Television thickness is a whole different matter than computer display thickness. People don't mount their computer displays on the wall for obvious reasons. A large number of people hang their TVs on the wall. That makes thickness and weight serious considerations.
Plasma has been at a serious disadvantage up until recently on the whole resolution thing. Uninformed consumers always believe more is better so LCDs with horizontal resolutions of 1366 or 1920 sold far better than plasmas offering only 840. Plasmas also consume vast amounts of electricity.
To be honest I haven't seen a DLP advertised in years. People buy what the retailers tell them to buy. If it's not in the weekly Best Buy flyer it doesn't exist.
I understand why people prefer light, thin displays over bulky CRTs, but things have gone too far. After all, the stand holding up the display is already several times deeper than the display itself so it's not like a thinner display actually saves any space.
Thin is also creeping into the shape of displays. 4:3 and 5:4 are gone in favor of "thinner" wide screens sporting 16:10 or 16:9 dimensions. This, of course, is inefficient for most content viewed on computer screens, but people don't seem to care about that. Don't get me started on the prevalence of TN displays with their bad, uneven color or super glossy displays that have to be cranked up to headache inducing brightness to hide the reflections.
It's all about fashion and form. Nobody seems to care about performance anymore.
Customers want what they want. Apple supplies what they think their main branch of customers want.
Your last sentence says it all, and exactly what I said.
It's all about fashion and form. Nobody seems to care about performance anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by melgross
Customers want what they want. Apple supplies what they think their main branch of customers want.
Your last sentence says it all, and exactly what I said.
I think that for a great many of apple's customers the difference in performance between the mobile chips and the desktop chips really doesn't come into play any longer. It's not such a vast gulf as it used to be. It's really only a concern for techheads and ppl inclined to go onto technology-oriented fora like this who want to squeeze out every smeg of processor power that they can. If this concerns you so much, an iMac is not for you, nor was it ever intended to be, I believe.
For what it is worth, working in video with 8 core mac pros and a couple of imac's in the office, for any non-pro or pro-sumer use I'd be more than happy with the performance of an iMac. (Heck, 3 years ago we even used to use G5 iMacs for broadcast motion graphics.)
Clarksfield has HyperTreading, which means it can do 8 thread compare to a Quad Core Core 2, which can only do 4. Under Certain Apps, such as DB, VideoEncoding, it can make HUGE improvement. ( Much more then 10- 15% as ealier post suggest ) Although most of the time we wont see much different. ( Although that greatly depends on how Grand Central Works out )
Clarksfield has Intergrated Northbridge. ( Memory Controller and PCI-Express ). Comparing Clarksfield's TDP ( Rumors to be 35W ) to Core 2 Duo TDP isn't fair.
So the overall TDP on Calpella platform should be lower then current Montevina.
Clarksfield should have Turbo Boost. As someone mentioned already. It was an listed features for Clarksfield in last IDF. Which should give it close to 2Ghz range under single threaded condition.
Clarksfield perform 10 - 25% faster then Core2 Duo Clock per Clock.
When you start taking these into account Qual Core Clarksfield doesn't look too bad at all.
Although the main questions is what chipset will Apple use. Nvidia doesn't have a license. Apple never like Intel Gfx much.
I believe, but dont hold me to this, that it has been shown in testing (I know that doesnt say much) that 4x 250MHz Cores is faster than 1x 1GHz core. Even without true multithread support. However this may not be the case in real life. However the key thing why I would choose Quad over Dual core. Check how many processes you have running currently. Im guessing 50+ which means the 2 cores have to switch 25 times and then run the process then switch back, plus any information carried on the bus, memory, cache etc. 4 cores 12-13 processes each, much less switching and therefore less time required, allowing for slower CPU speed (GHz) additionally you can shut cores down (as I understand) allowing for 2 cores to operate when the system is in idle etc. Saving power. Question now is, why did I buy a unibody mac now the quads are on there way?
