There will be a Xeon-branded version of this. Several Xeon versions, actually, for 1, 2, and 4+ socket systems. They all use the same silicon dies, just with different parts enabled/disabled. They will range in price from "Very Expensive" to "Holy Sh*t"
There will be a Xeon-branded version of this. Several Xeon versions, actually, for 1, 2, and 4+ socket systems. They all use the same silicon dies, just with different parts enabled/disabled. They will range in price from "Very Expensive" to "Holy Sh*t"
The MP Xeon uses a different chip from the others.
Anyone who wonders why you need more than 8 cores has never worked with "real" HD footage in a large project in Final Cut. If there is a lot of rendering to be done... even 8 cores can takes hours to render minutes of footage.
It depends on the architecture. for sure the original Quad cores wouldn't scale well to 8 or 16 cores on a chip simply because they used a shared cache scheme. The Nehalem architecture was a big improvement in cache design for the CPUs and should scale much better. The memory system also increased in speed a huge amount which will help scaling.
for memory intensive things, the current bottleneck is the memory system. This is exactly why apple won't ever put a core i5 in the mac pro (2 memory controllers vs 3).
it's also why their current motherboards are moronic - the ram chips should be installed in multiples of 3.
One final note to having lots of cores: Snow leopard. They improved the threading at the OS level. This will help with scaling. Other than that, lots of things haven't scaled well because they simply aren't written for an MP environment (someone pointed out illustrator). More and more code is being designed to utilize multiple cores and improvements remain.
The server version will become available March 16 and will be named Xeon X5680- 3.33GHz/3.6GHz Turbo, 12 threads per processor, 12MB L3 cache, and so on. Source: http://www.crn.com/white-box/222001806
Quote:
In addition to the Xeon X5680, the March 16 release list includes five more six-core chips, all with 12 threads and 12MB of cache -- the Xeon X5670 (2.93GHz, 95W), X5660 (2.80GHz, 95W), X5650 (2.66GHz, 95W), L5640 (2.26GHz, 60W) and W3680 (3.33GHz, 130W).
That last one, the W3680, is for single-socket "workstations" and has only one QPI link enabled.
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Finally, a reason to buy a Mac Pro instead of an iMac i7.
There's lots of other ones which is why Apple keeps jacking up the price.
There will be a Xeon-branded version of this. Several Xeon versions, actually, for 1, 2, and 4+ socket systems. They all use the same silicon dies, just with different parts enabled/disabled. They will range in price from "Very Expensive" to "Holy Sh*t"
The MP Xeon uses a different chip from the others.
what can run CRYSIS by the way ??
My Early 2008 MBP. On Medium-high settings.
I can't wait to run Adobe Illustrator on one of these...
and watch it peg 1 CPU, while 11 sit idle.
Anyone who wonders why you need more than 8 cores has never worked with "real" HD footage in a large project in Final Cut. If there is a lot of rendering to be done... even 8 cores can takes hours to render minutes of footage.
It depends on the architecture. for sure the original Quad cores wouldn't scale well to 8 or 16 cores on a chip simply because they used a shared cache scheme. The Nehalem architecture was a big improvement in cache design for the CPUs and should scale much better. The memory system also increased in speed a huge amount which will help scaling.
for memory intensive things, the current bottleneck is the memory system. This is exactly why apple won't ever put a core i5 in the mac pro (2 memory controllers vs 3).
it's also why their current motherboards are moronic - the ram chips should be installed in multiples of 3.
One final note to having lots of cores: Snow leopard. They improved the threading at the OS level. This will help with scaling. Other than that, lots of things haven't scaled well because they simply aren't written for an MP environment (someone pointed out illustrator). More and more code is being designed to utilize multiple cores and improvements remain.
what can run CRYSIS by the way ??
Runs quite nicely on my macbook pro duo 2.8 w/ 4 gig ram Win7. Can't crank up the eye candy ALL the way, but it look pretty dern good.
I can't wait to run Adobe Illustrator on one of these...
and watch it peg 1 CPU, while 11 sit idle.
haha - right?
In addition to the Xeon X5680, the March 16 release list includes five more six-core chips, all with 12 threads and 12MB of cache -- the Xeon X5670 (2.93GHz, 95W), X5660 (2.80GHz, 95W), X5650 (2.66GHz, 95W), L5640 (2.26GHz, 60W) and W3680 (3.33GHz, 130W).
That last one, the W3680, is for single-socket "workstations" and has only one QPI link enabled.