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When I got my used 2009 Mac Pro baseline 4-core, I was ASTOUNDED at how much faster it is than my 2010 MacBook Pro (with upgrade to fastest i7). Like at least EIGHT, maybe TEN times as fast at compiling/linking in XCode. Absolutely bliddy astonishing. It's gone from "time to take a pee now" to "just blink twice and it's done".

So, yeah, I don't even bother commenting anymore when someone says a mobile i7 can whack a pack of Xeons. It's just plain darn silly, that's all.

It does, of course, depend on how well-suited to multithreading the application in question is.

I write my own software, and I pay serious attention to optimal use of hardware, but I still don't see near 10x speedup in my own app (though I am after all very GPU-dependent). So, the boost in XCode was very surprising -- how much can you multithread a compiler? -- leading me to believe that something else under the hood in the Xeon architecture is just so much better organized than the i5/i7 setup as to provide jawdropping performance differences under certain circumstances....

Much of that performance gain is almost certainly GPU related, not CPU related.
The Quad-Core Mac Pro has twice as many cores as the 2010 MBPs, which are Dual-Core, so that would only result in 2 times performance gain.

I suspect that you would probably have achieved a similar result with a 27-inch mid 2011 iMac upgraded to 3.4GHz Intel Quad-Core i7 and 2GB 6970M GPU.
 
New poll over at french site macgeneration
"What will be your next computer".

6% vote Mac Pro, again more than Mac Mini !


rIzlI.png
 
New poll over at french site macgeneration
"What will be your next computer".

6% vote Mac Pro, again more than Mac Mini !


Image

More voted for getting a PC than mac pro should tell you something. Plus beating the mini isn't a big deal, worthless machine not fit to be a desktop yet can't be used as a portable - utterly useless.
 
More voted for getting a PC than mac pro should tell you something. Plus beating the mini isn't a big deal, worthless machine not fit to be a desktop yet can't be used as a portable - utterly useless.

Good for a TV if you watch movies in mkv and avi (movie server) Also good for audiophile firewire media server. A little Amarra player and a Benchmark DAC (or whatever) and you have a great little hi-fi.
 
More voted for getting a PC than mac pro should tell you something. Plus beating the mini isn't a big deal, worthless machine not fit to be a desktop yet can't be used as a portable - utterly useless.

But how many are in the market for a Pro workstation compared to a consumer computer? I'm guessing not many.
 
So, the boost in XCode was very surprising -- how much can you multithread a compiler? -- leading me to believe that something else under the hood in the Xeon architecture is just so much better organized than the i5/i7 setup as to provide jawdropping performance differences under certain circumstances....

How much? By a lot if bother to gather very basic information about the project (dependency information between files/targets. Some basic IDE editor scanners can gather this automatically in most cases. It was easily done when had to create "make files" by hand. )

xcodebuild -ParallelizeTargets

http://developer.apple.com/library/...win/Reference/ManPages/man1/xcodebuild.1.html


distcc

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/distcc.1.html

Guys, it's way simpler than that. Xcode automatically parallelizes building your different classes between cores.

On a 2 core machine, XCode compiles two classes at once. On an 8 core machine, you get 8 at once. Because a single target can have hundreds (or thousands) of classes (and you may have more than one target), a Mac Pro can easily rip through Xcode projects.

So yes, the compiler is multithreaded. But every class compile is single threaded, it just can do more than one class compile at a time with more cores.

Dependencies don't matter until linking time at the end when everything is compiled, so the compiler can usually ignore dependencies entirely.

This is also why the Mac Pro is a great development machine. If you have a 12 core, you will get 3x the performance of what any iMac can do.
 
Thanks for your contributions!

Whatever the explanation, I just timed it informally. Build from cleaned project (of course everyone's would be different):

40 sec on MBP 2010 i7 2-core 2.66GHz

<2 sec on MP 2009 Xeon 4-core 2.66GHz

so, a factor of twenty for me just doubling the number of cores (I doubt that XCode is using the 5870, but...).
 
But how many are in the market for a Pro workstation compared to a consumer computer? I'm guessing not many.

True, more and more pros have moved onto BOXX, Dell, HP, DIY Newegg and hundreds of other boutique builder workstations configured anyway they want with any possible option. They know that updates will be available sooner without all the super secrecy of Cupertino's version of the North Korean magic kingdom.
 
True, more and more pros have moved onto BOXX, Dell, HP, DIY Newegg and hundreds of other boutique builder workstations configured anyway they want with any possible option. They know that updates will be available sooner without all the super secrecy of Cupertino's version of the North Korean magic kingdom.

I don't think new Mac Pros being available have anything to do with them being announced. Apple could announce there will be new Mac Pros today and it changes nothing if you still can't actually get one.

So Apple can be a North Korean magic kingdom all they want for I care up until they day they release new ones. It's the actual releasing of new ones I care about.

There's way too much angst in this forum about Apple showing, instead of more well directed angst about Apple doing.
 
I don't think new Mac Pros being available have anything to do with them being announced. Apple could announce there will be new Mac Pros today and it changes nothing if you still can't actually get one.

So Apple can be a North Korean magic kingdom all they want for I care up until they day they release new ones. It's the actual releasing of new ones I care about.

There's way too much angst in this forum about Apple showing, instead of more well directed angst about Apple doing.

Knowing is half the battle. :D
 
True, more and more pros have moved onto BOXX, Dell, HP, DIY Newegg and hundreds of other boutique builder workstations configured anyway they want with any possible option. They know that updates will be available sooner without all the super secrecy of Cupertino's version of the North Korean magic kingdom.

Well, in other words, to say the percentages reflect the Mac Pro users moving to PC workstations is very misleading. It does not state as such and does not reflect the consumer Mac's users moving to consumer PC's which are probably the vast majority of that 8%.
 
I don't think new Mac Pros being available have anything to do with them being announced. Apple could announce there will be new Mac Pros today and it changes nothing if you still can't actually get one.

Actually, that changes everything in my opinion.
 
I don't think new Mac Pros being available have anything to do with them being announced. Apple could announce there will be new Mac Pros today and it changes nothing if you still can't actually get one.

If Intel has bungled the release of the Xeon E5's so far .... coming Q3 '11 , coming Q4 '11 .... coming Q1 '12 .... well announced but not quite up to volume to satisfy all contracts yet .....

Why would they announce early?

Nvidia and AMD haven't done too much better on the GPU side. TSMC was going be cranking those out in Q3-Q4 '11 and only extremely minor subsets of those product lines were coming out of the fabs by Jan '12.

Given these crews' track record over the last 12 months I wouldn't announce anything until had a backlog of parts in the factory and had started to crank them out in volume to a get to a release point.

Notice even HP is only system vendor to go out there on the limb and "pre-announce". I think everyone else is in the "fool me once .... fool me twice ..." camp. Apple typically plays things conservatively enough to be in the firmly in that camp by now. If this drags on until very close to the Ivy Bridge release point (end of April ), HP is going to look goofy with the "just wait till (implicitly early) April ".
 
NAB is my choice for some info. Updated or deprecated. Either one. Don't care. I have 3 more years on the hex before I even start looking. I haven't had purchase frustration in a while. I do feel everyones pain though. Throwing away money on older tech when "maybe, possibly, should be" is around the corner.
 
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