I believe, but dont hold me to this, that it has been shown in testing (I know that doesnt say much) that 4x 250MHz Cores is faster than 1x 1GHz core. Even without true multithread support. However this may not be the case in real life. However the key thing why I would choose Quad over Dual core. Check how many processes you have running currently. Im guessing 50+ which means the 2 cores have to switch 25 times and then run the process then switch back, plus any information carried on the bus, memory, cache etc. 4 cores 12-13 processes each, much less switching and therefore less time required, allowing for slower CPU speed (GHz) additionally you can shut cores down (as I understand) allowing for 2 cores to operate when the system is in idle etc. Saving power. Question now is, why did I buy a unibody mac now the quads are on there way?
Look at it this way, Macworld and other testing sites have shown that a 3.06 GHz iMac can beat a mid line Mac Pro in Photoshop and some other programs. Where the Mac Pro beats it significantly, most iMac customers won't really care that much.
We'll see 4 core chips in the iMac, the Mini, and the laptop lines in the next half year to 9 months or so. It's going to happen.
But will the programs that Apple supplies to that market catch up? That's the real question, because now, most can't use more than 2 cores, and this is what people here must understand.
Mac OS X already does the optimization for multiple cores when there are several processes/tasks running simultaneously. Grand Central is supposed to bring concurrency within a single process. To take advantage of this the apps should be specifically coded to use it. There might be slight advantage for all apps due to the improvements in the underlying frameworks, but those will be limited, because the OS will take a conservative approach and process the data synchronously unless explicitly allowed to use concurrency. Otherwise it may break old apps. Unless Apple is ready to provide updates for all iLife, iWork and some of the pro apps real soon after the Snow Leopard release (very unlikely), those chips do not look an attractive option.
Look at it this way, Macworld and other testing sites have shown that a 3.06 GHz iMac can beat a mid line Mac Pro in Photoshop and some other programs. Where the Mac Pro beats it significantly, most iMac customers won't really care that much.
We'll see 4 core chips in the iMac, the Mini, and the laptop lines in the next half year to 9 months or so. It's going to happen.
But will the programs that Apple supplies to that market catch up? That's the real question, because now, most can't use more than 2 cores, and this is what people here must understand.
That tells us something.
What it should tell you is that Photoshop doesn't scale well. With GrandCentral they have no more excuses to scale and offload sub sets of execution blocks because Apple is managing that for you.
The only problem will arrive with Adobe applying a modular design to make sure it can take advantage of this while not compromising it's Windows side.
Applications native to OS X and no other platform do not have to concern themselves with this as pure Cocoa applications.
Pixelmator is one example that comes to mind. Stone Design Create and the rest of his apps that Andrew writes will leverage as much as possible--he always tries to be on the leading edge in Cocoa programming.
Apple moving it's Final Cut Studio seems to be one you are dying to see be updated and leveraging GC and OpenCL.
Clarksfield should have Turbo Boost. As someone mentioned already. It was an listed features for Clarksfield in last IDF. Which should give it close to 2Ghz range under single threaded condition.
Clarksfield perform 10 - 25% faster then Core2 Duo Clock per Clock.
.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not impressed with Clarksfield based on the information you've provided. It'll be interesting to see how it actually performs once it's released. It may give a slight performance advantage over current dual core core duos in some instances but its not a slam dunk victory.
The clock speeds are just too low. That will improve as the manufacturing process shrinks but until then...
What it should tell you is that Photoshop doesn't scale well. With GrandCentral they have no more excuses to scale and offload sub sets of execution blocks because Apple is managing that for you.
The only problem will arrive with Adobe applying a modular design to make sure it can take advantage of this while not compromising it's Windows side.
Applications native to OS X and no other platform do not have to concern themselves with this as pure Cocoa applications.
Pixelmator is one example that comes to mind. Stone Design Create and the rest of his apps that Andrew writes will leverage as much as possible--he always tries to be on the leading edge in Cocoa programming.
Apple moving it's Final Cut Studio seems to be one you are dying to see be updated and leveraging GC and OpenCL.
