the right quad-core processors alone for $2000.
If you're not trolling, perhaps you are confused.
Re:a good chunk... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple 16GB (8x2GB) FB-DIMM 667 $4499
Newegg 16GB (8x2GB) Kingston (KVR667D2D8F5/1G) FB-DIMM 667 $2392
Apple 750GB SATA 3GB/s $$499
ZipZoomFly ST3750640NS 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s $299
Apple Warranty 1 Year
Seagate HD Warranty 5 Years
Kingston Memory Lifetime Warranty
So at the least buy a bare bones Mac Pro and add your own parts, you will save a ton.
Mac Pro uses different heat sink standards for RAM (Score:5, Informative)
Getting the right RAM 3rd party is a smarter buy than getting it from Apple, but make sure you get the right RAM!
Again, from what I've seen, _be very careful_ getting RAM for the Mac Pro. Make sure it's been thoroughly tested first and had no problems before getting any given brand, and without the proper heat sinks, it seems like you're going to get slowdowns of the RAM and dramatic increases in the use of fans in the Mac Pro. (From what I've seen, though, it's more likely to have errors than just do that, unfortunately.)
Then again, you could probably get away with standard heat sinks if you know how to tweak the fans to run fast enough to keep them from going wonky.
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Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they are able to boot into Windows since the Intel switch...
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Hose computers are great, especially when you connect them up to a series of tubes.
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Usually E and the spacebar wear out first. I wonder what this guy was doing with his keyboard. Then again, maybe he just missed his t-time.
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plenty of shops run avid systems on macs. Admitedly a lot of the large scale newsroom stuff is currently only on windows but all of that is fairly new. Stand alone editors (as used in TV show and movie editing) can be done just as easily on an avid PC as an avid mac.
Im not sure exactly what the breakdown is right now out in the field but these things are just fine for running Media composer and editing up your latest blockbuster movie (although I'm not sure if these actual machines have yet been certified
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
Premiere? Well first off, it is available [adobe.com]for the Mac, secondly Adobe stopped making it for the Mac for a while because Premeire has always been a low-end program for prosumers and multimedia professionals.
Only low end shops use Final Cut? So do you consider:
The BBC
CNN
David Fincher
The Washington Post
Pixar
Weta
ILM small shops? Cold Mountain and Lost in Translation were cut solely on Final Cut Pro, and for compositing tools don't forget Shake is what Weta used to make the Lord of the Rings movies and King Kong.
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Both have a huge number of FCP editors.
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Adobe and the Multi-threaded Client
http://www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=251 [illuminata.com]
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It's a chicken and an egg problem. If you don't have a system like this then no one will write software for it. Besides, we're already going dual and quad core on our desktops.
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Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you ever see how amazing WoW looks on a 30" display?
angel'o'sphere
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
thats impossible even for an 8 core machine.
please stop spreading this misinformation.
Whiney Mac Fanboy (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, it took GOD a whole week to make just this puny little planet and you complain that it takes several days to make a whole Galaxy!
In my days, we had to ... oh never mind.
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
4d? Are you sending your rendered images into the past, or the future?
Re:Advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
CG animation uses a timeline as well as three dimensional coordinates, so 4d is technically correct.
awesome machine (Score:2)
Re:awesome machine (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, Apple's totally missing the boat. If only they made some sort of "mini" Mac for consumers, or a Mac notebook. They could call that a Mac Book or something.
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Re:awesome machine (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a reasonable question. The general answer is a lot of niche markets, but not many general markets.
- Video/multimedia editing at real time or faster than real time
- Raytracing/3D image generation
- High-end data analysis (quite good for most sciences)
- Financial/Business data analysis
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And there are non-Apple users who will drop 4 grand on a PC for some tasks. Not all non-Apple users are MS Office drones.
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Powerbook, that's a name people would like!
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As for what connectivity is missing from the iMac, generally RAM capacity, The lack of any type of PCI or ExpressCard expandability. Insufficient number of either ethernet ports or USB/Firewire ports with independent controllers. Which is to say, the kinds of high bandwidth ex
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Re:awesome machine (Score:4, Insightful)
The OpenGL drivers are also multi-threaded. A game I play went from ~300 FPS to 500~ FPS when they turned on OpenGL multithreading on the Intel Mac builds.
