diglloyd's 2.93GHz 'Nehalem' Mac Pro Review!

[nanofrog]

Yes it will turn old school single threaded code into efficient multithreaded core, thats the whole main purpose of snow leopard!

Just read the vague information about snow leopard. It seems to be finally be able to utilize every ounce of your cores + memory.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard


“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

OpenCL is great and all BUT one word, Grand Central. Especially with 2x faster memory on the nehalem's architecture + QPI. It'll be a difference of night and day between the 08 and 09 mac pros.

It's really a matter of bringing the components together, and that's a group effort. The OS can't do it alone. A coding environment capable of developing multi-threaded apps is needed, an OS that can utilize the new extensions, and a final product from the actual application developer.

It's taken some time to happen, as everyone has been waiting for someone else to make a move first. In hopes of having to do less work, as it's a major undertaking.

If you truly read the quote from (article?) you posted, it says "Mac OS X multi core". To me, that translates into OS X ONLY, as that's the only part Apple can actually control. They don't write the 3rd party software, so they really have no idea as to how it will actually perform. Maybe the code was written to take advantage of it, maybe not. The code itself may also be anywhere from well written and lean, to bloated crap.

What it offers out of the box, should be a leaner OS, and the possibility of application performance improvements, provided the code can take advantage of it. Particularly Grand Central.

The use of the graphics GPGPU for processing will likely make more of an immediate impact, as that would be controlled by OS X.

LOL... Snow Leopard isn't suddenly going to turn old-school single-threaded code into efficient multi-threaded wonder code. It will only make it easier for developers to make multi-threaded apps... something which they all could have been doing for years now (albeit with more effort), but in many cases can't, won't, or it just doesn't make sense for their app. Honestly, OpenCL and utilizing the highly parallel architecture of GPU's for suitable tasks actually holds more promise for significant performance improvements... GPU's have upwards of hundreds of cores from this perspective.

This is more along my thinking as well. It will offer the possibility of improved performance with Grand Central, but the application developers will have to put some effort into using it, if they haven't already.

No, the 08 8 core models will handle everything properly and still be a beast of their own. But I'm just saying that if your considering to buying a new mac pro, get the nehalem model because it will be a difference in night and day between the two once snow leopard ships.

Apple knows nehalem was coming and its still what anywhere from 4-6 months before it hits. And to me it seems that snow leopard's main purpose was to really fully utilize the new architecture nehalem.

Its just that 08' models will be faster than what they are now of course but the new nehalems will be MUCH faster than the 08 models. Simple as that.

Think of it this way.

If you take an '08 and '09 MP, and install Snow Leopard,... exactly the same, and run the exact same benchmarks, the differences in performance would be a result of the hardware. If you compare the results with the same results from Leopard, the differences in scale would be equivalent.

Snow Leopard isn't magic fairy dust for a computer.

No, the difference won't be all that big.
Feel free to return to this thread once SL hits and laugh at me if I'm wrong.

Ask anyone who's managed to get a beta seed up and running.

Seems realistic, as not only from the Beta results, but the simple fact that new software versions that rewrote single threaded apps to multi-threaded apps won't appear the same day Snow Leopard releases.

Then there will be some applications that aren't suited for multi-threaded operation anyway.

Beta thats about 6 months away, uh huh. And have the beta testers run SL on a nehalem system yet and compare them with the 08 model? Naw.

Just wait until the final product is out and once apps fully utilize the nehalem architecture. I'm hoping that your ready to put your mac pro on eBay in about 4-6 more months.

It'll ship in June.

 

[-js-]

Amazon just raised their price $200 on the 2.8 MP08 octad over what I paid for it yesterday.

 

[mingus51]

Amazon just raised their price $200 on the 2.8 MP08 octad over what I paid for it yesterday.

Looks like J&R sold out so now we're onto PowerMax

 

[VirtualRain]

Yes it will turn old school single threaded code into efficient multithreaded core, thats the whole main purpose of snow leopard!

Just read the vague information about snow leopard. It seems to be finally be able to utilize every ounce of your cores + memory.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard


“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

OpenCL is great and all BUT one word, Grand Central. Especially with 2x faster memory on the nehalem's architecture + QPI. It'll be a difference of night and day between the 08 and 09 mac pros.

