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Rumour: 32nm Xeon a timed Apple exclusive
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 16th October 2009
The 32nm Gulftown Xeon chips may make their first appearance in Mac Pros, if rumours of a timed exclusivity agreement are accurate.
As reported over on French-language site MacBidouille (translated) - via Electronista - the word on the street is that Apple has been granted a time-limited exclusive right to build a Mac Pro system based around the new Xeon chips built on the Gulftown architecture, due early next year.
Although PC manufacturers would be granted supplies of the 32nm-based chips after a while, it would give Apple a temporary lead in the high-end workstation market. The six-core chips - which support Intel's Hyperthreading technology in order to simultaneously execute twelve separate threads per processor - are likely to feature 12MB of L2 cache without increasing the power usage over current quad-core Xeon chips.
The as-yet unconfirmed top-end Mac Pro allegedly features some neat hardware to match with its exclusive processor: a 10Gb Ethernet port - ten times faster than on the current Mac Pro line - and support for 8GB and 16GB DIMMs, which potentially means that a system could be specified direct from Apple with up to 128GB of RAM.
With the un-named tipster claiming that Apple could be looking to launch as early as the start of next year, it would steal a definite march on the PC market as Intel is not planning to make the new Xeon processors available to other customers until the second quarter of 2010.
Do you believe that Intel is harming its PC-friendly reputation with this timed exclusive deal, or will it take Apple at least that long to work out how to deal with 12 logical processors? Will you believe reports of a 10-gig-E equipped Mac Pro when you see it in the flesh? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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This chip isn't aimed at overclockers! Or even enthusiasts really.
And if you think it'll be expensive, wait till the Apple Tax is added!
Nothing anti-competitive about this. It happens every day with other products. Think about timed-exclusive games (GTA4), iPhones timed exclusive to O2 (coming to Orange soon).
Remember this is the retailers (Apple) offering a supplier (Intel) money for exclusivity. If you're referring to the Intel/AMD lawsuit (which I assume you are) then it's very different. In that case it's the supplier (Intel) offering lower prices to the retailers (Dell etc) if they don't use other suppliers (AMD etc).
You know Intel's line-up, right?
Anyways, it'll be overpriced but then again, Apple's servers are pretty cool and if they have a 3-6 months advantage they might gain some market-share.
Nothing that really affects me though.
Price? High of corse. Show somebody a low priced High-End Server-CPU!
www.adobe.com
www.autodesk.com
Mmm 12 cores + GCD = nice.
Great, except there are no 64bit Adobe apps, rendering 128GB of ram as much use as an inflatable dart board for Apple OSX and Autodesk products are generally aimed at Windows, Autocad has no OSX version
http://usa.autodesk.com/products/mac-compatible-products
There is only one 64-bit Adobe app, Photoshop. Of course, its not easy to use that much ram unless you are in the print world. But I use After Effects everyday, and it can easily use all that ram. It only starts with 3GBs of ram, but it can use unlimited ram for its multi-processing mode.
But in the long run, the people who are going to be using a computer like that are: 3D animators, video compositors working with HD and 4K, and people in need of a mini-supercomputer.
Not quite, Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, Premier Pro and some others I can't remember are all 64 bit. There is a 64bit Creative Suite....
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_64bit_wp.pdf
Also, its not that hard to make Photoshop use 3gb of ram, not sure what your Print World comment is about. As a Photographer (for construction and engineering industry) I can tell you (and offer proof also) a simple photomerge of 8, 3 mb photos makes it write an 8GB (yes not a typing mistake) scratch file to your drive of choice. Having more ram lets it avoid having to write this file so soon.
But I guess CS4 recently added all 64-bit, which is great!
This sort of deal happens legally all the time.
i completely agree. how is it fair to allow only apple to have the chip? what about other OSes. i hope apple gets sued again. they will probably use this as a lame excuse to say their computers are faster and better.
You get what you pay for and exclusive deals are perfectly normal. The anti-competitiveness law suit came up because Intel blackmailed companies to use their chips or otherwise they'd have to pay a lot more while their competitors would still get the cheaper chips thus being able to sell more for less. Nobody blackmailed Intel into signing an exclusive contract with Apple, Stevie just offered a boat load of money and got a limited-time exclusive product.
Macs have such a tiny market share...
Apple must have a huge amount of cash to throw about in order to afford a deal like that. A deal which probably won't do them a huge deal of good since as far as I'm aware, Windows/Unix/Linux is better for most Server/Workstation applications.
It's a deal between two companies. No one is being bribed or blackmailed, no one is being forced at gun point. Unlike some of the previous anti-competitive lawsuits, this doesn't involve one company saying you can have our chip on condition you don't stock the competitors.
Don't be too sad, I'm sure it's only a very brief thing, say a few months maybe. And besides, Apple will have paid a premium on these chips to entice Intel into the deal, so that means Apple will have to pass that cost on to the consumer ... and then you can complain about Apples pricing policies as well. That way its a win-win situation for you! Cool.
in the nehalem update they did manage to get a slightly more balanced system than their last iteration.... which was two quad core xeons but only 2GB of ram at stock. even now, you only get a 320GB hard drive for your £2k.... it will be interesting to see what they include with your 12 or 24 core system.
Apple getting this first doesn't really make any difference, mac pros are in a market of their own anyway. People who buy a very powerful mac are buying it to run mac only software. Its not like they are thinking whether they should get a super powerful PC workstation or a mac pro, their industry has already made up their mind.
first of all you dont game on a xeon cpu they are used for servers.
plenty of programs can use up to unlimted ram. Just cause games cant go above a set point doesnt mean the rest of the world is so inclined to do so. Alot of custom goverment apps. Apple doesnt sell the servers with osx even built on last i checked. As you can build the entire server from ground up how you desire.
3MB Jpegs can be HUGE, they are compressed remember. In print you can be manipulating many layers within PS and not only the file size but, as you have noted earlier, the space for calculating tasks goes through the roof. Raw and Jpeg of the same image will contain the same amount of pixels, it's just the grey levels per channel that differ. Merging a panorama from many images is also something done quite a lot in print. As is extending and image that the designer wants a bit more on.
With the way printers spend money on pre-press though, I can't see many laying out the cash Apple would want for one of these machines, especially the extortionate amount they charge for RAM. IE when I got my Macbook Pro, the ram upgrade (2 up to 4gb) cost £750. So, 1gb = £325, which means if you go for the full 128gb you may pay £41,600 for the upgrade. Nice. More than a full fat workflow system.
MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
...sorry, couldn't help it.