The Future of Apple's Pro Desktop Line

SB_SamuraiSam writes "WWDC is drawing nearer and ArsTechnica has a thorough look at what they think Apple's plans are for their future Pro desktop line. It's a decent read. As always Ars has a competent pulse on Apple and is more reasonable than purely speculative. From the article:

I think Apple's CPU choice is clear cut. Strange as it sounds, the Xeon 5100 series is the best fit for the Mac. If Apple wants to keep the Quad name alive, it's the only option. Dual CPU configurations are not possible with anything else in Intel land, so if Apple wants to offer two CPUs and four cores, Xeon is the only game in town. With the benchmarks we have seen, the Core 2 Duo is a clear winner for Intel, outperforming anything AMD has to offer. The Xeon? With its faster FSB and different memory, it's even faster than the Core 2 Duo."

The Switch?

[TrippTDF]

It seems to me that Apple might as well hold off on releasing the Pro line until CS3... I've talked to a few designers, and they are all holding out for CS3 to make the upgrade, since they work so frequently in these applications, and they take a big performance hit on the new hardware.

Re:I'm still not fully convinced.

[Mr. Underbridge]

I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.

Yes, but here, I don't think there are any single-core chips in play. The debate seems be be among dual-core chips, Xeon and Conroe, and further whether to use one or two dual core chips. The days of using multiple, single-core chips are gone. The article contends they'll go with Xeon because it's the only one of the dual-core chips that can be used in a multi-chip configuration, which is the only way Apple could hang on to the whole "Quad" thing. It would make a helluva flagship desktop PC. I tend to agree, because they need to maintain some kind of niche for their towers. It needs to be more than just slightly more powerful than the iMac.

Re:As A Quad-970 Owner I'm Sick To My Stomach

[4iedBandit]

Apple this mess didn't need to happen! Your bungling of the IBM relationship was your own fault!

Um, I've worked for IBM. I think I can safely say that the bungling wasn't on Apple's part.

Re:Xeon are for the XServe!

[frankie]

Conroe (Duo-tech) based Xeon chips will be coming out in September

Umm... you apparently haven't been paying attention since 2005. Intel rearranged their ship dates months ago. Xeon 5100 series [slashdot.org] (aka Woodcrest, aka Core 2 Server) is already shipping and available [google.com].

Re:Xeon are for the XServe!

[FuturePastNow]

Core 2 Xeons (Xeon 5100 series) are available now. You can go online and buy them. Er, well, most e-tailers are out of stock, but OEM's always get first pick. Go to this page and click auto-notify: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16819117100 [newegg.com]

Re:As A Quad-970 Owner I'm Sick To My Stomach

[rm69990]

I'd highly suggest returning the machine to Apple for repairs, there is clearly something wrong. Right this moment, I am encoding a 4 GB .MOV (MPEG-4 and AAC) to DVD Format with FFMpegX, have iTunes running on Shuffle playing my music, typing this from inside Camino, talking to friends on Adium and using X-Chat Aqua,Coreduotemp monitoring my CPU temp, and it is still running comfortably. Are you using the Core Solo or Duo? How much RAM is in it? I have the Core Duo Mini w/ 1 Gig of RAM. My Mom's 20" iMac Core Duo w/ 2 GB of RAM knocks the socks off of my old Powermac G4 1.4 GHz (upgraded with Mercury Extreme processor). Have you tried re-installing OS X? Trust me, it is not normal for your Mini to be acting like that. Yesterday, I had FFMpegX encoding another file and was using FrontRow to watch videos at the same time and it worked fine.

Re:Opteron

[Wesley Felter]

A Woodcrest system should have very similar power consumption to a 4x4 system. For example, check out AnandTech's comparison [anandtech.com].

Re:Windows faster on a Mac

[ZachPruckowski]

The dogcow was the Clarus symbol way back in the day. It was some strange creature that looked like a cross between a dog and a cow.

Sacrificial entrails refers to pagan rituals involving killing an animal (generally a sheep or goat) and studying the entrails in some strange ritual that was supposed to provide information about the future.

Re:As A Quad-970 Owner I'm Sick To My Stomach

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Please don't comment about professional workstations, they have nothing to do with your consumer grade shareware applications or games.

I believe that there are more professional workstations using intel products than that of the G5. I would even venture a guess that there are more workstations running SPARC than either x86 or POWER, because of the age of the SPARC and scientists don't always upgrade their computers. At least that is what I have observed.

I haven't used an Apple product for quite a while. Our lab has been using intel based motherboards due to the cost savings and performance when compared to Apple's offerings.

A very small number of the physicists (here) still used the Mac Pros, but its mainly because they can port their Unix based code to console OS X and have a nice GUI. Their programs may take advantage of the Altivec specs, but I don't think it's a feature they can't do without. I will say that one of the physicists in question has no desire to change, simply because what he has works and not because of any deficiencies of the Intel platform.

We tend to use FPGAs to perform accelerated calculations, so the existance of Altivec within a CPU is a non-issue. FPGAs are far more flexible. By that I mean while it can be used to accelerate vector calculations, I tend to use them for General I/O that interface with our lab/flight components. This flexibility gives us more bang for the buck, and VHDL experience can be used in both computational domains (Math & I/O).

On the x86 side of things, I've been interested in the Opteron line from AMD, since there is a FPGA available that will operate within the other CPU slot. Does anybody know if such a thing exist for Xeon line? Since I am mostly in the I/O arena, I uses PCI based FPGA boards.

Quad G5 is designed for such usage and those people using them does not come to slashdot to comment.

Well we never get moderated to more than 1 or 2...

Re:The Switch?

[SilentTristero]

4.1 is the end of the line for Shake. The huge price drop to $499 reflects that. All support contracts are being bought out and not renewed. Large customers have a source-escrow option available.

They are rumored to be starting work on a new compositing app which may or may not be shake-like, but which will certainly take some time to develop. Some of the shake support people have been laid off, but AFAIK the developers are moving over to the new shake-replacement project.

See http://www.fxguide.com/article359.html [fxguide.com] (podcast with Dion Scoppettuolo of Apple), http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showforu m=19 [highend3d.com], or http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2006/06/the-uncer tain-future-of-shake/ [outside-hollywood.com], and so on.

Re:As A Quad-970 Owner I'm Sick To My Stomach

[FuturePastNow]

It's not necessarily "bungling," either. Apple simply did not spend enough money with IBM for it to be worth it to IBM to spend R&D on Apple products. IBM can expect Microsoft to buy as many as 50 million XBox360 CPU's over the next five years. Sony may buy as many as 50 million Cell processors over the next five years.

How many G5's has Apple bought? Three million? There's no 3GHz G5 because Apple's orders would not cover IBM's investment in creating it.