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It'd rather see my 500FPS drop down to 200FPS than see my 70FPS drop down to 35.
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No price drops on old configurations (Score:3, Informative)
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Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a longtime mac user, I must admit that it feels inordinately good to say that.;-)
Re:Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, Intel hasn't yet shipped the Quattro Quad Core Core 2 Dueling Dualist Duo - that is coming later this month.
Apple is using the Core 2 Quad in this box (which lacks the swashbuckling extensions).
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they made an odd choice for video cards, though. you get three choices, none of which are top of the line: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500. the boutique PC vendors have been using nVidia's top of the line 8800 series cards, often two of them in SLI, for months now.
so the apple wins hands down
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So all this about how you can install Windows on it and dual-boot is what? Marketing? Because if I were to list the reasons I'd want to boot to Windows, which I wouldn't want to do regularly, then gaming would be it. That is the only time I turn off everything else that's running to free up both CPU time and bandwidth to turn it into a single-task machine. Any other "must-have" application I'd do my damndest to replace, emulate, virtualize or minimiz
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It seems you are under the mistaken impression that you can't drop any old modern nVidia PCI-E
Re:Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Informative)
Considering I find half a kazillion posts about said video cards not working under OS X, and the few that do need to use some beta driver from here [macvidia.com] and any new graphics cards will be a hit-or-miss thing too because the PC cards lack EFI support, yes I'm under that "mistaken impression". If you got any sources to back up your claims, I'd love to see them.
Re:Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Funny)
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How can you possibly love your platform more than your girlfriend? Even if my girlfriend were using a Commodore 64, I'd still support her choice of platform.
Re:Technological superiority at last! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Technological superiority at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel would *love* to see an end to the Microsoft monopoly. MS has had Intel by the short and curlies for some time; MS is the reason that Intel cannot work with non-x86 CPUs, and what killed the (somewhat) competitive Itanium 2.
Apple has demonstrated time and time again that they are willing to change architectures, buy the latest and greatest, and do not shirk at launching big expensive products at premium prices.
You can bet that Apple pays more than Dell does on a per-cpu basis, and guess what; they can afford to, because Apple has a significantly greater margin than Dell.
Why do you think that Intel has such excellent linux drivers cross the board? You can bet that Intel, although a MS ally, is tired of living under the Wintel shadow.
RAM/vidcard deficiencies are no big deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
While most Mac folks would think it anathema to do it, I've always had no probs with getting a Mac w/ only the CPU strength I want, then buffing out the hardware specs everywhere else once I got it home - saves tons of cash that way.
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Buy globally, upgrade locally!
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Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:4, Informative)
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself. For the Mac Pro, Apple charges $700 for 4GB (4x1GB) of RAM. You can get the same amount of RAM from DealRam [dealnews.com] for $500. The same goes for hard drives. Apple charges you $329 for a 500GB SATA drive, which you can get from NewEgg for around $200. [newegg.com] Granted, these aren't covered by your warranty, but they often have a manufacturer's warranty
I've often though the lack of user serviceable parts in the Mac Mini was designed to sell more RAM at Apple's hugely inflated prices.
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Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:5, Informative)
No. Installing memory in a Mac Mini does not void the warranty. [macworld.com]
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The only hard part about upgrading the RAM in a mini is not panicking at the plastic-popping sounds you get when you crack the case. Two sharpened putty knives (or lab spatulas), a
Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just ECC DDR-SDRAM, but FB-DIMM. The latter's even harder to get since it's only used for Intel's Xeon line of processors (which the Mac Pro and xServe use, and any workstation or server with multiple physical CPUs (not cores)).
When I purchased my Mac Pro, Apple's RAM was very close to the price of FB-DIMMs locally and not too much more online - it was worth it buying Apple's stuff, have it all installed and having Apple actually being forced to fix it should it cause kernel panics and stuff. Plus, Apple's RAM has larger heatsinks - I think Crucials do too (if you ask for them). I saw a memory test somewhere the revealed the memory can run hot, and you get a number of correctable ECC errors. But if your RAM has the larger Apple-recommended heatsinks on them, the ECC errors drop to zero.
