8-core Mac Pro 'official' - Advertised at the Apple Store

[Bastieeeh]

Yeah, you could see a Mac Pro with whopping 8 CPU cores at the British Apple Store this morning. After they realized the mistake (or did it happen intentionally?) they took the wrong offering down.



The story behind that is quite simple. When the current Apple Mac Pro was introduced in August last year it was quite a performer around the Macs. Featuring two Dual Core Xeons (Xeon 5100 aka Woodcrest, up to 3GHz, 4 MByte shared L2-Cache), support for up to four PCI-E graphics cards (no SLI or Crossfire though) and a solid storage/network base it was very competitive compared to the PC workstations as well. But soon afterwards (in mid November) Intel revealed the Quad-Core-Xeons ('Clovertown').
Now it's finally time for Apple to unveil something new - obviously a Dual Quad-Core workstation, this time hopefully with full SLI or Crossfire support.
To add another theory, Apple will reveal a Quad-Core desktop Mac at the same time. At the moment the iMacs are based on Core 2 Duos (Merom) and that's it. I think there is plenty of room for a Kentsfield Mac...

Source: Mac Rumors

[Jimmy 2004]

Now that Windows runs on Macs, we'll just have to wait for the rest of the hardware to reach the same standard as our PCs and they'll almost become an alternative.

J/K, but I definitely prefer Windows to Linux or Mac - if you want something to work, you can make it with minimal effort. 8 cores sounds like a lot, I'll stick to my one core for now.

[Bastieeeh]

TBH I think the MacOS will be a viable option in the near future for our windows based machines.

[Eric_Cartman]

i don't think crossfire or sli will be added

chances are this is just the same motherboard with quad-core xeons in it instead of dual-cores

why rework the motherboard to add features only a very very small percentage of their customers would use?

most mac users don't need or want sli or crossfire

as a matter of fact, i have read reports of people upgrading their quad-core mac pros to octo-core already, so i bet that is all Apple is doing

[DanTheBanjoman]

The crossfire/SLI issue isn't motherboard related most likely. It's a 5000x board which isn't supported by either Nvidia or ATI with a single exception. Dell sells some workstations with 2 Quadros in SLI on a 5000x. So technically there should be no issue.

[pt]

4 or 8 cores it's still a mac and you can mount a similar system or better with less money

[WarEagleAU]

8 cores. We can barely use 2 cores as it is now.

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

Originally Posted by WarEagleAU

8 cores. We can barely use 2 cores as it is now.

Um.....

Maybe YOU cant. But anyone who does photo or video editing can tell you the software makes great use of as many cores as you have.

And since the system will be tailored for photo/video editing, it will make use of all 8 cores.

Normally i never defend macs, but that comment was too uninformed.

[Wile E]

Originally Posted by pt

4 or 8 cores it's still a mac and you can mount a similar system or better with less money

Not really. You still have to consider the software. It works out to be very similar to build a comparable PC.