If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
Or will the G5 Powerbook steal the limelight and go first..?
(With the 970MP ramping discreetly for a March intro'?)
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
San Francisco looks too early to me.
Quote:
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
I am afraid it is not a matter of who can get there first. Things may be much more complicated. Actually, I expect Apple following a more conservative approach and trying to not rush the thing. Appropriate software support, cost issues and demand may delay more than we think the introduction of a dual core G5.
If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
Lemon,
Let the time of the 970 introduction be a guideline. Apple received "alpha" chip samples of the 970 around the late July (IIRC) before the year of the G5 intro at WWDC.
Quote:
Or will the G5 Powerbook steal the limelight and go first..?
(With the 970MP ramping discreetly for a March intro'?)
Maybe a stall tactic! . . . with intro of 970MP at WWDC?
Quote:
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
Lemon Bon Bon
Me being an optimist, I think late second quarter, but I can't say. I too hope that IBM can get to 970MP quicker.
Let the time of the 970 introduction be a guideline. Apple received "alpha" chip samples of the 970 around the late July (IIRC) before the year of the G5 intro at WWDC.
On the other hand that was for an all-new architecture. The 970MP will just drop into the existing machines.
On the other hand that was for an all-new architecture. The 970MP will just drop into the existing machines.
Programmer's playing mood music...be still my beating heart.
(This Antares is my purchase...surely, after years of waiting for a Mac tower, this one will be THE ONE!?)
I'm hoping, praying that 'Antares' will squeak the Mac upto 3 gig. Or will it 'merely' be two 2.5s on a chip? (ie for heat reasons..? In much the same way I'll doubt we'll see Intel's 3.6 going dual core at that speed grade...) But...PPC chips are much smaller and IBM will hopefully crack some of the problems that delayed the ramping of the 970 revB. So who knows.
Although, who could argue with a dual 'dual core' 970fx?
A 60% speed up would be much better than the 20% we'd get by going to 3 gig anyhow?
It's not just 'dual core' that is exciting. But what about Hypertransport 2? The prospect of faster graphics cards...with possibly 512 megs of ram on board? PCI Express surely will be in the dual core revision.
Will the Powermacs be bumped in the meantime? Morpheus over at Thinksecret's boards thinks a 2.7 'Ataire' bump is coming.
So we could see a 2 gig, 2.5 and 2.7 gig PowerMac line-up?
But if 2.5 yields are that bad...why not go to the next big thing like Intel themselves are doing. 4 gig isn't going to get them a whole boat load of performance. Similarly, in the scheme of things, a 2.7 won't be noticeably faster than a 2.5, will it?
If true, this could be ominous. At the rate Apple currently updates the PowerMac we may not see dual core until late 2005 if a 2.7 rev ships early 05. Or at all if the bump is delayed like the Rev B clearly, CLEARLY was.
Surely a better move will be to aggressively go to dual core. Morpheus seems to think the MP plans are as solid as a 'diamond'. Good. I'd like a timetable to match. ie 'WHEN?'
(This Antares is my purchase...surely, after years of waiting for a Mac tower, this one will be THE ONE!?)
O Lemon Man....
I remember that you the last two years drooled over the new G5 and when it finally came out you said you would buy the Rev B. And now: Still not done it? Waiting for Antares?
I remember that you the last two years drooled over the new G5 and when it finally came out you said you would buy the Rev B. And now: Still not done it? Waiting for Antares?
I would rather see Apple ship a 2x2 machine at less than nose-bleed speeds, just to avoid the thermal issues and improve longevity. The extra few percentage of clock rate doesn't buy you that much after all, the big win is going multi-threaded.
Yeah, I would rather see increase in throughput than more mhz crap. A crossbar backplane with up to 4 x FCAL disk and dual core chips. All this by Xmas (dunno which year tho) .
Well, I nearly bought the dual 2 gigger...but it took so long to deliver them that I thought I may as well wait for the infamous 'January update' oops, March, OOOOPS, JUNE?!? which never came. And when it did turn up, it didn't even ship the apologetic 2.5 speeds until August 2004! And they're still trickling through in late October..!