Let's hope they pull it off.
Photoshop does have some filters that are considered to be the ones that "pros" use the most that do use most, or all cores. But their push here won't be more optimal until CS5. This is a very big job. Adobe needed all of their resources to get it in XCode and Cocoa. The next step is optimization. Certainly Grand Central and Open CL will help there. But both of Apple's schemes require programming support in order to do more than the minimum.
I would certainly love to see FCS updated here. It's pretty good already, but it could likely have a major improvement. I certainly hope I don't die before they do so.
From what Adobe tells me, we could see improvements on the order of a couple of hundred percent in many areas, and in some, more.
Right now, opening and saving are a one core process, and so the fastest RAIDS are a waste of money. That is an area in which they are putting in a lot of work.
I think that for a great many of apple's customers the difference in performance between the mobile chips and the desktop chips really doesn't come into play any longer. It's not such a vast gulf as it used to be. It's really only a concern for techheads and ppl inclined to go onto technology-oriented fora like this who want to squeeze out every smeg of processor power that they can. If this concerns you so much, an iMac is not for you, nor was it ever intended to be, I believe.
For what it is worth, working in video with 8 core mac pros and a couple of imac's in the office, for any non-pro or pro-sumer use I'd be more than happy with the performance of an iMac. (Heck, 3 years ago we even used to use G5 iMacs for broadcast motion graphics.)
Mobile platforms are much more capable of high demand tasks now. I don't have the pleasure of using Macs at work, but there are laptops available that are perfectly capable of running 3D CAD packages and even computational fluid dynamics just fine. A colleague has a laptop with 4GB of memory and a 1 GB video card that outperforms the older (2-3 year) desktops. A laptop would not have been a good choice only a couple of years ago. Desktops have the room and cooling advantage, of course, but as pointed out laptops now have the quantity advantage to help reduce prices.
I'd love to know if anybody has any information or informed guesses about improvements when quadcore iMacs and Snow Leopard come out. As with the current state of software, it must be designed to take advantage of multiple processors. Will Grand Central truly handle the task of "handing out work" even if the software in question is not written this way? I see some discussion on Quadcore slower vs Dualcore faster. We must be talking about this type of situation. If the software is written to take advantage of multicores, as in some CFD programs, there is little doubt Quadcore is going to be faster, unless it is half the speed of the Dual Core.
Mobile platforms are much more capable of high demand tasks now. I don't have the pleasure of using Macs at work, but there are laptops available that are perfectly capable of running 3D CAD packages and even computational fluid dynamics just fine. A colleague has a laptop with 4GB of memory and a 1 GB video card that outperforms the older (2-3 year) desktops. A laptop would not have been a good choice only a couple of years ago. Desktops have the room and cooling advantage, of course, but as pointed out laptops now have the quantity advantage to help reduce prices.
I'd love to know if anybody has any information or informed guesses about improvements when quadcore iMacs and Snow Leopard come out. As with the current state of software, it must be designed to take advantage of multiple processors. Will Grand Central truly handle the task of "handing out work" even if the software in question is not written this way? I see some discussion on Quadcore slower vs Dualcore faster. We must be talking about this type of situation. If the software is written to take advantage of multicores, as in some CFD programs, there is little doubt Quadcore is going to be faster, unless it is half the speed of the Dual Core.
You're describing CAD/CFD/FEA as if they are designed to be parallel optimized. They currently have to evolve in this area just like Photoshop and all the rest. Besides, most of CAD primitives, CFD and FEA polygonal operations are done on the GPU via OpenGL.
Hyper-threading, the technique Intel uses to make 2 cores look like 4 works because most of the time your computer is processing a lot of little things that don't stress it much. Being able to juggle those tasks more efficiently results in improved performance.
There is an exception, however. If you are truly stressing the CPU it's theoretically possible for two intensive threads to be loaded onto the same physical core (two separate virtual cores) and therefore run at only half the speed.
