I laugh at dual- and quad-core

[dparm]

He has eight! (http://www.tuaw.com/2006/11/15/cnet-violates-mac-pro-warranty-installs-eight-cores-in-mac-pro/)


CNET violates Mac Pro warranty, installs eight cores in Mac Pro

Posted Nov 15th 2006 9:00AM by Erica Sadun (http://www.tuaw.com/bloggers/erica-sadun)
Filed under: Hardware (http://www.tuaw.com/category/hardware/)

(http://www.tuaw.com/category/hardware/)
http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2006/11/eightcore.jpgOver at CNET labs, they've done gone and stuck a couple of new Intel quad-core Xeon 5355 processors into an Apple Mac Pro and ran copious benchmarks (http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6663792.html?tag=blog) on their new baby. Surprisingly enough, a single 3.0 GHz quad core kicked the bejesus out of the 2.66 GHz oct cores in some of the tasks. Follow the link to see lots and lots of bar graphs. And yes, that is 8 cores hard at work in the CPU monitor. How long will we have to wait until we can pick up this configuration from Apple, instead of having to hack our way to more cores?

[bgwinkel]

Meh, this was done on 12 September at Anandtech. They have more benchmarks too.

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

[lnp]

I'm more of a media person and not a person who really understands all the innards, but isn't the point of multiprocessor computing to divide up the processing needs of the program? So, if a program isn't optimized for multicore compuing, won't more cores just be wasted?

[dparm]

Yes and no. Multiprocessor is not the same as multi-core.

If a program is optimized for multi-core systems, things will be faster. Otherwise, there's no speed boost. It will still offer the advantage of improved multi-tasking though (encode a video while you backup your data, for example).

[begay]

Lars, don't be bust'n bubbles now.... Its all about how it makes them feel... Like the spoiler on a nova makes it go really really fast.......

[nlopez]

multi-processing is multi-core. Programing wise it makes absolutly no difference if the cores are on the same package and socket or not. Multi-core is cheaper because you don't have to bring out all those inter-connect pins and deal with routing them around the motherboard but as far as any programs care they are exactly the same. "Optimizing for multi-core/processor" means breaking your work up into multiple peices so the different cores all have something to work on other than waiting for the first core to finish.