What chip will Mac Pro (Power Mac) get?

2

Comments

  • Reply 21 of 42
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Zab The Fab

    It's my impression that right now the Quad G5 is not worth the extra $ compared to the speed tests of the iMac Core Duo. The Quad G5 is certainly faster, but not as much as it is more expensive. What do you think?



    The Power Mac Quad is about the fastest machine you can get for the dollar spent. It compares pretty well with Quad Athlon/Opteron and Xeon systems.



    You will have to look at your particular app and see which would be the best option though. The G5 Quad should generally have twice as much throughput as the iMac Core Duo at 2 GHz.



    Quote:

    My choice revolves around choosing between the iMac Core Duo now, or waiting for a Mac Pro speed monster (which I feel will be introduced around summer, but time will tell). I need power for music production and a lot of it.



    Update often? If applicable, use a cluster?



    Quote:

    Obviously the comming intel Mac Pro will have to be faster than their iMac, but the question is if we can tell from Intel's roadmap WHAT the processor will be and there through WHEN it will be introduced.



    A Quad Woodcrest should be what Apple uses on the high end. It will only be incrementally faster than the PowerMac Quad. So, 20%? It'll run cooler though.



    Quote:

    There were some VERY interesting speculation that Apples engineers were working in secret (obviously) with Intel to develop a special product that would include some of the cool G6 technologies and be introduced to the Mac (and only to the Mac) at first and only later on be available for other PC vendors.



    Baseless speculation. The only thing that may help would be new SIMD instructions for Intel's new architecture.
  • Reply 22 of 42
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Quote:

    (in fact it seems this feature is much more about the Woodcrest chipset rather than the processor itself, so perhaps a Woodcrest chipset could drive two Conroes?)



    No. It would seem plausible but the processor itself must support a subset of MERSI Cache coherency protocols. Thus you could do it externally but why when you have the cache ondie? I think Conroe will be fine for most users and if you need a Quad then pony up and grab a Quad core Woodcrest with 16MB of Cache between the two sockets. If that doesn't get your mojo going nothing will.
  • Reply 23 of 42
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Zab The Fab

    Hi THT



    It's my impression that right now the Quad G5 is not worth the extra $ compared to the speed tests of the iMac Core Duo. The Quad G5 is certainly faster, but not as much as it is more expensive. What do you think?



    My choice revolves around choosing between the iMac Core Duo now, or waiting for a Mac Pro speed monster (which I feel will be introduced around summer, but time will tell). I need power for music production and a lot of it.



    Obviously the comming intel Mac Pro will have to be faster than their iMac, but the question is if we can tell from Intel's roadmap WHAT the processor will be and there through WHEN it will be introduced.



    There were some VERY interesting speculation that Apples engineers were working in secret (obviously) with Intel to develop a special product that would include some of the cool G6 technologies and be introduced to the Mac (and only to the Mac) at first and only later on be available for other PC vendors.



    Man, we live in exciting times







    Sincerely



    Zab the Fab




    It's my impression that the main market for the Quad G5 are those that are running pro apps all day long and they can't afford non-native performance.
  • Reply 24 of 42
    Quote:

    Originally posted by tubgirl

    sure the g5 got a good amount of memory bandwidth compared to intels FSBes, but do you really think it's important what frequency the fsb is really running at?



    and i dont really see the point in running the memory controller faster than the memory itself...?




    RAM increases its frequencies too. Best RAM runs quite quick

    PC-3200 SDRAM (DDR-400) or PC2-3200 SDRAM (DDR2-400, more efficient) are double-pumped, so they run at 200 MHz.

    But on the high-end side, there is also PC-4800 (DDR-600) at 300 MHz, or even expensive PC2-8000 (DDR2-1000) at... 500 MHz. Intel FSBes just can't handle these (more exactly they could, but asynchronously and with a performance threshold). But you don't need to spend stellar amounts of money with these variants to find there is also a wide range of cheaper frequencies, such as PC2-4200/4300/5300/5400/6400.



