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November 02, 2006
So much for the Mac Pro: Intel doubles the bet
Too bad for those inveterate toads who shelled out $3999 for a Mac Pro - that delightfully powerful box from Apple that ships with two K2.66GHz Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors and 3GB of RAM.
Today Intel announced it's brought forward the shipping date of its Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro: essentially two of those 2.66GHz dual-core processors on a single chip. According to the Tom's Hardware preview of the new chip, you can expect an 80 per cent performance jump in an application like HD video encoding and conversion from Kentsfield - essentially two Core 2 Duo E6700 cores in one socket package. Most software hasn't been re-written to take advantage of the extra cores, but when that happens, no self-respecting toad is going to be happy with a slow old Mac Pro. So much for that $3999.
And we should possibly mention the fact that we just happen to have one of those hot little CPUs in our possession for testing.
Posted by cw at November 2, 2006 05:03 PM
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Comments
AFAIK Video codecs can't take advantage of Distributed Processing.
This fact may be restricted to the Quicktime h.264 Codec or may include all Video Codecs.
Therefore, a Quad Core machine like the MacPro mearly lets you do more other stuff while one processor core is encoding the video. Dual Core Machines are still Ideal since one processor Core can do the encoding while the other core can deal with IO and UI.
Posted by: Daniel Woods at November 2, 2006 06:44 PM
we just happen to have one of those hot little CPUs in our possession for testing.
Should we take the temperature literally?
Posted by: anandasim ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 2, 2006 09:19 PM
What is the cost in electricity to run all 4 CPUs?
Posted by: Paul at November 2, 2006 09:20 PM
I was just about to buy a nice Mac Pro - one of those puppies running XP in a VM like Parallels, what a cool machine. Now I might hold off until I get a better sense of the roadmap.
AFAIK the Mac Pros only ship with 1GB of RAM. To get 3 will cost you about $4500, closer to $5500 from the Apple store. Ouch!
Posted by: Colin J at November 6, 2006 01:05 PM