Just bought the new 8 core Mac!!!

galactusofmyth · Apr 9, 2007

I'm leaning towards getting the 8 core after WWDC in June. Hopefully Leopard will be released by then and will bring even better multi-threading performance and more 64 bit features and performance. That being said...

Expecting a huge performance benefit in single app applications like Photoshop, is probably expecting a bit much. A lot of filters aren't multi-threaded, and a significant number of the ones that are can complete a task so quickly to begin with, that saving fractions of a second my not be noticeable. You can see that here in a comparison of from a dual core mac pro (one processor was disabled) to a quad core mac pro, running PSBench (a photoshop benchmarking tool).

Maybe more importantly, not all apps are designed for multiple cores, and many apps can't be (or there may be no meaningful advantage to doing it, so they are not).

There are lots of exceptions. 3D and video rendering jump to mind... scientific calculations (don't ask, i have no clue!). A few other things. But as one poster said, I don't think many people use those apps. I like FCP, which should scream on this 8 core system, but no one else in my work or acquaintances world uses that. Even I find iMovie just a lot easier to use.

Why then am I still interested? I have 16 apps open at a time, including Aperture and Photoshop, and both can tax a system like crazy. And I hope to do HD editing sometime soon, now that HD camcorders are cheaper. That will really fly on 8 core systems.

galactusofmyth · Apr 9, 2007

Sorry - forgot the link:

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2816

galactusofmyth · Apr 9, 2007

Sorry twice! Scroll to the bottom for the PSBench tests with the Mac Pro.

aj_taylor · Apr 9, 2007

Until the OS is 64 bit, you are limited to an address space of roughly 2.5Gb.

I haven't looked, but is CS3 for Mac 64-bit capable (if running on Leopard) ? Obviously it'll be 32 bit on Tiger.

galactusofmyth · Apr 9, 2007

Sorry this is disjointed (I'm at work)...

The other reason I would buy it over the quad system is if you spent the $3200 on the Quad, for another $699 you get 4 more processors. Not that $699 is to laugh at, but that does seem like a cheap upgrade. Take into account that processor is worth probably $1200 if not more. The desktop Quad Extreme Intel announced today goes for $1200, and Apple is using the server based Xeon version in the OctoMac.

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Not much else to say...and thanks for the link to the benchmark. It's very illuminating for those who choose to read it. I think one of the most interesting quotes in Anand's article is the following:

"We're almost at the end of the review and so far we've hardly shown any performance benefit thanks to quad cores; just about all of the benchmarks we've presented here today could be duplicated if you only had a single Xeon in the Mac Pro instead of two.

It seems that many multithreaded applications are specifically targeted at dual core systems, and scaling above and beyond two simultaneous (and CPU intensive) threads just isn't where it needs to be for four cores to make a big difference. With the trend in CPU architectures being to significantly ramp up the number of cores, software will follow, but for now truly taking advantage of four cores is much like the early days of dual core processors: you either need an application that is specifically designed to scale to four cores (e.g. CineBench/3D rendering), or you need to be a heavy multitasker."

Which again, was my point from the beginning. Thanks for your post. I was getting tired of being a lone voice in the wilderness.

Jeff
--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Duncan,

That's a popular misconception. See the benchmark data in the link from Anandtech. Maybe CS3 is better...I hope so...but Adobe hasn't really leveraged the multi-cores available in dual-core machines for several years now--and I doubt that they have suddenly changed their philosophy and written CS3 for 8-core machines that weren't even available when most of the CS3 code was written. Here's the link again to Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2816

Also note, the gains from four cores over two--when there were gains--were minute, and generally these times do not scale linearly with core count--even Intel will tell you that. So, the point I made remains--for a pretty huge price increase, for the average user on this group, it's very hard to see how 8-cores is plus.

It's great to have if you really need it, or have money to blow, but if someone has to work 5-10 more minutes a day because of the seconds/milliseconds difference per filter, I don't think that's going kill them. But hey, if they want to, more power to them.

As I pointed out in my reply to Steven, there are a lot of people who come and read this board and think that the opinions of some folks here are the final word. I just wanted to add some balance to the thread.

Jeff
--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Don Mason · Apr 9, 2007

Having more than 3 gigs of ram available for Photoshop will actually speed up the application when crunching large files, in spite of the 3 gig Photoshop limit.

Tiger will allow use all available surplus RAM as PS scratch space before writing to disk.

Cheers!

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Duncan C said:
I wonder if Apple will put one of the new 4 core chips into a
Macbook Pro? That would make for quite a powerful portable system.
Not sure if the power/heat requirements would work in a laptop,
though.

I highly doubt it. Even the mainstream PC manufacturers avoid this--only fringe companies for the most part put desktop processors in laptops--its a case of trying to put a square peg in a round hole. The laptops that they make with processors are big, thick and ugly, and that's the exact opposite of everything Apple stands for. Heck, they use laptop processors in everything but the Mac Pro where they use server/workstation processors.