How will OS X know in advance how much demand a given thread will place on the processor? I can't see how it can possibly guess correctly all the time. That means a real quad core processor will at times be significantly faster than a dual core Nehalem (4 virtual cores).
Then again, Mac users don't care about processor performance, GPU performance, internal storage capacity or how inaccurately their machine displays color and Apple doesn't care about me so I should go build a hackintosh and be done with it.
You're describing CAD/CFD/FEA as if they are designed to be parallel optimized. They currently have to evolve in this area just like Photoshop and all the rest. Besides, most of CAD primitives, CFD and FEA polygonal operations are done on the GPU via OpenGL.
There are analysis programs that use parallel processing quite well. On very large solutions, it is nearly linear with the number of processors. FLUENT is one of them. Yes, the visualization is done thru the GPU. I was using that as an example of how powerful laptops have become. This would have been considered a heavy duty workstation (4Gb mem, 1Gb GPU) only a few years ago.
Of course, these problems lend themselves well to splitting up the work
There are plenty of people that are attracted to the thinness of the iMac and would like to see it thinner/lose its chin. If you want desktop performance and aren't happy with the iMac why not get a Mac Pro?
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmurchison
My ideal iMac would be a thicker chassis with easy to access RAM and HDD bays. I'd like two 2.5" bays rather than one 3.5" bay.
Macbook Pro would do just fine with slower clocked Quad Core chips as the tradeoff is more power in a lower power envelope.
Crossing my fingers but I don't have much faith in Apple breaking their current pathological "thin is everything" mantra.
There are plenty of people that are attracted to the thinness of the iMac and would like to see it thinner/lose its chin. If you want desktop performance and aren't happy with the iMac why not get a Mac Pro?
Because it is way too expensive. I like the 24" iMac as it is, BTW. No chin is OK, not thicker. please!
If a particular software can use all of a core 2 duo processor now, why wouldn't it be able to use all of a core 2 quad? We've had core duo processors for years now and if you go into Activity Monitor you can see just about every software I can think of is multi-threaded. Take a handbrake encode for instance. That's like one process that definitely uses both cores to full advantage. Isn't OS X designed to be capable of inteligently handling multi-threaded apps? I remember this argument about the benefits of multi-core vs single going when Apple first moved to Intel.
I'm betting that the System will feel generally faster in a quad versus duo mac if the total Ghz is significantly greater. The 1.73 quad has 30% more total GHz than a 2.66 duo.
There are plenty of people that are attracted to the thinness of the iMac and would like to see it thinner/lose its chin. If you want desktop performance and aren't happy with the iMac why not get a Mac Pro?
Because that's form over function and as I type this looking at my 24" inch monitor it strikes me that I care not how thin it is (it's not hanging on a wall) what I care about is decent quality.
I don't give a damn about the chin and the iMac is and always has been a desktop computer. The whole reason why Apple chose to use laptop parts was because they could buy in bulk and save money back when they were a struggling company.
That was a long time ago. Today Apple is a much different company and it's time to realize that that a desktop computer needs to have desktop components and thus desktop performance.
I'll buy a Mac Pro when I need Mac Pro performance but right now the latter half of this year is going to bring Quad Core Nehalem performance as the mainstream desktop. The current iMac chassis cannot handle this and the current Macbook and Macbook Pro chassis cannot handle the Clarksfield chips coming without a redesign of their cooling capability.
This is form over function. At the end of the day I need to be productive....looking good comes in second if not third.
Because that's form over function and as I type this looking at my 24" inch monitor it strikes me that I care not how thin it is (it's not hanging on a wall) what I care about is decent quality.
I don't give a damn about the chin and the iMac is and always has been a desktop computer. The whole reason why Apple chose to use laptop parts was because they could buy in bulk and save money back when they were a struggling company.
That was a long time ago. Today Apple is a much different company and it's time to realize that that a desktop computer needs to have desktop components and thus desktop performance.