    More than high frequencies Double Data Rate memories, the best RAM for Intel with its low-clocked but quadpumped FSBes would ideally be the rare QDR (Quad Data Rate) SDRAM. But Intel seems to go DDR3 with its next chipsets.
  • Reply 25 of 42
    tubgirltubgirl Posts: 177member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Cosmos 1999

    RAM increases its frequencies too. Best RAM runs quite quick

    PC-3200 SDRAM (DDR-400) or PC2-3200 SDRAM (DDR2-400, more efficient) are double-pumped, so they run at 200 MHz.




    afaik, ddr2 memory runs at half the frequency compared to (bandwidth) quasi-equivalent ddr memory.

    for example, a pc2-3200 module (ddr2-400) runs at 100mhz and pc-3200 (ddr-400) runs at 200mhz.



    edit: it has something to do with the strobing or whatever...(?)
  • Reply 26 of 42
    telomartelomar Posts: 1,804member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by PB

    I suppose you compare yonah to merom. I wonder however if the following excerpt from Wikipedia makes sense:





    According to Intel, Merom's design places emphasis on both high performance and low power consumption. On a performance per watt basis, Intel claims Merom will outperform Yonah by a 2-1 margin. Ultra low voltage Merom chips will consume as little as 0.5 W of power, enabling ultra portable laptops to have battery lives in the tens of hours.





    Or it is just misinformation?




    Wikipedia is a pretty poor reference as there is no requirement of fact checking. Their performance claim is just outright wrong and the 0.5W processor that Intel talked about wasn't really aimed at laptops. More handhelds and things that currently use Xscale.
  • Reply 27 of 42
    Quote:

    Originally posted by tubgirl

    afaik, ddr2 memory runs at half the frequency compared to (bandwidth) quasi-equivalent ddr memory.

    for example, a pc2-3200 module (ddr2-400) runs at 100mhz and pc-3200 (ddr-400) runs at 200mhz.



    edit: it has something to do with the strobing or whatever...(?)




    Okay... didn't know that. It seems DDR2 interestingly uses some sort of "QDR calculation" but without being quad-pumped, weird. Because I don't see how say, PC2-3200, which is DDR2-400, could transfert 3200 GB/s @ only 100 MHz, being 64-bit wide. To me it must be clocked at 200 MHz (ther are 8 bits in 1 Byte).
  • Reply 28 of 42
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Mac Pro will use the woodcrest unless they decide to stop claiming they have pro workstation performance computers. Conroe could go into a low end version of it for those that seem to think they don't need that kind of performance, but I say they should buy an iMac if that's the case. Users that switched away because of the lack of graphics cards, and performance vs. the PC side wont come back on a conroe, What's the point? It's not fit to be a workstation processor.

    I'd say conroe is a lame excuse for a PowerMac replacement processor. Apple will use the woodcrest if they want to be taken seriously by serious people.
  • Reply 29 of 42
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    There's a lot of bogus stuff being thrown around here about bus and memory frequencies. Frequency doesn't matter; you have to look at the throughput. Intel isn't stupid; they will ensure that their FSBs can handle the memory that they use (I guess Woodcrest systems will use FBD-667 or FBD-800).
  • Reply 30 of 42
    Quote:

    Originally posted by tubgirl

    sure the g5 got a good amount of memory bandwidth compared to intels FSBes, but do you really think it's important what frequency the fsb is really running at?





    and i dont really see the point in running the memory controller faster than the memory itself...?




    In a clocked system, faster is always better unless you're concerned about power dissipation. Better synchronization, lower latency, etc. It's also true that memory chips often require some degree of data and addressing multiplexing, which sucks-up mutiple clock cycles. The faster the memory controller can fill up this info, the faster the actual memory access will be.



    Quote:

    Originally posted by wmf

    There's a lot of bogus stuff being thrown around here about bus and memory frequencies. Frequency doesn't matter; you have to look at the throughput. Intel isn't stupid; they will ensure that their FSBs can handle the memory that they use (I guess Woodcrest systems will use FBD-667 or FBD-800).