I think you are mis-interpreting this...

Looking at the portion in red... Mac OS X will be optimized to allocate threads, but it's still up to the application developers to make their code multi-threaded. The last sentence says this exactly...

Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems

Don't suddenly expect multi-threaded nirvana from snow leopard. Perhaps a release cycle or two after SL some tradtionally single-threaded apps will see improvements... but not all applications lend themselves to parallel processing and not all developers see rewriting their code to support multi-threading as a priority -features and bugs also need developer time.

 

[jjahshik32]

Beta 6 months away? What?
There are several fresh betas available.

All signs point to a June RTM.
We're approaching the end of March, so the golden copy hits in less than three months.

uh no. Beta is now 6 months at most until final release.

 

[jjahshik32]

d

I think you are mis-interpreting this...

Looking at the portion in red... Mac OS X will be optimized to allocate threads, but it's still up to the application developers to make their code multi-threaded. The last sentence says this exactly...



Don't suddenly expect multi-threaded nirvana from snow leopard. Perhaps a release cycle or two after SL some tradtionally single-threaded apps will see improvements... but not all applications lend themselves to parallel processing and not all developers see rewriting their code to support multi-threading as a priority -features and bugs also need developer time.

No s*it. Of course for applications developers have to support the new technology. But as a whole OS system, grand central is created to actually use all of the cores powers to efficiently and increase the use of all the cores and implement them for everyday use. Thus making multitasking faster.

I never said Snow Leopard would magically make photoshop 150% faster. But overall for the OS it will and have some effect on the apps as well due to the better management of the cpus + memory. Also your thinking this wrong, I think single thread apps wont make much of a big difference. Basically single thread is going to be left behind with old technology and wont really matter in the speed of single threading. Sure maybe a simple app here or there will still just use single threading but you dont need something monstrous to run transmission or azureus.

The whole point of snow leopard is to finally utilize multithreading as a single unity. This is the whole point of SL and the whole point of the multithreading, to increase overall speed since clocking up 1 single core would be way too hot and unstable.

This is where I think latency will be greatly reduced, especially running power hungry apps such as fcp, logic, cs4, etc.

Take this into account. If SL takes advantages and efficiently uses all of the 8 cores or the 16 cores and divide each of them to do certain tasks and allocate specific amount of memory and say you open final cut pro or photoshop. Since its more efficient now to handle certain tasks, fcp or photoshop would have less of a strain since its much more organized now, thus reducing a lot of the latency and especially the Nehalems having a 2x faster memory speeds compared to the last gen 8 cores, the overall system would run smoother and faster and perhaps increase productivity and possibly speed up the apps.

And this is all BEFORE the developer supports nehalem with the apps.

To simply put, what does SL offer? Faster and more efficient use of all the cores and memory. If you take that and consider Nehalem, basically SL is made for Nehalem's architecture. 2x faster memory, QPI and 8 cores with 2 threading on each core and especially the ability to disable unused core for more energy efficiency and turbo boosting a single core probably up to 400mhz higher. Its no rocket science why Apple has decided to create snow leopard when they foresaw the new architecture such as Nehalem and improvements from it in the future.

 

[Ploki]

look, we who are lucky to afford mac pro all have awsome computers, snow leopard will benefit all multicores and we all eagerly await its release, in a few months we will all bitch about the apple's next mac pro.

the thing about 08 09 bickery is that because of the actual 100% increase in power for the base model in the 06>08 switch with 0% price increase, people are disappointed because many skipped this generation because everybody expected more than it happened and NOT expected base octo going up in price, here is 20% performance up 20% price up. its all about the

jjahshik32: why is SL made for nehalem? what has SL to do with memory, why would SL benefit any multicore architecture more than the other.. the faster memory is already "exploited" by the default and its shown on Leopard itself, as far as 16 cores go, its still "16"cores resting on an 8x2.26 system however you put it its better to have 16 REAL cores than 16 "virtual" cores.
it depends VERY on the application, you have synths that have SINGLE thread and they max out a 2.8ghz core, so half of 2.26 core would suffer even more from this perspective.
Also SL is promising to utilize also the GPU in which nehalem/previous gen have the same advantage once again.
the one biggest advantage of nehalem is imo the memory throughput!