Apple doesn't make a single machine with the Intel desktop processors. It's a shame, because there is probably some room there. My guess is concern about cannibalizing the Mac Pro market. One of the top-of the line QX6800 machines--a Quad-core Core 2 Extreme processor that runs at 2.93GHz and a 1066MHz bus--would almost undoubtedly outperform the current 2.66GHz Mac Pros (due to an inherently faster memory architecture), and give a current quad-core 3GHz machine a good run for its money--at a significantly lower price. That wouldn't be a good market mover for Apple...so I doubt we will see it happen anytime soon--especially since they make so much money off of their laptops, not the Mac Pros or even the iMacs.

However...we can dream...in the meantime, it's likely we will have to wait until the next generation of process manufacturing until we see a true quad-core mobile chip. The "Penryn" 45nm process chips will be out soon, and we will see faster clock speeds as a result, but it's unlikely that we can see a quad-core at 45nm. We'll probably see them in the 2009 "Westmere" line or shortly after in the 2010 "Gesher" family of processors (also expected to 32nm). In between there, we will get lots of improvement, like the return of hyper-threading, which let your dual-core act more like a quad-core, and much more cache--all of which will help, as will the expected faster native speeds. In addition, Intel will finally be putting the memory controller on the CPU, like AMD did back in 2003--that will have a huge speed gain for many memory-intensive apps.

Its still a great world out there in microprocessor land...and there will be some interesting computers to take advantage of it.

Jeff

Jeff

--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Don Mason said:
Having more than 3 gigs of ram available for Photoshop will
actually speed up the application when crunching large files, in
spite of the 3 gig Photoshop limit.

Tiger will allow use all available surplus RAM as PS scratch space
before writing to disk.

Cheers!

Really? Can you provide documentation of this? I have not heard of this before...this would be very interesting if true, and a compelling reason to go out and buy a bunch of RAM if you use PS CS3 heavily. If it's true, I will finally max out my Mac Pro...

Can you post a link?

Jeff

--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Duncan C · Apr 9, 2007

Jeff_WI said:
Duncan,

That's a popular misconception. See the benchmark data in the link
from Anandtech. Maybe CS3 is better...I hope so...but Adobe hasn't
really leveraged the multi-cores available in dual-core machines
for several years now--and I doubt that they have suddenly changed
their philosophy and written CS3 for 8-core machines that weren't
even available when most of the CS3 code was written. Here's the
link again to Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2816

Jeff,

I read that review with great interest. I'm a software developer myself, and am currently developing a multithreaded, "universal" OS X application, so I well understand the issues involved. (My application, FractalWorks, creates fractal images, and breaks an image into an arbitrary number of pieces. It should be nearly 8 times as fast on an 8-core Mac as on a similarly configured single core Mac. I say nearly because there is some minor overhead involved in juggling multiple threads, and there will be some slowdown with shared access to main memory.) Anyone interested in trying out my app can download it here: http://homepage.mac.com/dmchampney1/FileSharing1.html . I'd love to hear how it performs on one of these new machines.)

It's my understanding that PS has been multithreaded for several releases now. Most of the image processing in PS would lend itself VERY well to breaking the job into N discrete pieces and farming them out to different processors. A lot depends on how the software is written however.

I'll be very curious to see how well the new multi-core Macs perform different CPU-intensive photo processing tasks using CS3. I wonder if anybody has done any testing on an 8-core mac with the CS3 public beta.

On another note, I was a bit disappointed to read about the slower access to main memory with the new machines. It sounds like the new serial memory is significantly slower.

Duncan C
--
dpreview and PBase supporter.

http://www.pbase.com/duncanc

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Duncan C said:
I'll be very curious to see how well the new multi-core Macs
perform different CPU-intensive photo processing tasks using CS3. I
wonder if anybody has done any testing on an 8-core mac with the
CS3 public beta.

Me too...I haven't seen any benchmarks yet, though. It's just a delight to have a native Intel version...

Duncan C said:
On another note, I was a bit disappointed to read about the slower
access to main memory with the new machines. It sounds like the new
serial memory is significantly slower.

Yes. That's a bit of a bummer. The unfortunate reality is that Apple is using an architecture that was really more designed for servers than workstations. The FB-DIMM memory architecture is very elegant for servers and the typical workload they handle, but not as great for classic workstation tasks. On the other hand, it's also the only way to get a larger amount of memory in an Intel machine. You have to take the lumps with the good.

I would be interested to see a script for your app. I have a quad-core Mac Pro, and everyone of the examples I tried pretty much finished instantaneously. Same with ones I tried myself--or else they crashed the machine (am I doing something wrong?).