But yes, FB-DIMMs are also why the Xeon platform's memory numbers aren't that great due to their higher latency - for raw memory-intensive stuff, a regular desktop Core2 processor will run rings around a Xeon Core2, even though the latter may have much faster RAM.
Re:Quick Mac Buying Tip (Score:5, Informative)
Look at Apple's "Select Developer Membership." At the base configuration, the difference between (ADC Select Membership + Mac Pro w/ discount) and (Mac Pro w/o discount) is $1... in favor of the membership. Bumping up the Mac Pro to the 8-core version yields $300 savings (ie: $800 savings - $500 membership). Plus you get everything that comes with the membership, including the Leopard Early Start Kit and two free tech support incidents.
If you're a student, the membership price drops from $500 to $100, though you're only allowed to use the hardware discount once ever, whereas the Select Membership lets you buy hardware with the discount once per year (at a price of $500/year).
This will help with the performance problems ... (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the updated video card? (Score:2)
Yes it's a workstation. Yes, it's not meant for games. But putting those cards in it would give Apple a significant salvo to fire into the boutique camp. I know a number of gamers who would buy them (outside the video card the machine is awesome).
8-core? Nice. But Apple, enough is enough: put a premium video card in
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But with the popularity of boot camp, they instead elected to go with a card that had working windows and linux drivers.
I want a MBP pretty bad, but I specifically will not purchase anything with ATI graphics. I gave them another chance after years of avoiding them (Radon 9600XT) and it turned out they STILL can't write drivers worth one tenth of one shit.
On top of that
No new video cards (Score:2, Interesting)
How about updated NVIDIA 8800 class video cards?
An apple with more than one core ... (Score:5, Funny)
USA only? (Score:4, Informative)
When you try to make it as expensive as possible.. (Score:3, Informative)
You've got $3,600 in displays alone - that's more than 1/3 of the price. Also, Apple is notorious for overpricing hard drives and memory. Buy the fastest CPUs and get everything else from someone else, including the displays (get'em from Dell), and you'll save 20%+.
Bah on minimums. (Score:3, Interesting)
But I think I see Apple's desire to sell an operational machine - it'd be hard to support a machine if it is untestable in the store - in other words, there are a lot of idiots out there who can still manage to screw up RAM and HDD purchasing and installation, and when the do screw up, they're likely to blame anyone else other than themselves.
Then again, my needs aren't really impacted by the "unacceptably minimal" 250 GB single disk and 1 GB of RAM - my world is CPU bound - loads of RAM and disk do not solve my problems where I work.
Went with quad 3.0... (Score:3, Interesting)
Toward the end of the year, if its still too slow, i can always throw down on some of the quad core chips. They're around $1200 right now on Newegg.
But so far, its not the processors that are slowing me down - its the hard drives and the 2 gigs of ram.
If you're buying the 8 core box, and you're NOT buying a SATA raid w/card to go with it, you're pissing in the wind... because you'll NEVER keep the processors busy enough..
encoding h.264 right now is taxing the 3 drive array inside my box, not the computing bits.
I'm sure that with the release of Final Cut Suite 6 - we'll hopefully get some 3D graphics - finally - and maybe we'll even get shake with the Uber package if we're lucky.
THEN we'll see.
but right now, i have literally thrown dozens of needlessly complex stuff at Motion 2, and i can't get the CPUs to bog down.
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Okay, seriously now, how well does the Mac video editing software take advantage of the potential of this system? I was considering building a dual-quad core pc in about a year...for video editing...but I fear that the software packages just won't take advantage of the hardware. I this changing? I don't see the average consumer being smart enough to lobby for multi-threaded software....?
Re:What do use it for? (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back some folks (Ars Technica, I think) swapped the dualies in the Mac Pro for these new quad cores and found out that it could not only see all the cores, but also utilize them. (Though they could never get it to peg the processors, even while playing 8 high-def videos on it.)
Mac OS X automatically sees and uses as many cores or processors that it has available. Final Cut Pro, the de facto video editing app for professionals these days, can see and use all these cores.