dTake this into account. If SL takes advantages and efficiently uses all of the 8 cores or the 16 cores and divide each of them to do certain tasks and allocate specific amount of memory and say you open final cut pro or photoshop. Since its more efficient now to handle certain tasks, fcp or photoshop would have less of a strain since its much more organized now, thus reducing a lot of the latency and especially the Nehalems having a 2x faster memory speeds compared to the last gen 8 cores, the overall system would run smoother and faster and perhaps increase productivity and possibly speed up the apps. .

everything you wrote here (except the 2x memory speed which is ALREADY fully working) applies to all generations.
making a better handling of resources thus a more effective OS. leopard is far from optimized for the 08 generation
not even close. it was not made for 08 generation anyway. dont say that.
its gazillions of PowerPC code, weak multithreading weak memory management etc...

 

[VirtualRain]

d

No s*it. Of course for applications developers have to support the new technology. But as a whole OS system, grand central is created to actually use all of the cores powers to efficiently and increase the use of all the cores and implement them for everyday use. Thus making multitasking faster.

I never said Snow Leopard would magically make photoshop 150% faster. But overall for the OS it will and have some effect on the apps as well due to the better management of the cpus + memory. Also your thinking this wrong, I think single thread apps wont make much of a big difference. Basically single thread is going to be left behind with old technology and wont really matter in the speed of single threading. Sure maybe a simple app here or there will still just use single threading but you dont need something monstrous to run transmission or azureus.

The whole point of snow leopard is to finally utilize multithreading as a single unity. This is the whole point of SL and the whole point of the multithreading, to increase overall speed since clocking up 1 single core would be way too hot and unstable.

This is where I think latency will be greatly reduced, especially running power hungry apps such as fcp, logic, cs4, etc.

Take this into account. If SL takes advantages and efficiently uses all of the 8 cores or the 16 cores and divide each of them to do certain tasks and allocate specific amount of memory and say you open final cut pro or photoshop. Since its more efficient now to handle certain tasks, fcp or photoshop would have less of a strain since its much more organized now, thus reducing a lot of the latency and especially the Nehalems having a 2x faster memory speeds compared to the last gen 8 cores, the overall system would run smoother and faster and perhaps increase productivity and possibly speed up the apps.

And this is all BEFORE the developer supports nehalem with the apps.

To simply put, what does SL offer? Faster and more efficient use of all the cores and memory. If you take that and consider Nehalem, basically SL is made for Nehalem's architecture. 2x faster memory, QPI and 8 cores with 2 threading on each core and especially the ability to disable unused core for more energy efficiency and turbo boosting a single core probably up to 400mhz higher. Its no rocket science why Apple has decided to create snow leopard when they foresaw the new architecture such as Nehalem and improvements from it in the future.

I think we are getting closer to agreeing how SL will impact things, but I'm still lost on one element of your position... Exactly what performance gains to expect from SL alone... assuming all other things stay constant. I'm guessing the gains will be negligable... that gains will only be seen by re-architecting the application code.

You seem to think the changes to OS X alone will make a big difference. This implies to me that the current multi-threaded performance in OS X leaves something to be desired. Is this what you believe?

I personally doubt it. I tend to think that Mac OS X has a very competent thread scheduler already.

I really think that Grand Central is a lot of marketing hype and that people will be disappointed after upgrading to realize that their performance really hasn't changed much at all. To suggest otherwise is to imply that the current OS X sucks at thread scheduling... a fundamental task of a modern OS... something Windows has been doing well for nearly 10 years... and something I suspect OS X has also done well for several years but it hasn't been as important in the past as it is today so the Marketing Machine is all over it now.

 

[jjahshik32]

I think we are getting closer to agreeing how SL will impact things, but I'm still lost on one element of your position... Exactly what performance gains to expect from SL alone... assuming all other things stay constant. I'm guessing the gains will be negligable... that gains will only be seen by re-architecting the application code.

You seem to think the changes to OS X alone will make a big difference. This implies to me that the current multi-threaded performance in OS X leaves something to be desired. Is this what you believe?