    Throughput, I assume, is how you're defining maximum-mean bandwidth. That is, the fastest that randomly accessed data can realistically make it from the memory to the CPU (or the CPU's cache). This factors in latencies, in which case the G5 architecture has the advantage. But with a big enough CPU cache, these latencies become less of a big deal for tasks that don't use large data sets.
  • Reply 31 of 42
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Conroe will have the same core as Woodcrest so the only thing you can really sell someone on is the SMP and potentially larger cache (if 8MB L2 Woodcrest actually get made)



    Apple would be silly to use Woodcrest in Powermacs that only have one socket unless they're offering upgrades. It really boils down to pricing. If Woodcrest is expensive then it'll only be used in high end configs. Conroe will be the mainstream performance desktop.



    Not much truly seperates a Xeon from a Pentium 4 other than a few engineering tweaks and marketing.



    I can't afford a quad but I'd take a nicely equipped Conroe any day.
  • Reply 32 of 42
    Well, I am buying a quad today. It makes sense as I will be updating from panther as well. I will be running tons of music software and some video software so I feel I will have a pretty competive system for the next year even when the intel macpro comes out. I will then wait for the quad core intel's to upgrade.



    When do you guys think the quadcore's will come from intel? It seems to be mid 2007 on most maps I have seen. But one thing I don't hear people taking into consideration is the initial cost of the high-end server/workstation chips from intel. This might either mean a higher cost range for the Macpro's or a lag in time before they are adopted into Mac systems.
  • Reply 33 of 42
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    Conroe will have the same core as Woodcrest so the only thing you can really sell someone on is the SMP and potentially larger cache (if 8MB L2 Woodcrest actually get made)



    Apple would be silly to use Woodcrest in Powermacs that only have one socket unless they're offering upgrades. It really boils down to pricing. If Woodcrest is expensive then it'll only be used in high end configs. Conroe will be the mainstream performance desktop.



    Not much truly seperates a Xeon from a Pentium 4 other than a few engineering tweaks and marketing.



    I can't afford a quad but I'd take a nicely equipped Conroe any day.




    I did say "Conroe could go into a low end version of it" But I thought Conroe was the P4 equivalent, and not an SP XEON. I would have expected Apple to use the XEON equivalent across the line. The XEON MP in the dual socket ones, and The regular SP XEON equivalent for the single socket ones.



    Anything is possible. We are talking a whole new ball game with intel. Apple is going to have a lot of processors to chose from in the next few years, and they may expand some. They are growing.

    I keep thinking about that thin tower that Alienware had, and Apple could do a midway system, but every time I do I think it will cut off iMac. Could you put a Conroe in an iMac? Do we know how much heat it generates yet? No. Not exactly. Again anything is possible, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is there will be a dual socket PowerMac with woodcrests in it with numbers so incredible everybody will be drooling on it.





    2500 Posts.
  • Reply 34 of 42
    tubgirltubgirl Posts: 177member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Cosmos 1999

    Okay... didn't know that. It seems DDR2 interestingly uses some sort of "QDR calculation" but without being quad-pumped, weird. Because I don't see how say, PC2-3200, which is DDR2-400, could transfert 3200 GB/s @ only 100 MHz, being 64-bit wide. To me it must be clocked at 200 MHz (ther are 8 bits in 1 Byte).



    well, the whole thing is a bit complicated and i cant say i know all the facts myself...



    http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mem...play/ddr2.html

    http://www.ipkonfig.com/Articles/DDR2_04/
  • Reply 35 of 42
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    Whatever the processor, I hope it also has socketted CPU's like the Intel iMac for future upgrades.
  • Reply 36 of 42
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Onlooker I don't take you much for a Conroe or Woodcrest guy.



    The minute that Quad Core on a die Intel chip is rumored you will be smitten with geek lust.