Now if you want to do that on the Windows side, I won't be of much assistance.
Re:Correction: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correction: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Correction: (Score:5, Informative)
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They may be used in a positive manner for posts along the lines of 'omg I luv apple' and 'mee too' etc.
Re:What do use it for? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see the average programmer experienced enough to write multi-threaded software...
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Re:What do use it for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Macs have been shipping with dual CPUs since 1999. Nearly every piece of Mac software is multi-threaded in some way. And it would be pretty crappy coding practice to assume 2 CPUs when making an application "thread hot," because typically you'll just spawn as many threads as you need and let the OS deal with it.
So I would expect many applications would use mulitple cores. The OS itself can also leverage mutiple CPUs... and given that it's typical that 75-200 applications are running at once, more CPUs will be better.
This isn't like Windows where 99% of all desktop machines had a single CPU until last year. Nearly all games were written single-threaded until this past year... I know because in 2000 I bought a dual 733 MHz PIII machine, and it was slower for games than a single 800 MHz P3. And it cost me a LOT more
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
I just interviewed with a small growing company. Every single desktop they had were Apple..... Considering they could have had *just as good* for cheaper that did the same thing ... I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do....
I wonder, since they are a small company, how big was their IT department? I run a small S/W consulting company (me, a few subcontractors, support folks for large projects), and we use Apple for pretty much everything except when a client requires something else. We have no IT guy. We have no virus scares. We have no FAQ for how to connect to the shared NAS box.
Sure, we could buy cheaper hardware, but then we'd have to worry about it and waste billable time dealing with the associated pain points. I can say that, for a small company, an Apple/OS X infrastructure is definitely cheaper in the long run.
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Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, maybe they don't want their employees wasting company time "fixing it themselves" - they'd rather just not have it break in the first place.
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
This varies depending upon the release dates and whatnot, but in general, I disagree. Apple usually wins for small form factor, with the mini almost always cheaper than Dell and anyone else, and they frequently win for pro notebooks, though not always. In fact, Apple is usually a bit more expensive for the Mac Pro line and this is an anomaly. For matching the exact same hardware and ignoring installed software, the last market study I saw put Apple at 8% more expensive than Dell, but 4% cheaper than the market on average. Of course it also put Apple far and away ahead of Dell in customer support and hardware reliability which was not accounted for in the price difference.
In general, you have to add extras to Dell machines to get them to the same functionality as Apple machines. Dell mostly sells minimal machines, while Apple is committed to the midrange, with firewire, dual monitor support, etc. in everything. Realistically, Apple does not usually lose on price, they lose on lack of variety, making it harder to find exactly what you want and usually resulting in your purchasing more than you need, to get the features you do need. This is a subtly different problem.
Re:8 cores ought to be enough for anyone (Score:5, Funny)
But seriously, unless you're gonna keep all 8 cores cooking a lot, or you do a lot of seriously high-end video work or something else where speed above all else matters, they'll be a waste.
OK...
I'm sorry, but is Apple running a "Buy an 8-Core Mac for your grandma" campaign or something?
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Re:DAMNIT! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I was wating for this machine! (Score:4, Informative)
Every machine running this generation of Xeon processors needs the type of RAM Apple uses and calling it "slow" does not really help your credibility here.
Umm, you can't? Since when? You've been able to swap the video cards in Apple's towers for about 8-10 years now.
Apple uses standard video cards, but as usual are a little ahead of the curve. Not all cards support EFI yet, since Vista is the first version of Windows to support it on the desktop properly. You're probably one of those people who complained about Apple's nonstandard choice of using USB for keyboards and mice instead of PS/2. Now many years later the bottom end of the PC market is finally catching up but my 8 year old mac is still working fine because they included USB and firewire instead of what was "standard" at the time.
Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss.
Re:great for apple folks (Score:5, Informative)
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Just be aware that adding a second 2.66ghz Quad-core chip (not even the 3.0ghz that Apple is selling) to your Precision 690 adds $1600 to the price. So a base 2.66ghz 8-core workstation from Dell is $5000. I'm sure you can get the slower Dell closer to the Apple price if you dump the RAM below 1GB, ditch the OS, and so on.