I personally doubt it. I tend to think that Mac OS X has a very competent thread scheduler already.

I really think that Grand Central is a lot of marketing hype and that people will be disappointed after upgrading to realize that their performance really hasn't changed much at all. To suggest otherwise is to imply that the current OS X sucks at thread scheduling... a fundamental task of a modern OS... something Windows has been doing well for nearly 10 years.

My whole point being is that previous gen 8 core mac pros will get a big performance gain with SL but the Nehalem mac pros will beat that easily. I mean there is no denying that. If you just look at what the Nehalem architecture and what features it offers and compare it towards what the SL's main purpose is, its no brainer that they go hand in hand.

That is all.

 

[rylin]

uh no. Beta is now 6 months at most until final release.

Fact: there was a seed of SL beta as recently as less than a month ago.
Fact: El Jobso said SL would ship "about a year" after the announcement (i.e., in June).

In essence; get off the drugs.

 

[jjahshik32]

look, we who are lucky to afford mac pro all have awsome computers, snow leopard will benefit all multicores and we all eagerly await its release, in a few months we will all bitch about the apple's next mac pro.

the thing about 08 09 bickery is that because of the actual 100% increase in power for the base model in the 06>08 switch with 0% price increase, people are disappointed because many skipped this generation because everybody expected more than it happened and NOT expected base octo going up in price, here is 20% performance up 20% price up. its all about the

jjahshik32: why is SL made for nehalem? what has SL to do with memory, why would SL benefit any multicore architecture more than the other.. the faster memory is already "exploited" by the default and its shown on Leopard itself, as far as 16 cores go, its still "16"cores resting on an 8x2.26 system however you put it its better to have 16 REAL cores than 16 "virtual" cores.
it depends VERY on the application, you have synths that have SINGLE thread and they max out a 2.8ghz core, so half of 2.26 core would suffer even more from this perspective.
Also SL is promising to utilize also the GPU in which nehalem/previous gen have the same advantage once again.
the one biggest advantage of nehalem is imo the memory throughput!





everything you wrote here (except the 2x memory speed which is ALREADY fully working) applies to all generations.
making a better handling of resources thus a more effective OS. leopard is far from optimized for the 08 generation
not even close. it was not made for 08 generation anyway. dont say that.
its gazillions of PowerPC code, weak multithreading weak memory management etc...

Just take a look at all the benchmarks when it comes to memory tests. The Nehalem has 2x faster in memory tests as to the last gen 8 core models.

 

[rylin]

Just take a look at all the benchmarks when it comes to memory tests. The Nehalem has 2x faster in memory tests as to the last gen 8 core models.

You really need to start reading the posts you reply to.

everything you wrote here (except the 2x memory speed which is ALREADY fully working) applies to all generations.

Furthermore, Nehalem's faster memory bus has nothing to do with Snow Leopard.

 

[jjahshik32]

Fact: there was a seed of SL beta as recently as less than a month ago.
Fact: El Jobso said SL would ship "about a year" after the announcement (i.e., in June).

In essence; get off the drugs.

Ok then it'll be released in june and get ready to sell your previous gen 8 core when you see the monster results of the nehalem.

And dont forget, I told you so.

I remember when Nehalem architecture was all the up-hub and surprisingly snow leopard was announced. It automatically hit me, oh I see why they are releasing SL due to the future of the architecture that takes better advantages.

 

[jjahshik32]

You really need to start reading the posts you reply to.


Furthermore, Nehalem's faster memory bus has nothing to do with Snow Leopard.

Umm why wouldnt it have anything to do with snow leopard? Its supposed to utilize memory and allocate them much more efficiently and it can even take up to 16TB.

"To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk."

Ok so if it allocates more into the physical memory, and the Nehalem being 2x faster when it does come to memory tests.. uhhh I think it would make a much bigger impact overall as to the last gen. Consider the memory speeds and add QPI, 40% less latency, 2 hyperthreads on each cores and we have a winner.

 

[rylin]

Ok then it'll be released in june and get ready to sell your previous gen 8 core when you see the monster results of the nehalem.

And dont forget, I told you so.