I'll buy a Mac Pro when I need Mac Pro performance but right now the latter half of this year is going to bring Quad Core Nehalem performance as the mainstream desktop. The current iMac chassis cannot handle this and the current Macbook and Macbook Pro chassis cannot handle the Clarksfield chips coming without a redesign of their cooling capability.
This is form over function. At the end of the day I need to be productive....looking good comes in second if not third.
Intel has new desktop CPUs designed for AIOs. I can't imagine that it was Dell's XPS One that pushed these low power options desktop options out of Intel's labs. This seems like it's something that Apple would have requested, like they did with the MBA's SFF C2D., though that one was already made and shelved from Intel.
I would bet money that the next iMac will use these low-power desktop C2Qs. They offer more performance and are cheaper than the notebook-grade C2Ds.
I'm betting that the System will feel generally faster in a quad versus duo mac if the total Ghz is significantly greater. The 1.73 quad has 30% more total GHz than a 2.66 duo.
It won't. A lot of applications are faster on a quad than a dual, but general system responsiveness won't be.
Comments
It wouldn't require only SL technologies (Grant Central) to compensate.
Lightroom, for example, has multi-core support built-in. Quad Cores would come in handy.
IIRC, this is true for Photoshop, too.
Unfortunately, not so much for Photoshop yet.
Television thickness is a whole different matter than computer display thickness. People don't mount their computer displays on the wall for obvious reasons. A large number of people hang their TVs on the wall. That makes thickness and weight serious considerations.
Plasma has been at a serious disadvantage up until recently on the whole resolution thing. Uninformed consumers always believe more is better so LCDs with horizontal resolutions of 1366 or 1920 sold far better than plasmas offering only 840. Plasmas also consume vast amounts of electricity.
To be honest I haven't seen a DLP advertised in years. People buy what the retailers tell them to buy. If it's not in the weekly Best Buy flyer it doesn't exist.
I understand why people prefer light, thin displays over bulky CRTs, but things have gone too far. After all, the stand holding up the display is already several times deeper than the display itself so it's not like a thinner display actually saves any space.
Thin is also creeping into the shape of displays. 4:3 and 5:4 are gone in favor of "thinner" wide screens sporting 16:10 or 16:9 dimensions. This, of course, is inefficient for most content viewed on computer screens, but people don't seem to care about that. Don't get me started on the prevalence of TN displays with their bad, uneven color or super glossy displays that have to be cranked up to headache inducing brightness to hide the reflections.
It's all about fashion and form. Nobody seems to care about performance anymore.
Customers want what they want. Apple supplies what they think their main branch of customers want.
Your last sentence says it all, and exactly what I said.
It's all about fashion and form. Nobody seems to care about performance anymore.
Customers want what they want. Apple supplies what they think their main branch of customers want.
Your last sentence says it all, and exactly what I said.
I think that for a great many of apple's customers the difference in performance between the mobile chips and the desktop chips really doesn't come into play any longer. It's not such a vast gulf as it used to be. It's really only a concern for techheads and ppl inclined to go onto technology-oriented fora like this who want to squeeze out every smeg of processor power that they can. If this concerns you so much, an iMac is not for you, nor was it ever intended to be, I believe.
For what it is worth, working in video with 8 core mac pros and a couple of imac's in the office, for any non-pro or pro-sumer use I'd be more than happy with the performance of an iMac. (Heck, 3 years ago we even used to use G5 iMacs for broadcast motion graphics.)
Clarksfield has HyperTreading, which means it can do 8 thread compare to a Quad Core Core 2, which can only do 4. Under Certain Apps, such as DB, VideoEncoding, it can make HUGE improvement. ( Much more then 10- 15% as ealier post suggest ) Although most of the time we wont see much different. ( Although that greatly depends on how Grand Central Works out )
Clarksfield has Intergrated Northbridge. ( Memory Controller and PCI-Express ). Comparing Clarksfield's TDP ( Rumors to be 35W ) to Core 2 Duo TDP isn't fair.
So the overall TDP on Calpella platform should be lower then current Montevina.
