Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > OS X v10.8 - Mountain Lion

OS X v10.8 - Mountain Lion (Page 3)
Thread Tools
imitchellg5  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Colorado
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:03 PM
 
That's not what I meant. I meant when Apple releases a Developer Preview, it's pretty much the same (feature-wise) as what will ship.
     
Salty
Professional Poster
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:04 PM
 
OK so here's something. They took RSS out of Safari! WTF!?
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:20 PM
 
Originally Posted by imitchellg5 View Post
That's not what I meant. I meant when Apple releases a Developer Preview, it's pretty much the same (feature-wise) as what will ship.

Oh really? Has this been consistently true? If so, I guess that changes things. I probably still wouldn't put the build on my personal production machine though, personally.
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:21 PM
 
Originally Posted by Salty View Post
OK so here's something. They took RSS out of Safari! WTF!?

That's somewhat surprising, but I think RSS is mostly dead anyway and is being replaced by Twitter as far as end users are concerned. It is still useful for developers though.
( Last edited by besson3c; Feb 20, 2012 at 03:30 PM. )
     
imitchellg5  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Colorado
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Oh really? Has this been consistently true? If so, I guess that changes things. I probably still wouldn't put the build on my personal production machine though, personally.
At least since I've been downloading them. The only features that I can recall being added with the Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion betas were different wallpapers between versions. But no, on a money-making machine, I wouldn't install it, though it does seem to be very stable, I'm sure you could push it into a screw up.
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 03:31 PM
 
Originally Posted by imitchellg5 View Post
At least since I've been downloading them. The only features that I can recall being added with the Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion betas were different wallpapers between versions. But no, on a money-making machine, I wouldn't install it, though it does seem to be very stable, I'm sure you could push it into a screw up.

But I'm not talking about features, I'm talking about significant low level code changes.
     
angelmb
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Automatic
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 04:32 PM
 
Originally Posted by Salty View Post
OK so here's something. They took RSS out of Safari! WTF!?
What about Mail app, can you still use it as your RSS reader of choice.?
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 04:46 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
That's somewhat surprising, but I think RSS is mostly dead anyway and is being replaced by Twitter as far as end users are concerned. It is still useful for developers though.
Huh?

How do you read news?
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 04:51 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Huh?

How do you read news?

I used to use RSS, but I've found that simply following the Twitter feeds of my favorite news sites was a suitable replacement, and easier for me anyway since I keep track of my Twitter feed anyway for other reasons.

My sense is that RSS never really caught on fire because of the complexity of finding a client, learning how to get to the feed on each site, dealing with sites that didn't have feeds at all, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like RSS and it is useful for sharing information between sites, but a lot of my clients don't request RSS feeds because they don't even know what RSS is, and I think this is probably pretty common.

There are users that don't know what Twitter is either or find it more complicated, but I think that Twitter is an easier sell than RSS.
     
TETENAL
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: FFM
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 04:52 PM
 
Nobody ever read news in Safari's RSS view.
     
Nergol
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 05:03 PM
 
I haven't upgraded since Snow Leopard, and am unlikely to do so anytime soon. Lion didn't impress me - undo its insensible, ugly, or just plain dumb interface upgrades, and it's basically back to being Snow Leopard, with slightly less stability. Thanks, but I'll keep my thirty bucks. As for Mountain Lion, if I wanted an OS where I had to log in to an internet-based account when I started it up, I'd get a Chromebook. No, Apple, I don't want you knowing where I am and what I'm doing every time I use my Mac, thanks. And I'd like to choose the cloud services I want to use myself, instead of having you pick them out for me.

Also, as someone else has pointed out, Snow Leopard is rock-solid, stable, and works fine. Any obsessive need I might have had to be an early adopter ran out around 1997 or so. So, no sale for me until major things start to break if I don't upgrade. And even then it'll be reluctantly.
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 06:19 PM
 
Originally Posted by Nergol View Post
I haven't upgraded since Snow Leopard, and am unlikely to do so anytime soon. Lion didn't impress me - undo its insensible, ugly, or just plain dumb interface upgrades, and it's basically back to being Snow Leopard, with slightly less stability. Thanks, but I'll keep my thirty bucks. As for Mountain Lion, if I wanted an OS where I had to log in to an internet-based account when I started it up, I'd get a Chromebook. No, Apple, I don't want you knowing where I am and what I'm doing every time I use my Mac, thanks. And I'd like to choose the cloud services I want to use myself, instead of having you pick them out for me.
I think the thing you are referring to is the initial machine setup the first time you use it ever. I would bet you can cancel out of this too, it just does an initial sync with iCloud so if you don't use iCloud it shouldn't be a big deal.

