8 CPU cores in a Mac Pro

thebigsky

Sorry if this has already been posted but I noticed today that the guys over at Anandtech have dropped a couple of quad core Xeons (Clovertown) into an existing Mac Pro and it just worked, with all 8 cores recognised, nice!

Fully story here.

suntzu

Oh man. The things I could do with that kind of machine. And that's just the work stuff!

thebigsky

Reading this helped sway my decision on buying a Mac Pro, I bought the 2.66 Ghz version and put the extra money saved over the 3 Ghz towards more memory, safe in the knowledge I can drop some quicker processors in when prices fall.

wxwax

thebigsky wrote:

Reading this helped sway my decision on buying a Mac Pro, I bought the 2.66 Ghz version and put the extra money saved over the 3 Ghz towards more memory, safe in the knowledge I can drop some quicker processors in when prices fall.

You feel comfortable that that's a real world scenario?

thebigsky

wxwax wrote:

You feel comfortable that that's a real world scenario?

In what way?

JohnR

I think he's asking if you are comfortable that the processor swap was done by someone and it's not something common? or something like that.

If in fact that it does come about that you can swap in new processors fairly easy then I would get the 2ghz intel one and save even more money.

But then again, I heard that the "clovertown" chips aren't really quad chips, but merely 2 dual cores sharing a chip. Apparently the real quads aren't coming until next year or something like that? And that Intel is pushing these out to beat AMD's quad chips....which (I think) are real quad chips.

Or something like that. Surely someone here knows?

DudeX

Intel's quadcore chip is 2 dual core chips on a board. So it's not a true quad core in a single package design like AMD's codenamed Barcelona 4 processor on a die chip.

Nevertheless, preliminary benchmarks of Intel's quadcore nets a 50-80% improvement over Intel Core Duo 2 chips in applications that are very multithreaded.

In light usage application usage, it might be a bit slower due to the overhead of managing 4 cpus.

For Photoshop, 4 cores is a good thing.

wxwax

thebigsky wrote:

In what way?

Do you really and truly believe that it's real world practical to buy a 2.66 Mac Pro right now, and expect to change the processors in a year or three?

I can see an experiment verifying that such a thing can be done. But does that necessarily mean that in the real world, you or I could swap out processors as easily as memory?

thebigsky

I guess it would depend on your level of technical expertise, as far as I'm concerned it's a very realistic idea, as demonstrated by the fact it's already been done.

I've never found swapping out processors a problem before and have done it on many occasions and I wouldn't be surprised if companies such as Sonnett are also working on a retail solution as we speak.

Charlie

SpeshulEd

switching out processors on a windows machine is cake, never tried it on a mac, but as long as the motherboard was made to be able to handle the better cpu, you should be all set, if not, just replace the mobo.

easy as pie.

wxwax

Cool, thanks.

JohnR

wxwax wrote:

Do you really and truly believe that it's real world practical to buy a 2.66 Mac Pro right now, and expect to change the processors in a year or three?

I can see an experiment verifying that such a thing can be done. But does that necessarily mean that in the real world, you or I could swap out processors as easily as memory?

Powermac G4's are/were able to swap out processors pretty easily. OWC and others sell them. G5's (so far) are about the only ones I know of that can't swap out processors.