frankie's Journal: It's 2007; do you know where your Macs are?

So here we are, four months into the first year of Apple Inc, and they are living up to the name change. I didn't realize the utter non-extent of it until I opened the latest version of MacTracker, clicked 2007 in the Timeline, and found exactly THREE entries:

1. AirPort Extreme (802.11n)
2. Apple TV
3. Mac Pro (8-core)

That's the complete list of product revisions since last year. Not even an iPod Gig-bump or an inch of display. Exactly one Mac update that's only of use to a handful of high-end pro artists. Meanwhile, Centrino Duo is here, and everyone else's models are zooming ahead. Several of them offer internal cameras now, BTW.

There hasn't been a year with this few announcements since ... hmm ... 1998. Lord Steve really believes iPhone is going to be as big a hit as iMac and iPod were. Dammit, I don't care about that, gimme my MacBook Santa Rosa!

8-core?

[benhocking]

I'm unfamiliar with the tracker - I tried to look around, but I didn't see that 2007 option you were talking about. So, tell me about this 8-core. Is it out already?

I do cpu-intensive, highly-parallelizable simulations, and I realize I'm not a typical "consumer" in that regard, but I'm salivating over all increases in the default number of cores. (I'm really excited about Intel's 80-core, but I realize that's still on the horizon...

Actually, never mind about the more info, I realized that if there's any

Re:

[frankie]

Mac Pro Octo is actually a relative bargain. Compared to the wholesale price of stock 2.66GHz Woodcrest, you'd be getting 3GHz Clovertown AT COST. And if only Apple offered 2GHz Clovertown [wikipedia.org], it would be a free option (either 4x2.66 or 8x2.00).

None of which matters to me, of course. 4-core is already more than I would be able to utilize 95% of the time. Gimme an xMac Conroe in a Shuttle form factor, and a MacBook Santa Rosa, that's all the computing power I'll need until well into next decade. And by then th

Bothers me

[benhocking]

None of which matters to me, of course. 4-core is already more than I would be able to utilize 95% of the time.

Yeah, that's what bothers me. I'm afraid that more and more people will fail to realize any benefits in higher and higher n-core systems, and then my dreams of a 1,000,000-core processor will never be realized. (1,000,000-core processor with each processor handling 10,000 neurons = 10 billion neurons = 1 human brain, presumably operating in faster-than-real-time.)