Filed under: Hardware
CNET violates Mac Pro warranty, installs eight cores in Mac Pro
Over at CNET labs, they've done gone and stuck a couple of new Intel quad-core Xeon 5355 processors into an Apple Mac Pro and ran copious benchmarks on their new baby. Surprisingly enough, a single 3.0 GHz quad core kicked the bejesus out of the 2.66 GHz oct cores in some of the tasks. Follow the link to see lots and lots of bar graphs.
And yes, that is 8 cores hard at work in the CPU monitor. How long will we have to wait until we can pick up this configuration from Apple, instead of having to hack our way to more cores?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fra said 9:09AM on 11-15-2006
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APPLE TO SHIP A DUAL QUAD MAC PRO WITHIN THE NEXT WEEK!!!!111!!!111one!!!1
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Jason Brennan said 9:25AM on 11-15-2006
Hahaha well I wouldn't really consider it hacking the Mac Pro, because after all you're just replacing the CPU. I have to admit, I'm surprised that it works, knowing Apple's history on upgrades. But it's welcome news.
It's also welcome news to know that my 3.0GHz Mac Pro still reigns supreme! So much power for a student...it's truly overkill haha.
PS: I laugh every time I hear the word bejesus. It should be used more often I think
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bob said 9:31AM on 11-15-2006
good to see osx whopping xp on the 'fair' tests (not itunes or gaming)
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Mark Fleser said 9:37AM on 11-15-2006
Do you really think that CNET really cares about violating the warranty? As if they'll go into the apple store and go "ummmm, my mac isn't working", "well what model is it?" They'll ask. "well it's the eight core mac pro". At that point the genius will start drooling over the computer he is standing in front of starting a fire.
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Sherman Homan said 10:59AM on 11-15-2006
Creating the marketing name for a eight processor Mac should provide for endless hours of jokes!
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mike said 10:59AM on 11-15-2006
thanks for this information
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complex said 11:03AM on 11-15-2006
Already done by Anand over two months ago.
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u07ch said 1:24PM on 11-15-2006
Given that OS/X is booting after changing the chip i have to rethink something :: I thought that the security that tied OS/X to the mac was in the processor itself. Is it is the efi ? Or is it hidden elsewhere on the motherboard ?
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Jamie said 1:28PM on 11-15-2006
There's nothing tying OS X to the Mac on the Mac Pros; Apple is no longer shipping TPM.
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Chris K said 8:11PM on 11-16-2006
Anand didn't give any benchmarks. This test did.
So with chipmakers using multiple cores to keep up with Moore's law, how are programmers going to increase the parallelism of their apps to utilize the multiple processors? As this test shows, some tasks don't lend themselves to multiple threads.
Is some sort of time slicing (similar to a mainframe's task scheduling, but on a lower level) the direction PC software needs to take to make use of a multicore system?
I'm in the market for a Mac Pro (stupid non-DL-DVI on my iMac!) soon, but I can't see Apple putting a quad core Xeon in the Mac Pro until Intel can produce them at 3GHz.
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