New Mac Pros - 12 cores

[dum]

Configure your Mac Pro with 4, 6, 8, or 12 cores of processing power and boost performance up to 1.5x

A 1.5x performance boost...
That's hardly worth getting a 2nd mortgage out on your daughter's kidneys now is it ?

Never the less, it should mean more used octo-cores on the 2nd-hand market...

So.. regarding this development could a more informed macfag than myself please consolidate the opinions of pimply-arsed dweebs across the blogosphere and puke it up here in the thread for me to consume at my own pace ?

Cheers bud.

[martinkellogs]

edited

[dum]

a more informed macfag

will you accept a generic fag instead?

Sorry No... the mac variety take it deeper and harder.

[martinkellogs]

edited

[polyslax]

I don't read tech blogs but I think on the raw power front the previous gen of MP obviously remains a very viable platform. I'd say if you can score one you'd be getting a good deal. As an octo owner it's so far working out pretty much as I had hoped... plenty of future left.

[dum]

I think on the raw power front the previous gen of MP obviously remains a very viable platform. I'd say if you can score one you'd be getting a good deal. As an octo owner it's so far working out pretty much as I had hoped... plenty of future left.

Kool, that's what I figure. I'm power-saving from september-december when I'll be scoping out the used market for an octocore.

After my recent out-of-warranty authorised-apple-repair-centre experience (which was an expensive pain in the hole) I came to two conclusions on how to best maintain customer satisfaction when spending money on apple computers:

Buy new, 3 yr warranty, sell after 2 yrs.
or
Buy used, DIY repairs.

I'mma give option two a whirl.


BUT I DIGRESS! ... let's hype up the 12 cores here
(best way to genereate octo sales!)

[djsynchro]

It just works.

[djsynchro]

[martinkellogs]

edited

[timothyallan]

From my trawling of GS and other internets, I've gathered that the 3.33ghz-6 core single currently performs better than the 2.9ghz 12 core in Logic simply because currently Mhz is king. Once systems start taking advantage of > 8 cores, that will reverse and the 12 core shall be the king.

See the benchmarks below for the awesomeness:



There's also a ram limit depending if you get the single or dual chip motherboard, can't remember what it is exactly though.

[muthafunka]

Buy new, 3 yr warranty, sell after 2 yrs.

Been doing exactly this for years, a year remaining of warranty pretty much pays for the Appleacare in resale value.
Only qualm I may have right now is I have the last 15" MBP with a PCI slot for my UAD Solo, damned if I'm getting a 17" just to use the card.

[ekwipt]

From my trawling of GS and other internets, I've gathered that the 3.33ghz-6 core single currently performs better than the 2.9ghz 12 core in Logic simply because currently Mhz is king. Once systems start taking advantage of > 8 cores, that will reverse and the 12 core shall be the king.

See the benchmarks below for the awesomeness:



There's also a ram limit depending if you get the single or dual chip motherboard, can't remember what it is exactly though.

DAWs offload there tracks on each core, so track 1-8 will go on Core 1-8, 9-16 to back to Core 1-8 and so on.

Have a look at some of the Logic tests on Gearslutz, Cores are definitely King.

Another thing to take into account is the amount of RAM, with more DAWs becoming 64bit (hurry up Abes) More samples can be streamed directly to RAM.

I think it's a bit of a balancing act between Cores and Mhz.

I'd rather have a 6 Core Nehalem 3.33 than most of the 8 Cores, but wouldn't be selling an a8Core in hurry for one?

I think the Geekbench Graph you linked to would pretty much be the order i'd buy the MacPros in.

RE the Ram limit, it more bandwidth intensive to run the current MAcPros in either 3 slot or 6 slot configs, when you fill the other slot bandwidth drops around 20%

[leedsquietman]

The only thing about 64 bit is the total crapshoot that 3rd party plugins become, plus you need more memory to run 64 bit in the first place, so a min 6GB ram is recommended on 64 bit o/s and 64 bit DAW. Some plugins such as TC Powercore and Waves don't even run in 64 bit yet period.

A lot of people with 64 bit o/s are therefore still running the 32 bit version of the DAW to prevent these incompatibilities at present, which limits RAM use to 3.6GB but gives stable performance.

[plantaginate]

DAWs offload there tracks on each core, so track 1-8 will go on Core 1-8, 9-16 to back to Core 1-8 and so on.

is this true?
has any daw developers come out and state point blank this is how it works?
or is it a internet forum folk lore kind of thing?
just strikes me as being too simple, too compartmentalized to be true

[timothyallan]

It is. Bussing, grouping etc foils all that, plug Logic 9 currently has issues with many cores. GS has a few lengthy threads on it.