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Apple might release six-core Mac Pros
EXPENSIVE TOYMAKER Apple might be about to release a line of six-core Mac Pros that you will have to mortgage your house to buy.
A number of tech magazines are reporting that the Mac Pros will be based around Intel's Core i7-970 chip and should be in the shops in a couple of weeks.
If turns out to be the case then Apple will have done a deal with Chipzilla to get the chips early again. A similar deal was done with Intel's Core i5 chips when those found their way into Macbooks before they were widely available.
The rumour mill is also reporting that the machines will have Mac-edition ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards, which cost nearly £300.
The last major refresh to the Mac Pro equipped it with Intel's Nehalem Xeon processors, with a high-end eight-core Mac Pro offering two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 chips. Earlier this month, Apple upgraded that to a potential maximum 2.93GHz eight-core system.
All up we can expect any new Apple Mac Pro machines to be expensive in a way that many can't comprehend. Apple usually takes the hardware costs of the machines and then about doubles or triples that to arrive at a retail price.
The current equivalent Mac Pro, complete with Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics and monitor is now in the shops for £2,499. The costs of hardware in this case will be about £500 for the chip and £300 for the GPU.
Our guess is that any new Mac Pro will probably end up at about £3,000 or more. The beast will be targeted at high-end professional workstations in publishing and art studios. Still for a couple of hundred quid more you could buy this, which looks a bit more interesting. µ
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The iPod is basically a toy, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. A good product doesn't have to be designed only for work. That said, only recently has anyone created a PMP that honestly challenges it (Zune HD).
The iPhone is a pretty serious piece of hardware even if it's designed more for consumers than businesses. I don't see how anyone could claim there is a better smartphone out there with a straight face. I've been a Blackberry user for years but I'm finally dropping the habit with the next iPhone release.
The Macbook Pro, also not a toy. While Apple has been strangely slow to update it with new intel processors, it's still one of the three or so high-end laptops that I'd consider buying. The others being Lenovo's Thinkpad and HP's EliteBook.
The iMac and Macbook aren't bad computers either. I don't think they're something a serious user would have as their primary machine, but they're still fairly capable. As with other Apple products, people may knock the iMac for whatever reason buy I've also yet to see any other company produce and all-in-one that is as good. The others all seem to be fatally flawed in some way. If I were buying a computer for my mom, it'd be an iMac. It just wouldn't be the 27" model. That is really a problem with the panel manufacturer and not with Apple (Dell sells a monitor based on the same panel and it has the same issues).
I don't think you'd see someone who actually knew what they were talking about say OSX was a toy either. People will say 'Linux is better'. Why? Because you can't run Photoshop on it, so it's better? No doubt I'd rather install OSX on a machine that I build. Apple really should release it this way, even with a really stringent hardware compatibility list. They could definitely carve some market share from Microsoft.
The AppleTV? Pointless waste of space. They could have done something cool with it but I'm guessing the content MAFIA didn't get on board.
Oh, and their mice suck, badly.
The Mac Xeon is probably the only thing Apple makes that's not a toy. I've worked on them and they are respectable machines.
If I were to buy a workstation, I'd probably go with a Boxx.
http://www.boxxtech.com/
Also, the 2.93GHz chips (and 2.66GHz ones) have been available in the 2S Mac Pro since launch, they weren't upgraded recently. Apple did add a 3.33GHz option to the 1S Mac Pro, however.
that the inq igonored copying any news regarding the Intel 6 core processor.. Makes you wonder?
Considering the base Mac Pro now gets beaten by sub £500 desktops this is a much needed fillip.
Nice to get back to saying 'Core' rather than 'WTF'.
It's nice to see that somebody finally points out the facts that Nick doesn't do his homeworks. Well Nick, what do you think about it? Don't most of your articles have comments like this? Do your research, and btw, the Desktop you're linking to uses different CPU ;) and as others said there's no macbook with core i5 out there.
Did you even check what the going rate was for a Xeon-based workstation? A mere 30 seconds in Google reveals that the current range of Mac Pros run pretty much par for the course versus other Xeon-based workstations of similar spec. You seem to be confusing "I can't afford one" and "hideously expensive".
The difference between a journalist and a blogger is research. Do some for once in your life.
On a side note a consumer-grade chip driving a Mac Pro isn't likely because they don't support ECC memory, and because you can only install one per motherboard. Again, if you'd done some research you should know that.
This is the most powerful Intel processor for dual socket server and has won the benchmark against AMD Magny Cours.
Considering how much you rabidly flame Apple I would think you'd use some of your time to conduct some basic research. Apple doesn't offer Core i5/i7 processors in it's laptops, it certainly didn't get them early. However, the Macbook Pro page is down at their online store at the moment, so perhaps they're updating them today. They have had desktop i5/i7 processors in the iMac line for a bit.
On a side note, you have this annoying habit of suggesting that any IBM POWER processor is a Cell. A few Apple rants back at this site, or perhaps it was Fudzilla, you did this. A POWERx, PowerPC, and Cell processor are very different.
POWER (as in POWER5/6/7) are for enterprise servers. The last PowerPC chip Apple used in it's G5 Power Macs and iMacs (the 970 series) was a cut down POWER4. The Cell has a PowerPC core with additional processing units for floating point math performance.
Second of all, you're assuming a lot when you say a hex-core intel processor is going to be a grand. First off, Apple doesn't use Core i7 processors in it's Mac Pros, they use the Xeon variants. The reasons for this are obvious in the dual processor model (it's not even particularly overpriced for what it is). The single socket Mac Pro uses Xeons as well. I'm guessing it's for registered/ECC DIMM support and also so they can charge more. That part is ludicrously priced.