I remember when Nehalem architecture was all the up-hub and surprisingly snow leopard was announced. It automatically hit me, oh I see why they are releasing SL due to the future of the architecture that takes better advantages.

Like I said, feel free to return to this or any of the other threads when SL is out.
It's quite simple though: software isn't magic.

There are only a few more instructions in Nehalem/i7 (iirc, specifically to help offload video decoding) -- and the compilers Apple are using need to take advantage of those instructions to even get that much accelerated.

Software isn't a magic bullet.
99% of the optimizations in SL will apply to the '08 MP as well.
We're not talking different instruction sets here, where certain compile settings might give an amazing result, but rather we're aware of the lowest common denominator to which the entire thing caters.

You're simply expecting too much, and you'll be disappointed.

 

[jjahshik32]

Like I said, feel free to return to this or any of the other threads when SL is out.
It's quite simple though: software isn't magic.

There are only a few more instructions in Nehalem/i7 (iirc, specifically to help offload video decoding) -- and the compilers Apple are using need to take advantage of those instructions to even get that much accelerated.

Software isn't a magic bullet.
99% of the optimizations in SL will apply to the '08 MP as well.
We're not talking different instruction sets here, where certain compile settings might give an amazing result, but rather we're aware of the lowest common denominator to which the entire thing caters.

You're simply expecting too much, and you'll be disappointed.

If software isnt magic, then can you tell me WHY Apple is pushing SL in the first place?? And WHY developers comes up with updates to utilize the new architecture and hardwares??

Then I guess we all shouldnt upgrade to SL and just keep on chugging along on the regular Leopard.

I think were done here.

 

[rylin]

Umm why wouldnt it have anything to do with snow leopard? Its supposed to utilize memory and allocate them much more efficiently and it can even take up to 16TB.

"To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk."

Ok so if it allocates more into the physical memory, and the Nehalem being 2x faster when it does come to memory tests.. uhhh I think it would make a much bigger impact overall as to the last gen. Consider the memory speeds and add QPI, 40% less latency, 2 hyperthreads on each cores and we have a winner.

The faster bus is there whether or not you're running Snow Leopard.
It's as simple as that.

Those benchmarks you cite?
They're not from SL.
they use existing hardware through existing software, and there's not a whole lot to optimize.

The 64bit-ness of SL is simply memory addressing; doling out more than 4GB per process, being able to address more RAM.

You're still limited by the chipset and the logic board in terms of how much memory you can install.

Neither Snow Leopard nor Nehalem gives you more physical RAM than the machine actually has, so it doesn't actually "allocate more into the physical memory".

 

[jjahshik32]

It's really a matter of bringing the components together, and that's a group effort. The OS can't do it alone. A coding environment capable of developing multi-threaded apps is needed, an OS that can utilize the new extensions, and a final product from the actual application developer.

It's taken some time to happen, as everyone has been waiting for someone else to make a move first. In hopes of having to do less work, as it's a major undertaking.

If you truly read the quote from (article?) you posted, it says "Mac OS X multi core". To me, that translates into OS X ONLY, as that's the only part Apple can actually control. They don't write the 3rd party software, so they really have no idea as to how it will actually perform. Maybe the code was written to take advantage of it, maybe not. The code itself may also be anywhere from well written and lean, to bloated crap.

What it offers out of the box, should be a leaner OS, and the possibility of application performance improvements, provided the code can take advantage of it. Particularly Grand Central.

The use of the graphics GPGPU for processing will likely make more of an immediate impact, as that would be controlled by OS X.

This is more along my thinking as well. It will offer the possibility of improved performance with Grand Central, but the application developers will have to put some effort into using it, if they haven't already.

Think of it this way.

If you take an '08 and '09 MP, and install Snow Leopard,... exactly the same, and run the exact same benchmarks, the differences in performance would be a result of the hardware. If you compare the results with the same results from Leopard, the differences in scale would be equivalent.

Snow Leopard isn't magic fairy dust for a computer.

Seems realistic, as not only from the Beta results, but the simple fact that new software versions that rewrote single threaded apps to multi-threaded apps won't appear the same day Snow Leopard releases.

Then there will be some applications that aren't suited for multi-threaded operation anyway.

It'll ship in June.