I would have definitely have bought the dual 3 gigger.
It's a similar situation, the 2.5 has been limited in quantity.
It hasn't got PCI Express and yields on the Nvidia card are low. The 30 inch LCD that I want and the graphics card are barely shipping.
It's nearly November. May as well wait until the next big thing hits aka Dual Core. Hopefully it will breach the 3 gig mark.
970GX MP?
GX for Powerbook?
MP for PowerMac?
Well, they'll have to do something to get the G5 into a Powerbook and laptops are massive at the moment. With Dothan kicking spades out of desktops and Mac laptops alike surley it is a good idea to invest in the fasionable uptake of laptops to soak up the iPod PC crowd.
Things are going well for Apple at the moment. Even better than the iMac renaissance of the late 90s...when Moto's cpu progress torpedoed attempts at real growth.
This time? Apple have stunning tower, desktop and laptop and iPod and software and OS offerings. And a good cpu in the G5 which is holding its own, especially in dual formations and with huge bandwidth!
I'd like to see Apple play the same aggression with cpu in the PowerMac/Book and desktops as they are with iPod.
Sure, they can't run IBM for them. But IBM is a world class CPU partner.
2005 should be an exciting year after the luke warm 2004 in terms of cpu progress (but above the disastrous moto' years...let's be fair here...)
I'm hoping for the real heritage of Power and PowerPC to filter down to Mac offerings early to mid-2005.
So, the cpu while good? Not excellent, the initial excitement and clamour has not been built upon...and the promise not delivered...yet.
I may seem like a perenial 'gonna buy if' but I know what I want Apple to offer and if they deliver at the right time compared to Wintel offerings...then I'll buy.
Apple didn't deliver their 2 gig machines on time. Jobs didn't deliver on his 3 gig promise. I didn't deliver with my wallet. Fair game. It's fun watching all the other stuff Apple are doing in the meantime from the Production Suite to Tiger to iMac G5 to the remarkably energetic iPod line. I'll raise a glass to Apple on their $100 million profit.
The 970MP is from what I understand a dual core 970GX with 1 MB L2 cache for each core. Small difference but relevant.
GX, will that keep the heat down in the MP ie sticking in two low power cores.
Keep the high grades for the PowerTower. eg 2-3 gig.
1.4-1.8 gig for the PowerBooker?
So, it's not an 'FX' but a modified chip in light of the power/heat difficulties at 0.09.
It's a tweaker 970 fx design to address thermal issues?
Hopefully it will be easier to get those speed grades out and ramp to slightly higher speeds. I doubt we'll see 4 gig PPCs any time soon in light of Intel's difficulties.
But a 2.8-3.2 gig 970GXMP? ('GXMP'...sounds messy...)
Heh, guess I have something in common with IBM ... I under-estimate things in case of problems.
I don't blame Lemon for waiting though. I too am waiting, but for a few other enhancements to come along.
Me too. Of course my current Mac is only 3 years old (dual 1 GHz G4) and I typically wait for a solid 6x performance increase before upgrading. 2.5 GHz x 2 SMT cores ought to do just fine.
I read these postings, and I can get into the prediction game, too. But I just received my 30" ACD coupled with a dual G5 2.5Mhz with the Nvidia 6800 card, and well, this machine is so fast, I have to wonder who really needs that kind of speed? Unless you are doing weather modeling or analyzing nuclear explosions, do you really need more?
Tonight I worked on my Halloween costume, editing an 80MB file in Photoshop to output to a large format HP DesignJet, and I never needed to wait for the computer. Not once. I never see the color wheel.
I can open iPhoto (Apple's worst app, but I still use it), have over a hundred photos on the screen at once (remember, this is on the 30" ACD), then move the slider to resize all the photos at once. No problem. No waiting.
At this point, if you are waiting for the next generation Mac, you aren't likely to actually ever purchase a machine. So, while you can enjoy speculating, you lose some credibility saying that you are going to wait.
