The Apple News That Got Buried 347
An anonymous reader writes, "Apple's Showtime event was all well and good, but the big news today was on Anandtech.com. They found that the two dual-core CPUs in the Mac Pro were not only removable, but that they were able to insert two quad-core Clovertown CPUs. OS X recognized all eight cores and it worked fine. Anandtech could not release performance numbers for the new monster, but did report they were unable to max out the CPUs."
CPU upgrade market (Score:2, Interesting)
And yes, my blog is down until we get a new transformer installed at my building...... Hopefully tomorrow by noon as they are installing a new one as we speak.
Great!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Bash fork bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the ultimate performance benchmark! How fast does your system halt?
Re:CPU upgrade market (Score:3, Interesting)
And it will still bode poorly for these companies because now that the Mac is all off-the-shelf components, so are the CPU upgrades.
How does this bode for NT6? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:completely impossible statementt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... really BIG news... bah (Score:4, Interesting)
We're introducting a virtual infrastructure very quickly, using XServe RAIDs as our storage LUNs. That being said, with VMware's soon-to-be Mac OS X offering, this would give our mac-toting engineers the ability to build a virtual machine locally before deploying it into the wider infrastructure. That is a truly valuable tool.
There's three of us at work that heavily rely on our non-mac machines - a pair of us doing some reasonably heavy VM work. I'd love to transition to a straight Mac platform (not Mac OS X + SuSE + XP). It's such a pain in the ass to have to suspend one and start another constantly because my performance starts to block. It's not disk I/O - the I/O never pegs (most of the stuff is resident, anyway). The RAM can be mitigated by adding more RAM (4GB currently). More than once I've watched procmon show me that the vmx process is pegged on the
Amdahl's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
Amdahl's Law might have been written for Big Iron, but it applies even more so to smaller sytstems.
XP 64? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mac OSX kills it (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember writing stuff similar to this back in the 80's to trip the watchdog on the VAX when the system operator was away and the machine needed a reboot. I think the C code of choice was something like "main(){while(fork(fork())||!fork(fork()))fork();
Re:completely impossible statementt (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Summary is wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually really easy to do if your memory system isn't meant to service 8 cores. And the article pretty much backs this up, every time the quad cores fail to shine it's blamed on the memory. But to me, the really interesting aspect of this is that they always blame FB-DIMM, which gains bandwidth by sacrificing latency. They even go so far as to suggest:
So, I think regular DDR2 @ 667 = 5.4 GB/s... divided amongst 8 cores is just 677 MB/s per core. It seems insane to think that would work (maybe it would, maybe my numbers are wrong also). If you want to attack latency but simply can't give up the bandwidth, wouldn't the SMP model work better-- just swap out the L2-miss stalled thread, and run the other full bore. Now you've reduced the problem to distributing your register bank among active threads. Well, I think that's how video cards do it, and memory latency is their enemy #1.
In any event, there you have it. The performance pendulum has left Ghz, is briefly swinging toward more cores, but appears headed now toward memory systems. Does anyone else think it's funny that L1 is still just 32kb? (oughta be enough for anybody).
certainly difficult to max out .. (Score:5, Interesting)
The poor baby's probably starved for data to crunch, having only 256M of RAM per cpu and apparently just the standard disk setup.
And it appears that they left the default OS X limit of 100 tasks per user in place as well.
Gotta open things up to let those puppies breathe!
Things you should know but don't seem to. (Score:1, Interesting)
Even if there really is some person on Earth that found your blog being down distressing enough to email you about it, I'm sure you put their fears at ease with a return email right? I'm thinking it's pretty safe to say that your responsibility to the public ends there. I doubt someone is going to say, "Hey, I saw your post on Slashdot yesterday, what an ass, you didn't even update us on the status of your blog! We're on pins and needles here. If I give you my cell number would you please give me a call the moment it's back up?"
So like the other guy said, nobody cares that your blog is down. To go one further, nobody cares that you even have a blog so don't fool yourself into thinking you are going to impress anyone by telling them you have a blog. "Hey baby, how's about we go back to my place for a drink? We can get a little more comfortable and have a nice long talk, right after I check my blog. Oh yeah, you heard me right baby. That's right, I'm a blog star."
As for calling into question the validity of a person's opinion because they posted AC, Slashdot should have policies to protect people like you from yourself. How ignorant is it to post on Slashdot, especially engaging in any sort of confrontational banter, using your name and having links to your blog in your profile? Where someone can easily google all sorts of the critical information you have sprawled all over the web in just minutes. While you can know nothing more than I exist, I can know everything about you. The person with a problem isn't the person posting AC, it's the person with their full name, address, phone number and place of employment in their sig. Wether you know it or not, that's what you have been doing every time you post on Slashdot.
Welcome to the internet. Please stow all personally identifiable information in public forums where it is likely you will draw unwanted attention to yourself. Keep your hands, feet, and self promoting blogs to yourself at all times.
Re:Things you should know but don't seem to. (Score:2, Interesting)
You question the productivity of my post as well as the motivation behind it. Very well, if you insist, I will support my statement and the contribution it was intended to make. In your first post you unethically advertised your blog. You were called on it. You then attacked the person that called you on it and attempted to deny your self-promotion by explaining it away as a public service announcement. It was laughable at best.
Your actions personally made me sick. Citing web statistics in an attempt to inflate your image. While I'm sure they inflated nothing more than your ego, they are most irrelevant. If you feel your blog being down is of general interest to Slashdot visitors, submit it as a news story. Quite frankly you are not fooling anyone, you did not post about your blog out of concern for your audience whom you think the majority of Slashdot is a member of. My contempt for your behavior led me to refute your claims of public service.
It was my desire to mitigate the vile stench your post brought with a somewhat lighthearted ribbing. I think I accomplished that task. I also wanted to refute your implication that nothing credible can be said in anonymity. Quite to the contrary in fact, seldom does ones name add to the validity, credibility, or productivity of a post. The only identity that would have supported the AC's claim that nobody cares would be Official Slashdot Poll Administrator. Since any other identity would not have added anything, anonymity certainly did not diminish his point.
The vast majority of Slashdot users do not use their real name. There is a reason for this, this is a public forum and some people can venomously disagree with even the slightest of opinion in opposition to their own. But you know that, you gave quite a response to someone who expressed an opinion of apathy to your cause. It is not courageous to use your real name while participating in flamewars on Slashdot, it's foolhardy. You have no idea who is watching and what your words might motivate them to do.
I would have no problem at all posting on Slashdot with my real name, so long as I did nothing more than add factual on-topic information to the conversation. However, informing you that your ego is hanging out is a situation that I feel calls for anonymity. I have no idea what kind of psychotic reaction you might have. There's certainly nothing to come from sharing my identity with you that would warrant such a risk. I was merely reminding you of the same.
Other than amusement the point of my post was to embarrass you and others who would use Slashdot for their own self-promotion into not doing it. If everyone typed up some gibberish post to brag about having a new Mac and a blog then Slashdot would be less than it is now.
Re:I guess (Score:3, Interesting)
It would have been fun to see something better show the potential gains available from additional cores. A utility like Visual Hub [techspansion.com] can use multiple cores to be simultaneously transcoding multiple
Re:certainly difficult to max out .. (Score:1, Interesting)
Darwin 9.0.0d1
$ ulimit -u
266
Stock settings (though who knows what the final release will use).
Re:I guess (Score:3, Interesting)
<idea>Maybe up the CPU quantum in the scheduler on multi-processor machines, to reduce the bus traffic spent on cache spill & refill.</idea>