That doesnt make any sense. Since the current Leopard runs about the same compared to the 08 vs. the 09 models that it'll be equivalent on the SL?

Especially when the current Leopard isnt really utilizing much on the current Nehalems features nor architectures? I guess we would have to find out once 10.5.7 is released to see if any differences occur.

 

[jjahshik32]

The faster bus is there whether or not you're running Snow Leopard.
It's as simple as that.

Those benchmarks you cite?
They're not from SL.
they use existing hardware through existing software, and there's not a whole lot to optimize.

The 64bit-ness of SL is simply memory addressing; doling out more than 4GB per process, being able to address more RAM.

You're still limited by the chipset and the logic board in terms of how much memory you can install.

Neither Snow Leopard nor Nehalem gives you more physical RAM than the machine actually has, so it doesn't actually "allocate more into the physical memory".

Nehalems features comes into play along with SL which will be a good amount faster than the 08 models.

I believe right now on the leopard, its not really utilizing the features of Nehalem. Just wait until 10.5.7 to clear some things up for now.

 

[rylin]

If software isnt magic, then can you tell me WHY Apple is pushing SL in the first place?? And WHY developers comes up with updates to utilize the new architecture and hardwares??

Then I guess we all shouldnt upgrade to SL and just keep on chugging along on the regular Leopard.

I think were done here.

Because Leopard is bloated in comparison to Tiger, and Apple wanted a chance to come up with a leaner and more secure OS.

You trying to end the discussion on your terms just shows how ignorant you are, and that you don't like being proven wrong.
Hint: when everyone else has a view point that differs from your own, it's rarely everyone else that's wrong.

 

[rylin]

That doesnt make any sense. Since the current Leopard runs about the same compared to the 08 vs. the 09 models that it'll be equivalent on the SL?

Especially when the current Leopard isnt really utilizing much on the current Nehalems features nor architectures? I guess we would have to find out once 10.5.7 is released to see if any differences occur.

WHAT EFFIN' FEATURES?!

It's already been explained to you that the faster memory speeds aren't OS related.

 

[jjahshik32]

WHAT EFFIN' FEATURES?!

It's already been explained to you that the faster memory speeds aren't OS related.

That is BS. Faster memory has everything to do with relations to an OS. Its retarded to think otherwise. Faster 1033MHZ RAM + QPI, 2x hyperthreading in each cores, able to disable unused cores and triggering turbo boost and no more slow ass FSB has everything to do with faster memory throughput.

Jesus, so this is what it feels like fighting with someone whos trying to defend their own hardware to DEATH.

 

[jjahshik32]

Because Leopard is bloated in comparison to Tiger, and Apple wanted a chance to come up with a leaner and more secure OS.

You trying to end the discussion on your terms just shows how ignorant you are, and that you don't like being proven wrong.
Hint: when everyone else has a view point that differs from your own, it's rarely everyone else that's wrong.

How is Leopard bloated?? My clean install is only 7.1GB.

As for your little comment it seems that can be said about you as well. Jesus.

Nehalem= superior hardware thus faster. Thats the truth and it will utilize SL much better than any other hardware thats out right now and thats a fact. Accept it and LIVE with it.

Your older 8 core machines are still fast and will be faster with SL, no doubt. But my point is that Nehalem will get the most benefits and outdo the older 8 cores.

 

[rylin]

That is BS. Faster memory has everything to do with relations to OSX. Its retarded to think otherwise. Faster 1033MHZ RAM + QPI and no more FSB has everything to do with faster memory throughput.

Jesus, so this is what it feels like fighting with someone whos trying to defend their own hardware to DEATH.

I'll bet you $500 you'll see pretty much the same memory throughput speeds under Linux.
OS X is not some magical piece of software.
It simply goes as fast as it can on the underlying hardware.

Faster 1033MHZ RAM + QPI and no more FSB has everything to do with faster memory throughput.

Funny how none of those are specific to OS X, eh?

 

[JimGoshorn]

How is Leopard bloated?? My clean install is only 7.1GB.

Since Snow Leopard isn't supposed to support PPC machines anymore, aren't the applications etc. installed with SL stripped of PPC code thus making them leaner and the total install smaller?