Me too. Of course my current Mac is only 3 years old (dual 1 GHz G4) and I typically wait for a solid 6x performance increase before upgrading. 2.5 GHz x 2 SMT cores ought to do just fine.
Chances are we upgrade our powermacs at the same time again.
I'm holding out for something at preferably faster than the current dual 2.5 Ghz, that'll offer at least 4x the performance of my two year old PowerMac. With the slowdown of processor advancement it should last at least three or four years in time before getting too slow. Then it can last another year. So for a machine that I hope to last a half decade, I expect it to have all the functions I need and some more for expansion. Hopefully in the fashion of PCIe slots, and extra hard drive bays.
I read these postings, and I can get into the prediction game, too. But I just received my 30" ACD coupled with a dual G5 2.5Mhz with the Nvidia 6800 card, and well, this machine is so fast, I have to wonder who really needs that kind of speed? Unless you are doing weather modeling or analyzing nuclear explosions, do you really need more?
Heh. Look at my user name and tell me that again with a straight face. Not only that, but give me a bit of time and I'll make your machine whimper and plead for mercy. I agree that many of the existing apps in general use don't require this level of horsepower, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a very large (infinite?) number of potential software packages that do things that you'd really like to do but require far far greater computing power.
This isn't even about wild new kinds of software -- any game player will tell you his machine isn't fast enough for next year's games.
My specific reasons for wanting the next Mac are to work with a highly-SMP machine that has huge vector processing and 64-bit addressing capabilities. The current 2 - 2.5 GHz clock rate is fine, but I want 4+ hardware threads. 8 would be best: 2 chips w/ 2 cores w/ 2 HW threads each. At 2.5 GHz such a PowerPC's peak theoretical floating point performance rate should be about 200 GFlops, plus a graphics card which is also approaching 1 TFlops. I think Apple has the best chance of getting us this level of performance on the desktop in the next 1-3 years, in a usable fashion.
My specific reasons for wanting the next Mac are to work with a highly-SMP machine that has huge vector processing and 64-bit addressing capabilities. The current 2 - 2.5 GHz clock rate is fine, but I want 4+ hardware threads. 8 would be best: 2 chips w/ 2 cores w/ 2 HW threads each. At 2.5 GHz such a PowerPC's peak theoretical floating point performance rate should be about 200 GFlops, plus a graphics card which is also approaching 1 TFlops. I think Apple has the best chance of getting us this level of performance on the desktop in the next 1-3 years, in a usable fashion.
From which hat do you pull that 200 GFlops figure? 2.5 GHz * 2 chips * 2 cores * 2 HW threads * 4 FLOPS (FMAC) + 2.5 GHz * 2 chips * 2 cores * 2 HW threads * 4 FLOPS (Altivec)?
Edit 2: I'm not sure I get this. With 2 HW threads, you don't get twice the peak performance? The FPUs themselves won't be able to push through twice as much work, do they?
I think we should begin to look beyond SMP. Imagine a machine with a 2.5GHz dual-core CPU, plus a far lower-clock rate CPU like a 8-, 16- or even 32-core CPU running at 1GHz or even at 800 MHz.
Of course the operating system would know the difference between the two fast cores and the many slow cores. The OS kernel and the main thread of the foreground application would always be scheduled only on the fast CPU. A multi-threaded application will be able to mark threads as "run_anywhere".
Applications that can make very good use of multithreading (renderers) without running into lock problems will be able to make use of the full 32x1GHz that the high-end machine offers. Regular, foreground apps like Mail or Safari would not need this and run on the strong processors when they're in the foreground, or on the weak processors when they're in the background.
The lineup would be differentiated by the number of slow processors (4-32) and the number of fast cores (1-4) rather than by the raw power of those processors.
Comments
Originally posted by MarcUK
We now know that Intels fastest chips at the end of 2005 will be dual core 3.2ghz 64bit.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if that was true for IBM as well.
If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
Or will the G5 Powerbook steal the limelight and go first..?
(With the 970MP ramping discreetly for a March intro'?)
