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epitaphic

macrumors regular
Aug 10, 2006
137
177
London
FleurDuMal said:
But, if you use FCP, Photoshop (come CS3) and, to a lesser extent maybe, Aperture, then you will utilise it. Video encoding also benefits from every extra core and Mhz you can throw at it.

Well, its not so clear cut. FCP itself won't work any faster (eg RT Render) than on a Conroe system (as demonstrated by benchmarks that show a dual woodcrest having no difference from a single woodcrest setup).

As far as encoding goes, its entirely dependent on the encoding algorithms. MPEG2 should be able to take advantage of all cores. H264 is notable for being piss poor at taking advantage of even just two cores, and that's on a one pass encode, a second pass is always done using one core only.

Photoshop's code base is notorious for poor scalability. It can use two cores relatively well, rarely going over 70-80%. When on a quad core, it takes 30% advantage from those extra two cores. I've read that on a 8 core system, the improvement would be near 8% for the extra four cores.

Unless Adobe rewire the PC and Mac versions from the ground up (highly doubtful), Photoshop will continue to scale abysmally.

As far as Aperture, I don't really know how well it does, for example, on a DP2.5 G5 vs a Quad2.5 G5. Would be interesting to see if there are heavy optimizations in the code.

Going beyond a single core is highly dependent on the way the coding is done for each software, and some things are just inherently serial. Most pro apps scale adequately to two cores, beyond that remains to be seen.

At the moment the real advantage beyond two cores is in multitasking. I personally think the sweet spot for performance, multitasking and longevity is a quad core system. I think as it stands with Apple's line up, a Mac Pro should last a lot longer than any G4 or G5 before it. Personally I'd prefer a Kentsfield xMac ;)
 

epitaphic

macrumors regular
Aug 10, 2006
137
177
London
cube said:
The have not closed any gap. The "xMac" should be less expensive than the iMac.

Well the problem with that is you have a semi-pro mac being cheaper than a consumer mac. I know its because it's headless but still, there's never been any overlap in pricing between consumer and pro line ups. I don't think even in the days of the crippled singe G5 1.8 it was cheaper than the most expensive iMac. Was the cube ever cheaper than the most expensive consumer mac?
 

cube

Suspended
May 10, 2004
17,011
4,973
epitaphic said:
Was the cube ever cheaper than the most expensive consumer mac?

Everybody wanted a Cube. But the price was wrong.

An "xMac" would be better if it was just a practical box, nothing fancy like that.

I have a Cube. I don't want another hardly upgradeable machine anymore.

I was just an impressionable Mac newbie. I'm not impressed by PCs, which is what Macs are now. I just want Mac software. The hardware is ugly inside, it can be ugly outside too (but it must be stable).
 

cube

Suspended
May 10, 2004
17,011
4,973
epitaphic said:
seems like a hackintosh is what you need...

If Apple licenses the software and makes it as stable on third party hardware (pipe dream).
 

epitaphic

macrumors regular
Aug 10, 2006
137
177
London
cube said:
If Apple licenses the software and makes it as stable on third party hardware (pipe dream).

There's probably a greater likelyhood of Appe going back to Freescale than opening the platform. So if you don't want to wait for the second coming, do it yerself, build/buy an intel PC, install osx86... it's a mac! ;)
 

cube

Suspended
May 10, 2004
17,011
4,973
I wish Apple would take on that suggestion from Sun to replace Darwin with Solaris. Then I could buy the software from Apple and the hardware from Sun.

But for sure I don't want Apple to buy Sun!
 

Macinposh

macrumors 6502a
Jun 7, 2006
700
0
Kreplakistan
epitaphic said:
Photoshop's code base is notorious for poor scalability.

Unless Adobe rewire the PC and Mac versions from the ground up (highly doubtful), Photoshop will continue to scale abysmally.


Wich they apparently are doing,according to a person that participated in the Adobes presentation where they showed the QT demo of CS 3.

No reason to be overly pessimistic.

Adobe has to revamp the code to support multiple processors,since it is the way of the future in computing for the next few years.
When they have started the coding they have had all the info on the AMD and Intells roadmaps.
And by the time CS3 is out, 8 core systems have been out for 6 months...
They wont/cant stall multiple processor optimisation untill 2009 when CS 4 comes out (18-24month cycle adobe has), because the systems by then would have,what,16-32 cores??

I´ll eat my proverbal hat if the CS 3 isnt optimised for 2+ cores.




But,with greedy and lazy companies,you never know what to expect..
:cool:
 

epitaphic

macrumors regular
Aug 10, 2006
137
177
London
Macinposh said:
Wich they apparently are doing,according to a person that participated in the Adobes presentation where they showed the QT demo of CS 3.

I sincerely hope they do rewrite the whole thing from scratch. From what I've heard, they couldn't port the PPC version to intel because the code was a mixture of patches upon patches of pre PPC code. I'd imagine the PC version is of similar disarray because I haven't heard of photoshop taking advantage of more than 2 cores on windows.

If they are re-writing something that took 15 years to develop in 24 months then kudos to them. Unfortunately I reckon they'll be more focused on simply getting it to work on intel macs.

Look at Apple, they've been shipping quads for about a year (they've probably had quads in their roadmap for at least a year before that). Are any of their apps optimized for 4+ cores? Not that I know of.

Not being pessimistic, just outlining that fully optimizing for a whole app for 4,8,etc cores is probably not trivial and takes a long, long time to develop (that's when the very nature of the process isn't serial).
 
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