The fractals are quite beautiful....

Jeff
--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Duncan C · Apr 9, 2007

Jeff_WI wrote:
[snip]

Jeff_WI said:
I would be interested to see a script for your app.

What do you mean by a script? You mean an AppleScript that drives it? I haven't tackled AppleScript support yet. Some of that comes for free with Cocoa, but I haven't even looked at it.

Jeff_WI said:
I have a
quad-core Mac Pro, and everyone of the examples I tried pretty much
finished instantaneously. Same with ones I tried myself--or else
they crashed the machine (am I doing something wrong?).

Crashed the machine? Eek. It's very stable on my G4 machines, and with the (limited) testing I've done with my wife's dual core MacBook Pro. Let me know what you do to crash it. Surely you mean "app quit unexpectedly" rather than brought the whole machine down. It's quite hard to do that with a Mac without running a task in kernel mode (a big no-no for normal apps.)

In order to make your Mac sweat you have to zoom in on details deep in a plot, and crank the max iterations up. (The maximum supported iterations is 65535.)

Drop me an email (address is in my profile, and in the About box for FractalWorks) and I'll send you some plot files that should make even an 8-core machine work a little. Let me know the display size on your machine too...

Duncan C

Jeff_WI said:
The fractals are quite beautiful....

I find it mind-boggling that such beauty and complexity lurks in such a simple formula:

Z(n+1) = Z

^2 + C

Duncan C

Jeff_WI said:
Jeff
--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

--
dpreview and PBase supporter.

http://www.pbase.com/duncanc

Jeff_WI · Apr 9, 2007

Duncan C said:
Crashed the machine? Eek. It's very stable on my G4 machines, and
with the (limited) testing I've done with my wife's dual core
MacBook Pro. Let me know what you do to crash it. Surely you mean
"app quit unexpectedly" rather than brought the whole machine down.
It's quite hard to do that with a Mac without running a task in
kernel mode (a big no-no for normal apps.)

Oops, I was typing fast. I meant to say it crashed the app.

Duncan C said:
In order to make your Mac sweat you have to zoom in on details deep
in a plot, and crank the max iterations up. (The maximum supported
iterations is 65535.)

One way to crash it is to type in a larger number...it didn't happen all the time, but it happened 3x out of 10 tries. The other ones came out fine.

Duncan C said:
Drop me an email (address is in my profile, and in the About box
for FractalWorks) and I'll send you some plot files that should
make even an 8-core machine work a little. Let me know the display
size on your machine too...

Thanks, will do--kind of fun.

Duncan C said:
Duncan C

Duncan C said:

The fractals are quite beautiful....

Click to expand...

I find it mind-boggling that such beauty and complexity lurks in
such a simple formula:

Z(n+1) = Z^2 + C

Indeed.

Jeff

--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Duncan C · Apr 9, 2007

Jeff,

I added another plot file, called "Slow Mandelbrot" to my file sharing folder. Try downloading it and plotting it. I bet IT doesn't plot instantaneously. Let me know how long it DOES take.

It isn't as visually appealing as some of the others. I set it up as a demonstration of a "deep plot" that takes a LOT of calculations to render.

If you launch the application "Console" from your utilities folder it will show you how many iterations it took to render, and how long, to 1/60 of a second.

Duncan C
----

Jeff_WI said:
Jeff_WI said:

I'll be very curious to see how well the new multi-core Macs
perform different CPU-intensive photo processing tasks using CS3. I
wonder if anybody has done any testing on an 8-core mac with the
CS3 public beta.

Click to expand...

Me too...I haven't seen any benchmarks yet, though. It's just a
delight to have a native Intel version...

Jeff_WI said:

On another note, I was a bit disappointed to read about the slower
access to main memory with the new machines. It sounds like the new
serial memory is significantly slower.

Click to expand...

Yes. That's a bit of a bummer. The unfortunate reality is that
Apple is using an architecture that was really more designed for
servers than workstations. The FB-DIMM memory architecture is very
elegant for servers and the typical workload they handle, but not
as great for classic workstation tasks. On the other hand, it's
also the only way to get a larger amount of memory in an Intel
machine. You have to take the lumps with the good.

I would be interested to see a script for your app. I have a
quad-core Mac Pro, and everyone of the examples I tried pretty much
finished instantaneously. Same with ones I tried myself--or else
they crashed the machine (am I doing something wrong?).

The fractals are quite beautiful....

Jeff
--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

--
dpreview and PBase supporter.

http://www.pbase.com/duncanc

J. Stayton · Apr 10, 2007

Jeff,
Is this what you're looking for?