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
Lemon Bon Bon
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
San Francisco looks too early to me.
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
I am afraid it is not a matter of who can get there first. Things may be much more complicated. Actually, I expect Apple following a more conservative approach and trying to not rush the thing. Appropriate software support, cost issues and demand may delay more than we think the introduction of a dual core G5.
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
Hmmm.
If Apple received 970MPs in August then how long from Alpha chip samples to actual production. 2005 has been muted. ie early 2005...Jan' maybe for the production to begin. Can Apple announce then? At San Fran'?
Lemon,
Let the time of the 970 introduction be a guideline. Apple received "alpha" chip samples of the 970 around the late July (IIRC) before the year of the G5 intro at WWDC.
Or will the G5 Powerbook steal the limelight and go first..?
(With the 970MP ramping discreetly for a March intro'?)
Maybe a stall tactic! . . . with intro of 970MP at WWDC?
Intel, having 'taped out' a dual core...the links suggest dual core Pentiums a year from now? Seems that they'll be there with AMD. So is dual core a late 2005 item?
I'd hope a dual core specialist like IBM can get there quicker?
Lemon Bon Bon
Me being an optimist, I think late second quarter, but I can't say. I too hope that IBM can get to 970MP quicker.
Originally posted by MacJedai
Lemon,
Let the time of the 970 introduction be a guideline. Apple received "alpha" chip samples of the 970 around the late July (IIRC) before the year of the G5 intro at WWDC.
On the other hand that was for an all-new architecture. The 970MP will just drop into the existing machines.
On the other hand that was for an all-new architecture. The 970MP will just drop into the existing machines.
Programmer's playing mood music...be still my beating heart.
(This Antares is my purchase...surely, after years of waiting for a Mac tower, this one will be THE ONE!?)
I'm hoping, praying that 'Antares' will squeak the Mac upto 3 gig. Or will it 'merely' be two 2.5s on a chip? (ie for heat reasons..? In much the same way I'll doubt we'll see Intel's 3.6 going dual core at that speed grade...) But...PPC chips are much smaller and IBM will hopefully crack some of the problems that delayed the ramping of the 970 revB. So who knows.
Although, who could argue with a dual 'dual core' 970fx?
A 60% speed up would be much better than the 20% we'd get by going to 3 gig anyhow?
It's not just 'dual core' that is exciting. But what about Hypertransport 2? The prospect of faster graphics cards...with possibly 512 megs of ram on board? PCI Express surely will be in the dual core revision.
Will the Powermacs be bumped in the meantime? Morpheus over at Thinksecret's boards thinks a 2.7 'Ataire' bump is coming.
So we could see a 2 gig, 2.5 and 2.7 gig PowerMac line-up?
But if 2.5 yields are that bad...why not go to the next big thing like Intel themselves are doing. 4 gig isn't going to get them a whole boat load of performance. Similarly, in the scheme of things, a 2.7 won't be noticeably faster than a 2.5, will it?
If true, this could be ominous. At the rate Apple currently updates the PowerMac we may not see dual core until late 2005 if a 2.7 rev ships early 05. Or at all if the bump is delayed like the Rev B clearly, CLEARLY was.
Surely a better move will be to aggressively go to dual core. Morpheus seems to think the MP plans are as solid as a 'diamond'. Good. I'd like a timetable to match. ie 'WHEN?'
Lemon Bon Bon
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
(This Antares is my purchase...surely, after years of waiting for a Mac tower, this one will be THE ONE!?)
O Lemon Man....
I remember that you the last two years drooled over the new G5 and when it finally came out you said you would buy the Rev B. And now: Still not done it? Waiting for Antares?
Originally posted by Sophie_
O Lemon Man....
I remember that you the last two years drooled over the new G5 and when it finally came out you said you would buy the Rev B. And now: Still not done it? Waiting for Antares?
Don't let him read this: http://www.macosrumors.com/102504A.php
....or he will be waiting for a full Power 5.
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
Although, who could argue with a dual 'dual core' 970fx?
