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Dzokayi · Sep 14, 2006, 10:56 AM

Here it is. Looks like a drop-in replacement as folks here indicated it would be. Not bad... I bet the Xserves will see more of this action than the Mac Pros.

tooki · Sep 14, 2006, 11:49 AM

Clovertown is four cores, not eight. You're seeing eight because the Mac Pro holds two of them.

tooki

Dzokayi · Sep 14, 2006, 12:03 PM

I realize that... editing title for clarification. The big news is that with the switch to Intel, Apple is no longer taking pains to cripple the upgrade potential of the professional logic boards.

We grabbed a pair of 2.4GHz Clovertown samples and tossed them in the system, and to our pleasure, they worked just fine. Our samples used a 1066MHz FSB, although we're expecting the final chip to use a 1333MHz FSB, but the most important part of the test is that all 8 cores were detected and functional.

This is a nice break from the Power Mac G5 days, and should considerably extend the useful lifespan of the current Mac Pro lineup. Bravo!

Leonard · 04:43 PM

Yeah, I mentioned that a couple days ago. http://forums.macnn.com/65/power-mac...adeable-proof/

I thought it was significant news that someone actually performed an upgrade on the CPUs. Sure some sites said the Mac Pro should be upgradeable since it has sockets, but Anandtech actually performed an upgrade and got the MacOS X running on the upgraded machine and recognizing all 8 cores. That's quite a difference than saying it should, or it might be upgradeable.

The info on the latency in the memory subsystem isn't good news, though. I thought the latency would have been made up for with the extra 2MB of L2 cache in the Xeons.

Dzokayi · Sep 14, 2006, 10:24 PM

...I missed your earlier thread, Leonard. This doesn't seem to have generated much excitement on the boards. I am thrilled, however. Oh well. Mods, feel free to kill / consolidate threads.

webmonkie · Sep 15, 2006, 07:42 AM

Clovertown will give a solution to professional mobile desktop. With a processor like this I can see myself getting a 17-Inch Mac Pro Notebook and having no problems with applications like Photoshop and illustrator.

wei · Sep 15, 2006, 07:53 AM

ehh... correct me if i'm wrong... isn't Clovertown a Xeon family proc?
How you going to stuff a server proc into a laptop??? Maybe you have to wait for Core 4 Duo mobile version then.

Leonard · Sep 15, 2006, 10:57 AM

Yes, Clovertown is a Xeon, which is a desktop chip. Let me see, we are in the Mac Pro forum aren't we... why, yes we are!

On the laptop side, you would have to wait for the successor to Merom. Not sure what that is.

chefpastry · Sep 15, 2006, 11:37 AM

Does anyone have any idea how much a Clovertown may cost when it's introduced? I think I have to start saving...

mduell · Sep 17, 2006, 03:18 PM

Originally Posted by webmonkie

Clovertown will give a solution to professional mobile desktop. With a processor like this I can see myself getting a 17-Inch Mac Pro Notebook and having no problems with applications like Photoshop and illustrator.

As others have noted, Clovertown is a workstation-class chip with a TDP to match. The codename for Intel's 4 core mobile chip hasn't leaked yet, so it's likely quite a ways away.

Avanon · Sep 19, 2006, 12:16 AM

Very exciting news. My only question: What apps will be able to take advantage of all 8 cores?

Simon · Sep 19, 2006, 03:31 AM

As soon as you have a code that has eight demanding threads, you'll want a Clovertown Mac Pro.

No seriously, in my work I deal with parallel HPC and for the stuff we do, basically the more cores the better. Of course there is a trade-off because at some point stuff like L2 cache, memory bus and the inter-core communication becomes a problem. But in general, multiple cores is a direct advantage.

For consumers it's not quite as clear. Although Mac OS X constantly has many threads running and will no doubt be able to distribute tasks to all cores, many of those tasks will be rather light weight and not really max out your box. OTOH since multi-cores have come to the consumer market I'd expect many codes to be optimized for multithreading and parallel operation. Chances are, with time your additional cores will get used more and more. Especially multimedia apps will profit from multiple cores and strong vector processing units. And hopefully game developers will also start to realize that their codes need to make more use of distributed performance. Letting the second core do the audio while the first core and the GPU do the rest of the game was only the first step.