From barefeats:

"Wow! Can you believe it? What happened? Tiger. That's what happened. Photoshop CS2, though it supports up to 3.5GB of memory cache, actually turns over cache management to Mac OS X. Using Activity Monitor, we observed the OS grabbing up to 7GB of memory to use as cache for Photoshop CS2, the only user application running on our G5/2.5GHz Power Mac with 8GB of memory."

http://www.barefeats.com/cscs2.html

Some more testing...

http://www.barefeats.com/quad16.html

Jim

Jeff_WI said:
Don Mason said:

Having more than 3 gigs of ram available for Photoshop will
actually speed up the application when crunching large files, in
spite of the 3 gig Photoshop limit.

Tiger will allow use all available surplus RAM as PS scratch space
before writing to disk.

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Really? Can you provide documentation of this? I have not heard
of this before...this would be very interesting if true, and a
compelling reason to go out and buy a bunch of RAM if you use PS
CS3 heavily. If it's true, I will finally max out my Mac Pro...

Can you post a link?

Jeff

--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

Duncan C · Apr 10, 2007

Jeff_WI said:
Duncan C wrote:
Oops, I was typing fast. I meant to say it crashed the app.

I figured. Crashing the computer (or anything other than a single app) is really hard to do under OS X.)

Jeff_WI said:
Jeff_WI said:

In order to make your Mac sweat you have to zoom in on details deep
in a plot, and crank the max iterations up. (The maximum supported
iterations is 65535.)

Click to expand...

One way to crash it is to type in a larger number...it didn't
happen all the time, but it happened 3x out of 10 tries. The other
ones came out fine.

A larger number in which box, max iterations? Could you write down the values you enter that cause crashes? (If you have something that crashes as often as 3 out of 10 times, you could use a command-shift-3 screenshot to save the settings before pressing return to plot, rather than writing everything down.)

My guess is that my range checking is off, and I'm letting in some illegal values. Since I know what the ranges SHOULD be, I'm not entering illegal values.

Duncan C

Jeff_WI said:
Jeff_WI said:

Drop me an email (address is in my profile, and in the About box
for FractalWorks) and I'll send you some plot files that should
make even an 8-core machine work a little. Let me know the display
size on your machine too...

Click to expand...

Thanks, will do--kind of fun.

Jeff_WI said:

Duncan C

Jeff_WI said:

The fractals are quite beautiful....

Click to expand...

I find it mind-boggling that such beauty and complexity lurks in
such a simple formula:

Z(n+1) = Z^2 + C

Click to expand...

Indeed.

Jeff

--
http://www.pbase.com/jhapeman

--
dpreview and PBase supporter.

http://www.pbase.com/duncanc

galactusofmyth · Apr 10, 2007

As an update, here's a quick review from barefeats.com., who just received there octomac, with the Quadro 4500 card upgrade. The tests are by no means extensive, but it is what one should reasonable expect for performance for common single apps (photoshop and aperture in this case):

http://www.barefeats.com/octopro1.html

Doesn't show much benefit to the extra 4 cores. He also mentioned Quicktime Export and iDVD Video Asset Encode didn't use more than 4 cores. Maybe they will be updated to do that, so maybe there could be some benefit (maybe when Leopard is out?). But this is what we have as of today.

Again, this doesn't dissuade me at all, because I multitask like crazy (aperture, photoshop, running Handbrake in the background, 3 safari Windows with 12 tabs each open, itunes going... you get the point). I'm guessing 8 cores and a lot of memory will help multitaskers a lot, and probably more so under Leopard. If that's true, $699 for 4 more cores seems cheap for how I use a computer.

aj_taylor · Apr 10, 2007

Don Mason said:
Having more than 3 gigs of ram available for Photoshop will
actually speed up the application when crunching large files, in
spite of the 3 gig Photoshop limit.

Tiger will allow use all available surplus RAM as PS scratch space
before writing to disk.

Not true. The OS will use available RAM as a buffer cache for I/O if there is a lot of I/O happening - this is typically where the bulk of the Inactive page count goes. If PS is the thing doing the I/O, then it will, effectively, be a cache for PS. But, this is NOT the same as "PS scratch space".

Don Mason · Apr 10, 2007

Here ya go....

Straight from Adobe.....

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?event=view&id=KC.320005&extid=320005&dialogID=8789614&iterationID=1&sessionID=1213e42822ad783c7d7d&stateID=0+0+8795712&mode=simple

When you run Photoshop CS2 on a computer with a 64-bit processor (such as a G5, Intel Xeon processor with EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, or Opteron processor), and running a 64-bit version of the operating system (Mac OS v10.3 or higher, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition), that has 4 GB or more of RAM, Photoshop will use 3 GB for it's image data. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Maximum Used By Photoshop number when you set the Maximum Used by Photoshop slider in the Memory & Image Cache preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, actions, etc.

If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB (Windows) or 8 GB (Mac OS)), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data.

Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop, is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can speed performance of Photoshop.

Just bought the new 8 core Mac!!!

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