The 970MP is from what I understand a dual core 970GX with 1 MB L2 cache for each core. Small difference but relevant.
edit: fixed poor word selection (least -> less)
Dobby.
O Lemon Man....
Well, I nearly bought the dual 2 gigger...but it took so long to deliver them that I thought I may as well wait for the infamous 'January update' oops, March, OOOOPS, JUNE?!? which never came. And when it did turn up, it didn't even ship the apologetic 2.5 speeds until August 2004! And they're still trickling through in late October..!
I would have definitely have bought the dual 3 gigger.
It's a similar situation, the 2.5 has been limited in quantity.
It hasn't got PCI Express and yields on the Nvidia card are low. The 30 inch LCD that I want and the graphics card are barely shipping.
It's nearly November. May as well wait until the next big thing hits aka Dual Core. Hopefully it will breach the 3 gig mark.
970GX MP?
GX for Powerbook?
MP for PowerMac?
Well, they'll have to do something to get the G5 into a Powerbook and laptops are massive at the moment. With Dothan kicking spades out of desktops and Mac laptops alike surley it is a good idea to invest in the fasionable uptake of laptops to soak up the iPod PC crowd.
Things are going well for Apple at the moment. Even better than the iMac renaissance of the late 90s...when Moto's cpu progress torpedoed attempts at real growth.
This time? Apple have stunning tower, desktop and laptop and iPod and software and OS offerings. And a good cpu in the G5 which is holding its own, especially in dual formations and with huge bandwidth!
I'd like to see Apple play the same aggression with cpu in the PowerMac/Book and desktops as they are with iPod.
Sure, they can't run IBM for them. But IBM is a world class CPU partner.
2005 should be an exciting year after the luke warm 2004 in terms of cpu progress (but above the disastrous moto' years...let's be fair here...)
I'm hoping for the real heritage of Power and PowerPC to filter down to Mac offerings early to mid-2005.
So, the cpu while good? Not excellent, the initial excitement and clamour has not been built upon...and the promise not delivered...yet.
I may seem like a perenial 'gonna buy if' but I know what I want Apple to offer and if they deliver at the right time compared to Wintel offerings...then I'll buy.
Apple didn't deliver their 2 gig machines on time. Jobs didn't deliver on his 3 gig promise. I didn't deliver with my wallet. Fair game. It's fun watching all the other stuff Apple are doing in the meantime from the Production Suite to Tiger to iMac G5 to the remarkably energetic iPod line. I'll raise a glass to Apple on their $100 million profit.
Lemon Bon Bon
The 970MP is from what I understand a dual core 970GX with 1 MB L2 cache for each core. Small difference but relevant.
GX, will that keep the heat down in the MP ie sticking in two low power cores.
Keep the high grades for the PowerTower. eg 2-3 gig.
1.4-1.8 gig for the PowerBooker?
So, it's not an 'FX' but a modified chip in light of the power/heat difficulties at 0.09.
It's a tweaker 970 fx design to address thermal issues?
Hopefully it will be easier to get those speed grades out and ramp to slightly higher speeds. I doubt we'll see 4 gig PPCs any time soon in light of Intel's difficulties.
But a 2.8-3.2 gig 970GXMP? ('GXMP'...sounds messy...)
Lemon Bon Bon
Originally posted by Programmer
On the other hand that was for an all-new architecture. The 970MP will just drop into the existing machines.
Heh, guess I have something in common with IBM ... I under-estimate things in case of problems.
I don't blame Lemon for waiting though. I too am waiting, but for a few other enhancements to come along.
Originally posted by MacJedai
Heh, guess I have something in common with IBM ... I under-estimate things in case of problems.
I don't blame Lemon for waiting though. I too am waiting, but for a few other enhancements to come along.
Me too. Of course my current Mac is only 3 years old (dual 1 GHz G4) and I typically wait for a solid 6x performance increase before upgrading. 2.5 GHz x 2 SMT cores ought to do just fine.
Tonight I worked on my Halloween costume, editing an 80MB file in Photoshop to output to a large format HP DesignJet, and I never needed to wait for the computer. Not once. I never see the color wheel.