    I think you're right. Depending on cost Conroe will either be the lowend PM or the lowend and midrange with Woodcrest taking over the high end.
  • Reply 37 of 42
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Producer

    Well, I am buying a quad today. It makes sense as I will be updating from panther as well. I will be running tons of music software and some video software so I feel I will have a pretty competive system for the next year even when the intel macpro comes out. I will then wait for the quad core intel's to upgrade.



    When do you guys think the quadcore's will come from intel? It seems to be mid 2007 on most maps I have seen. But one thing I don't hear people taking into consideration is the initial cost of the high-end server/workstation chips from intel. This might either mean a higher cost range for the Macpro's or a lag in time before they are adopted into Mac systems.




    Man I know its probably too late now but I think there is a strong possibility that Apple will update the Quad G5 one last time before it goes Intel. With the a lot of the Pro apps that a Quad owner would use not going UB for a while the Powermac is going to look pretty lame if its not updated for nearly a year (Woodcrest availablity estimated at September 06?)
  • Reply 38 of 42
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    Onlooker I don't take you much for a Conroe or Woodcrest guy.



    The minute that Quad Core on a die Intel chip is rumored you will be smitten with geek lust.



    I think you're right. Depending on cost Conroe will either be the lowend PM or the lowend and midrange with Woodcrest taking over the high end.




    As long as it still comes in a dual socket PowerMac.
  • Reply 39 of 42
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Cosmos 1999

    Okay... didn't know that. It seems DDR2 interestingly uses some sort of "QDR calculation" but without being quad-pumped, weird. Because I don't see how say, PC2-3200, which is DDR2-400, could transfert 3200 GB/s @ only 100 MHz, being 64-bit wide. To me it must be clocked at 200 MHz (ther are 8 bits in 1 Byte).



    The xbitlabs article pretty much tells the story. For PC2-3200/DDR2-400, the DRAMs themselves run at 100 MHz. The key difference is that they can deliver 4x the bits per DRAM clock cycle compared to regular SDRAM (and 2x the bits/clock cycle compared to DDR SDRAM). In order to actually deliver that many bits to the memory bus, the I/O buffers are clocked at 200 MHz, and is DDR as well. This translates to being about to deliver 32 bytes per DRAM clock at 100 MHz, effectively 400 MHz data rate as if it were 400 MHz SDRAM.



    For PC-3200/DDR1-400, the DRAMs run at 200 MHz, are capable of delivering 2x this bits per DRAM clock compared to regular SRAM. The I/O buffers are clocked at 200 MHz, are DDR, so it translates to being able to deliver 32 bytes per DRAM clock at 200 MHz, effectively 400 MHz data rate as if it were 400 MHz SDRAM.



    Intel FSBs. They are quad-pumped, but as long as they support the data rate provided by dual-channel DDR2-667, -800, whatever the memory standard is, it will be fine. 2 channels of DDR2-667 requires a FSB with 1333 MHz data rates. Intel will have that available for the Xeon Woodcrests, and possibly Conroe. When DDR2-800 becomes cheap and voluminously available, Intel will need to up their FSB to 1600 MHz data rates to support 2 channels of DDR2-800. I believe they'll do that.



    The G5 FSB. It is double data rate or double pumped. The 2.5 GHz G5 has a 1.25 GHz data throughput, not rate, FSB. 2 unidirectional links, one going to and the other going from, operating at 625 MHz. It's 32 bit wide and DDR, so it has 5000 MB/s bandwidth for both data and address info. That's the maximum bandwidth going one direction. When people advertize it though, they give a throughput MHz number. The G5 FSB is able to transfer 5 GB/s of data and address info going both directions at the same time, add them together, and out comes a 10 GB/s data throughput number equivalent to a "1.25 GHz" G5 FSB number.
  • Reply 40 of 42
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Thereubster

    Man I know its probably too late now but I think there is a strong possibility that Apple will update the Quad G5 one last time before it goes Intel. With the a lot of the Pro apps that a Quad owner would use not going UB for a while the Powermac is going to look pretty lame if its not updated for nearly a year (Woodcrest availablity estimated at September 06?)



    Actualy Apple started the Universal crossgrade today.



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