Clarksfield should have Turbo Boost. As someone mentioned already. It was an listed features for Clarksfield in last IDF. Which should give it close to 2Ghz range under single threaded condition.
Clarksfield perform 10 - 25% faster then Core2 Duo Clock per Clock.
When you start taking these into account Qual Core Clarksfield doesn't look too bad at all.
Although the main questions is what chipset will Apple use. Nvidia doesn't have a license. Apple never like Intel Gfx much.
I believe, but dont hold me to this, that it has been shown in testing (I know that doesnt say much) that 4x 250MHz Cores is faster than 1x 1GHz core. Even without true multithread support. However this may not be the case in real life. However the key thing why I would choose Quad over Dual core. Check how many processes you have running currently. Im guessing 50+ which means the 2 cores have to switch 25 times and then run the process then switch back, plus any information carried on the bus, memory, cache etc. 4 cores 12-13 processes each, much less switching and therefore less time required, allowing for slower CPU speed (GHz) additionally you can shut cores down (as I understand) allowing for 2 cores to operate when the system is in idle etc. Saving power. Question now is, why did I buy a unibody mac now the quads are on there way?
Look at it this way, Macworld and other testing sites have shown that a 3.06 GHz iMac can beat a mid line Mac Pro in Photoshop and some other programs. Where the Mac Pro beats it significantly, most iMac customers won't really care that much.
We'll see 4 core chips in the iMac, the Mini, and the laptop lines in the next half year to 9 months or so. It's going to happen.
But will the programs that Apple supplies to that market catch up? That's the real question, because now, most can't use more than 2 cores, and this is what people here must understand.
That tells us something.
Look at it this way, Macworld and other testing sites have shown that a 3.06 GHz iMac can beat a mid line Mac Pro in Photoshop and some other programs. Where the Mac Pro beats it significantly, most iMac customers won't really care that much.
We'll see 4 core chips in the iMac, the Mini, and the laptop lines in the next half year to 9 months or so. It's going to happen.
But will the programs that Apple supplies to that market catch up? That's the real question, because now, most can't use more than 2 cores, and this is what people here must understand.
That tells us something.
What it should tell you is that Photoshop doesn't scale well. With GrandCentral they have no more excuses to scale and offload sub sets of execution blocks because Apple is managing that for you.
The only problem will arrive with Adobe applying a modular design to make sure it can take advantage of this while not compromising it's Windows side.
Applications native to OS X and no other platform do not have to concern themselves with this as pure Cocoa applications.
Pixelmator is one example that comes to mind. Stone Design Create and the rest of his apps that Andrew writes will leverage as much as possible--he always tries to be on the leading edge in Cocoa programming.
Apple moving it's Final Cut Studio seems to be one you are dying to see be updated and leveraging GC and OpenCL.
Let's hope they pull it off.
...
Clarksfield should have Turbo Boost. As someone mentioned already. It was an listed features for Clarksfield in last IDF. Which should give it close to 2Ghz range under single threaded condition.
Clarksfield perform 10 - 25% faster then Core2 Duo Clock per Clock.
.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not impressed with Clarksfield based on the information you've provided. It'll be interesting to see how it actually performs once it's released. It may give a slight performance advantage over current dual core core duos in some instances but its not a slam dunk victory.
The clock speeds are just too low. That will improve as the manufacturing process shrinks but until then...
What it should tell you is that Photoshop doesn't scale well. With GrandCentral they have no more excuses to scale and offload sub sets of execution blocks because Apple is managing that for you.
The only problem will arrive with Adobe applying a modular design to make sure it can take advantage of this while not compromising it's Windows side.
Applications native to OS X and no other platform do not have to concern themselves with this as pure Cocoa applications.
Pixelmator is one example that comes to mind. Stone Design Create and the rest of his apps that Andrew writes will leverage as much as possible--he always tries to be on the leading edge in Cocoa programming.
Apple moving it's Final Cut Studio seems to be one you are dying to see be updated and leveraging GC and OpenCL.
Let's hope they pull it off.
