[MW Forums]

Intel's new energy-efficient quad-core Xeon processor will ship Monday. more

[bigh]

So, any of you Mac Pro users willing to drop one of these into your box and see what happens? C'mon... you know you want to.

[solipsism]

Any chance that the energy usage--and subsequently the heat produced--is low enough to be considered for the iMac?

[projectiris]

There is no chance, zilch, nada of these lower-power varients being used in the Mac Pro. Can you really realistically see the Mac Pro's cores, if even it has 8 of them, being clocked at 1.86GHz? I mean, which would you rather have, four 3GHz cores or eight 1.86GHz cores, bearing in mind the current software usage models? You'd have to a very specific usage pattern to gain extra performance from the eight core model at that clock speed. There's also the marketing aspect, although we should have left GHz behind us, sub-2GHz doesn't sound good for a 'pro' machine.

[melgross]

That's the very post I was going to make.

[tallscot]

Quote:

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There is no chance, zilch, nada of these lower-power varients being used in the Mac Pro. Can you really realistically see the Mac Pro's cores, if even it has 8 of them, being clocked at 1.86GHz? I mean, which would you rather have, four 3GHz cores or eight 1.86GHz cores, bearing in mind the current software usage models? You'd have to a very specific usage pattern to gain extra performance from the eight core model at that clock speed. There's also the marketing aspect, although we should have left GHz behind us, sub-2GHz doesn't sound good for a 'pro' machine.

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The 5300 Cloverton Xeon is at 2.66 Ghz. An 8-core PC gets a Cinebench score of around 1,900 whereas the 4-core 3 Ghz Mac Pro gets a score of around 1,500. That's not very good scaling.
I think the number of cores is going to be the new Mhz Myth. People are going to think they are getting twice the speed because they have twice the cores. The 8-core 5300-based PCs are seeing a speedup of just over 4X, not 8X.
Oh yeah, the iMac would get the Core 2 Extreme, which has four cores.

[Nobody]

Apple, could you please make a fanless Mac for the rest of us using all that power saving technology from Intel?
Fanless = ultraquiet. Bedroom quiet.
Thanks.

[Machound]

I agree this is not a good choice for a Mac Pro. But I'd surely love to get my hands on a next generation Mac Mini with a low-power quad Xeon. I'm drooling all over myself for that. Will it happen this year?... Probably not... but we can fantasize, can't we!

[michaelrmills]

Me too... I'm not interested in them being in a Mac Pro now.

[Machound]

50 Watts/CPU sounds a bit high for a laptop. I wonder when they'll be able to get the current down below 30-40W at reasonable clock rates?

[BrianM]

Generally the iMac core2duo or MacPro can barely be heard... although in the MacPro the hard drive is very loud, as is the optical
with the iMac core2duo the optical drive is the loudest thing in the case.

[michaelb]

Quote:

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Apple, could you please make a fanless Mac for the rest of us using all that power saving technology from Intel?
Fanless = ultraquiet. Bedroom quiet.
Thanks.

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I have a 3.0GHz Mac Pro IN A BEDROOM, and the thing is whisper quiet. So much so that coming in the door I literally have to look to see if the white dot on the front is there to tell if it is on or not.
Under a desk, using the system is almost inaudible.
The fans are virtually a non issue. The loudest components are now the hard drives. With two Seagate 7200.10 drives (quiet) in a RAID-0 arrangement, plus the standard shipped Western Digital WD2500 (noisiest), the main sound you can hear is their spinning hum, the seek & read/write noise.
By the way, for comparison, I also have a dual G5 2.5GHz in another room, which relative to the Mac Pro is an airforce grade supersonic wind tunnel! It is as loud and obnoxious as the Mac Pro isn't. I also have an old 450MHz Cube, running a photo display, and despite being fanless, its hard drive means it is not totally noiseless.
There's no doubt, Mac Pros are very quiet machines.

[MacTel]

Maybe this news means well get an annoucement from Apple tomorrow on updates to the Mac Pros. I can't believe how long Apple has gone without updating at least some of their system offerings.