{"id":55718,"date":"2009-11-30T13:00:57","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T18:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theappleblog.com\/?p=36750"},"modified":"2009-11-30T13:00:57","modified_gmt":"2009-11-30T18:00:57","slug":"rumor-has-it-6-core-i9-mac-pro-due-in-2010-but-it-hardly-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/55718","title":{"rendered":"Rumor Has It: 6-Core i9 Mac Pro Due in 2010, But It Hardly Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Back in October,\u00a0HardMac reported<\/a> that Apple was busy testing Intel\u2019s new \u201cGulftown\u201d Xeon chip ahead of its inclusion in a refresh of the Mac Pro, which is slated for release early next year. The 32nm Gulftown chip is an evolution of the 45nm architecture found in the currently-shipping 2009 Mac Pro model.<\/p>\n

Gulftown will be sold under the Core i9 brand name for consumer machines, while its server counterpart will be labeled the Xeon 5600 series. HardMac\u2019s sources suggested Apple would have short-term exclusive use of the chip, much as it did for each of the last two \u201cXeon\u201d revisions of the Mac Pro line.<\/p>\n

Now, according to AppleInsider<\/a>, Polish website PCLab last week published<\/a> performance test results on Gulftown, showing that the new chips operated at nearly twice the speed of the previous generation chips during parallel tasks. In addition, they consumed only 50 percent as much power doing so. Sadly, the performance results are no longer available. PCLab explains:<\/p>\n

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We have been contacted by the reps of Intel Corporation. We agreed to remove the article. We will bring it back once Gulftown hits the stores, somewhere in 2010 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Earlier this year I bought a 2009 Mac Pro. And \u2013 as sheer luck would have it \u2013 my purchase was delayed by one week\u2026 the very same<\/em> week, as it happens, that Apple refreshed the Mac Pro line. I scoured the online store, meticulously comparing specs and searching the web for in-depth reviews of the new machine from the sort of geeks who spend their days doing nothing but benchmark testing. In short, I learned that while the Mac Pro prices went up, clock speeds came down \u2013 but I was reassured by those \u201cin the know\u201d that it didn\u2019t matter the cores were (marginally) slower than before. I was still getting a more powerful machine than I\u2019d ever need. I don’t mind admitting, though, for what I paid, I wanted my Mac Pro to be light years<\/em> ahead of everything else, and I wanted it to stay<\/em> that way for a long time! That\u2019s not too<\/em> much to ask, is it? <\/span><\/p>\n

Still, Gulftown will squeeze-in an extra four physical cores above the eight I currently enjoy, and provide an extra four megabytes of L3 cache over the eight offered by my suddenly lowly-by-comparison machine. And don\u2019t forget that 50 percent power-saving\u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019m only partially joking. Setting aside my shameful greed for ever-more-powerful hardware, the fact remains that my many-cored 2009 Mac Pro is woefully under-utilized. I do a fair bit of audio and video editing, but none of the software I use takes full advantage of multiple-processor cores. In addition, none of it is optimized for the 64-bit architecture of my machine or its Snow Leopard operating system. Final Cut doesn\u2019t even try<\/em> to be 64-bit compatible. Adobe CS4 Master Collection (in itself almost the price of a Mac Pro!) stubbornly remains a 32-bit suite.<\/p>\n

So the bottom line is that my gloriously powerful and impressive Mac Pro is still sporting its (virtual) training wheels because, frankly, developers are dragging their heels updating their software.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t stop me wanting<\/em> the new Mac Pro, of course. Like I said, I\u2019m greedy<\/em>. But I\u2019m also learning. And even if Apple releases this behemoth early in 2010, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be too<\/em> frustrated. News of breathtakingly-more-powerful machines is tantalizing, to be sure, but until software developers really get behind this new hardware, whatever advantages these powerful new chips and architectures promise remains almost entirely academic.<\/p>\n

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