Photoshop does have some filters that are considered to be the ones that "pros" use the most that do use most, or all cores. But their push here won't be more optimal until CS5. This is a very big job. Adobe needed all of their resources to get it in XCode and Cocoa. The next step is optimization. Certainly Grand Central and Open CL will help there. But both of Apple's schemes require programming support in order to do more than the minimum.
I would certainly love to see FCS updated here. It's pretty good already, but it could likely have a major improvement. I certainly hope I don't die before they do so.
From what Adobe tells me, we could see improvements on the order of a couple of hundred percent in many areas, and in some, more.
Right now, opening and saving are a one core process, and so the fastest RAIDS are a waste of money. That is an area in which they are putting in a lot of work.
I think that for a great many of apple's customers the difference in performance between the mobile chips and the desktop chips really doesn't come into play any longer. It's not such a vast gulf as it used to be. It's really only a concern for techheads and ppl inclined to go onto technology-oriented fora like this who want to squeeze out every smeg of processor power that they can. If this concerns you so much, an iMac is not for you, nor was it ever intended to be, I believe.
For what it is worth, working in video with 8 core mac pros and a couple of imac's in the office, for any non-pro or pro-sumer use I'd be more than happy with the performance of an iMac. (Heck, 3 years ago we even used to use G5 iMacs for broadcast motion graphics.)
Mobile platforms are much more capable of high demand tasks now. I don't have the pleasure of using Macs at work, but there are laptops available that are perfectly capable of running 3D CAD packages and even computational fluid dynamics just fine. A colleague has a laptop with 4GB of memory and a 1 GB video card that outperforms the older (2-3 year) desktops. A laptop would not have been a good choice only a couple of years ago. Desktops have the room and cooling advantage, of course, but as pointed out laptops now have the quantity advantage to help reduce prices.
I'd love to know if anybody has any information or informed guesses about improvements when quadcore iMacs and Snow Leopard come out. As with the current state of software, it must be designed to take advantage of multiple processors. Will Grand Central truly handle the task of "handing out work" even if the software in question is not written this way? I see some discussion on Quadcore slower vs Dualcore faster. We must be talking about this type of situation. If the software is written to take advantage of multicores, as in some CFD programs, there is little doubt Quadcore is going to be faster, unless it is half the speed of the Dual Core.
Mobile platforms are much more capable of high demand tasks now. I don't have the pleasure of using Macs at work, but there are laptops available that are perfectly capable of running 3D CAD packages and even computational fluid dynamics just fine. A colleague has a laptop with 4GB of memory and a 1 GB video card that outperforms the older (2-3 year) desktops. A laptop would not have been a good choice only a couple of years ago. Desktops have the room and cooling advantage, of course, but as pointed out laptops now have the quantity advantage to help reduce prices.
I'd love to know if anybody has any information or informed guesses about improvements when quadcore iMacs and Snow Leopard come out. As with the current state of software, it must be designed to take advantage of multiple processors. Will Grand Central truly handle the task of "handing out work" even if the software in question is not written this way? I see some discussion on Quadcore slower vs Dualcore faster. We must be talking about this type of situation. If the software is written to take advantage of multicores, as in some CFD programs, there is little doubt Quadcore is going to be faster, unless it is half the speed of the Dual Core.
You're describing CAD/CFD/FEA as if they are designed to be parallel optimized. They currently have to evolve in this area just like Photoshop and all the rest. Besides, most of CAD primitives, CFD and FEA polygonal operations are done on the GPU via OpenGL.
There is an exception, however. If you are truly stressing the CPU it's theoretically possible for two intensive threads to be loaded onto the same physical core (two separate virtual cores) and therefore run at only half the speed.
How will OS X know in advance how much demand a given thread will place on the processor? I can't see how it can possibly guess correctly all the time. That means a real quad core processor will at times be significantly faster than a dual core Nehalem (4 virtual cores).
Then again, Mac users don't care about processor performance, GPU performance, internal storage capacity or how inaccurately their machine displays color and Apple doesn't care about me so I should go build a hackintosh and be done with it.