I can open iPhoto (Apple's worst app, but I still use it), have over a hundred photos on the screen at once (remember, this is on the 30" ACD), then move the slider to resize all the photos at once. No problem. No waiting.
At this point, if you are waiting for the next generation Mac, you aren't likely to actually ever purchase a machine. So, while you can enjoy speculating, you lose some credibility saying that you are going to wait.
Woodman
Originally posted by Programmer
Me too. Of course my current Mac is only 3 years old (dual 1 GHz G4) and I typically wait for a solid 6x performance increase before upgrading. 2.5 GHz x 2 SMT cores ought to do just fine.
Chances are we upgrade our powermacs at the same time again.
I'm holding out for something at preferably faster than the current dual 2.5 Ghz, that'll offer at least 4x the performance of my two year old PowerMac. With the slowdown of processor advancement it should last at least three or four years in time before getting too slow. Then it can last another year. So for a machine that I hope to last a half decade, I expect it to have all the functions I need and some more for expansion. Hopefully in the fashion of PCIe slots, and extra hard drive bays.
Originally posted by The Woodman
I read these postings, and I can get into the prediction game, too. But I just received my 30" ACD coupled with a dual G5 2.5Mhz with the Nvidia 6800 card, and well, this machine is so fast, I have to wonder who really needs that kind of speed? Unless you are doing weather modeling or analyzing nuclear explosions, do you really need more?
Heh. Look at my user name and tell me that again with a straight face. Not only that, but give me a bit of time and I'll make your machine whimper and plead for mercy. I agree that many of the existing apps in general use don't require this level of horsepower, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a very large (infinite?) number of potential software packages that do things that you'd really like to do but require far far greater computing power.
This isn't even about wild new kinds of software -- any game player will tell you his machine isn't fast enough for next year's games.
My specific reasons for wanting the next Mac are to work with a highly-SMP machine that has huge vector processing and 64-bit addressing capabilities. The current 2 - 2.5 GHz clock rate is fine, but I want 4+ hardware threads. 8 would be best: 2 chips w/ 2 cores w/ 2 HW threads each. At 2.5 GHz such a PowerPC's peak theoretical floating point performance rate should be about 200 GFlops, plus a graphics card which is also approaching 1 TFlops. I think Apple has the best chance of getting us this level of performance on the desktop in the next 1-3 years, in a usable fashion.
Originally posted by Programmer
My specific reasons for wanting the next Mac are to work with a highly-SMP machine that has huge vector processing and 64-bit addressing capabilities. The current 2 - 2.5 GHz clock rate is fine, but I want 4+ hardware threads. 8 would be best: 2 chips w/ 2 cores w/ 2 HW threads each. At 2.5 GHz such a PowerPC's peak theoretical floating point performance rate should be about 200 GFlops, plus a graphics card which is also approaching 1 TFlops. I think Apple has the best chance of getting us this level of performance on the desktop in the next 1-3 years, in a usable fashion.
From which hat do you pull that 200 GFlops figure? 2.5 GHz * 2 chips * 2 cores * 2 HW threads * 4 FLOPS (FMAC) + 2.5 GHz * 2 chips * 2 cores * 2 HW threads * 4 FLOPS (Altivec)?
Edit 2: I'm not sure I get this. With 2 HW threads, you don't get twice the peak performance? The FPUs themselves won't be able to push through twice as much work, do they?
Of course the operating system would know the difference between the two fast cores and the many slow cores. The OS kernel and the main thread of the foreground application would always be scheduled only on the fast CPU. A multi-threaded application will be able to mark threads as "run_anywhere".
Applications that can make very good use of multithreading (renderers) without running into lock problems will be able to make use of the full 32x1GHz that the high-end machine offers. Regular, foreground apps like Mail or Safari would not need this and run on the strong processors when they're in the foreground, or on the weak processors when they're in the background.
The lineup would be differentiated by the number of slow processors (4-32) and the number of fast cores (1-4) rather than by the raw power of those processors.