You're describing CAD/CFD/FEA as if they are designed to be parallel optimized. They currently have to evolve in this area just like Photoshop and all the rest. Besides, most of CAD primitives, CFD and FEA polygonal operations are done on the GPU via OpenGL.
There are analysis programs that use parallel processing quite well. On very large solutions, it is nearly linear with the number of processors. FLUENT is one of them. Yes, the visualization is done thru the GPU. I was using that as an example of how powerful laptops have become. This would have been considered a heavy duty workstation (4Gb mem, 1Gb GPU) only a few years ago.
Of course, these problems lend themselves well to splitting up the work
My ideal iMac would be a thicker chassis with easy to access RAM and HDD bays. I'd like two 2.5" bays rather than one 3.5" bay.
Macbook Pro would do just fine with slower clocked Quad Core chips as the tradeoff is more power in a lower power envelope.
Crossing my fingers but I don't have much faith in Apple breaking their current pathological "thin is everything" mantra.
There are plenty of people that are attracted to the thinness of the iMac and would like to see it thinner/lose its chin. If you want desktop performance and aren't happy with the iMac why not get a Mac Pro?
Because it is way too expensive. I like the 24" iMac as it is, BTW. No chin is OK, not thicker. please!
I'm betting that the System will feel generally faster in a quad versus duo mac if the total Ghz is significantly greater. The 1.73 quad has 30% more total GHz than a 2.66 duo.
There are plenty of people that are attracted to the thinness of the iMac and would like to see it thinner/lose its chin. If you want desktop performance and aren't happy with the iMac why not get a Mac Pro?
Because that's form over function and as I type this looking at my 24" inch monitor it strikes me that I care not how thin it is (it's not hanging on a wall) what I care about is decent quality.
I don't give a damn about the chin and the iMac is and always has been a desktop computer. The whole reason why Apple chose to use laptop parts was because they could buy in bulk and save money back when they were a struggling company.
That was a long time ago. Today Apple is a much different company and it's time to realize that that a desktop computer needs to have desktop components and thus desktop performance.
I'll buy a Mac Pro when I need Mac Pro performance but right now the latter half of this year is going to bring Quad Core Nehalem performance as the mainstream desktop. The current iMac chassis cannot handle this and the current Macbook and Macbook Pro chassis cannot handle the Clarksfield chips coming without a redesign of their cooling capability.
This is form over function. At the end of the day I need to be productive....looking good comes in second if not third.
Because that's form over function and as I type this looking at my 24" inch monitor it strikes me that I care not how thin it is (it's not hanging on a wall) what I care about is decent quality.
I don't give a damn about the chin and the iMac is and always has been a desktop computer. The whole reason why Apple chose to use laptop parts was because they could buy in bulk and save money back when they were a struggling company.
That was a long time ago. Today Apple is a much different company and it's time to realize that that a desktop computer needs to have desktop components and thus desktop performance.
I'll buy a Mac Pro when I need Mac Pro performance but right now the latter half of this year is going to bring Quad Core Nehalem performance as the mainstream desktop. The current iMac chassis cannot handle this and the current Macbook and Macbook Pro chassis cannot handle the Clarksfield chips coming without a redesign of their cooling capability.
This is form over function. At the end of the day I need to be productive....looking good comes in second if not third.
Intel has new desktop CPUs designed for AIOs. I can't imagine that it was Dell's XPS One that pushed these low power options desktop options out of Intel's labs. This seems like it's something that Apple would have requested, like they did with the MBA's SFF C2D., though that one was already made and shelved from Intel.
I would bet money that the next iMac will use these low-power desktop C2Qs. They offer more performance and are cheaper than the notebook-grade C2Ds.
I'm betting that the System will feel generally faster in a quad versus duo mac if the total Ghz is significantly greater. The 1.73 quad has 30% more total GHz than a 2.66 duo.
It won't. A lot of applications are faster on a quad than a dual, but general system responsiveness won't be.