Also, as someone else has pointed out, Snow Leopard is rock-solid, stable, and works fine. Any obsessive need I might have had to be an early adopter ran out around 1997 or so. So, no sale for me until major things start to break if I don't upgrade. And even then it'll be reluctantly.
I definitely agree that there is far less reason to upgrade these days. About the only thing that appears interesting in this update to me is the Notification Center and ditching Growl which I'm not completely comfortable with (I suspect that at times it causes performance problems).

It's going to be weird though dealing with all of the applications that have Growl support built in and that fire their own notifications conflicting with Growl. I guess just turning Growl off or removing it entirely will suppress the messages, but I'm not sure if some apps actually include their own version of Growl that runs on its own, or whether it uses the main user installed version?
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 06:37 PM
 
Originally Posted by TETENAL View Post
Nobody ever read news in Safari's RSS view.
I don't read news anywhere else when on the Mac.

I have about five or six sites I visit directly, and about twenty I scan via RSS feeds.

On the iPhone, I use Pulse, which is an RSS reader, almost exclusively for news.

How do you read news?
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 06:41 PM
 
RSS via an email client made much more sense than RSS in a browser. Look at most RSS clients, they look just like email clients, and for a reason. I use a web based RSS reader build into my browser's home page, but if i didn't, building it into Mail would work pretty well for me too.
     
imitchellg5  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Colorado
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 06:49 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
I don't read news anywhere else when on the Mac.

I have about five or six sites I visit directly, and about twenty I scan via RSS feeds.

On the iPhone, I use Pulse, which is an RSS reader, almost exclusively for news.

How do you read news?
Feedly is a great RSS reader extension for Safari and it works perfectly well under 5.2.
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 07:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
RSS via an email client made much more sense than RSS in a browser. Look at most RSS clients, they look just like email clients, and for a reason. I use a web based RSS reader build into my browser's home page, but if i didn't, building it into Mail would work pretty well for me too.
I read RSS feeds in Safari and Cmd-click on the links to open the full articles in new tabs.
     
TETENAL
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: FFM
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 08:21 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
How do you read news?
I read news on the web.

How could one even read news as RSS? I know of no news site that provides full articles as RSS, since it is hard to include ads. When I have to go the web site to read the full article I see no point in starting with the RSS feed just to read the headlines.
     
Salty
Professional Poster
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 09:53 PM
 
RSS makes tons of sense in a browser since it is content off of websites. This is super irritating! Why would they pull out a feature that they once made a big deal about!? (Sherlock not withstanding)

I'm rather irritated about this, though I guess I'll check out feedly when I get home today.
     
chabig
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jun 1999
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 10:07 PM
 
I keep RSS feeds in Google Reader and the feeds stay synced whether on my Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Like you, I command click them to open in new tabs.
( Last edited by chabig; Feb 20, 2012 at 10:19 PM. )
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 20, 2012, 11:07 PM
 
Salty, sometime, in another thread can you retell your story about accidentally farting in the gym when you were trying to impress that guy? I always think about that story, that is one of my all time favorite MacNN stories, but you told it so long ago that I don't think I remember all of the details.

Sorry to derail, but you're not around very often anymore so I wanted to get your attention.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 01:17 AM
 
My RSS reader IS headlines-only. I click on the articles I want to read, and I clear out the ones I don't. Works very well for me.
     
Salty
Professional Poster
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 01:42 AM
 
Honestly I barely remember. My guess is that I was bending over to pick up some really heavy free weights and let one go accidentally.
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 02:00 AM
 
Originally Posted by Salty View Post
Honestly I barely remember. My guess is that I was bending over to pick up some really heavy free weights and let one go accidentally.
Your iPod was involved in the story. Remember now?
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 02:14 AM
 
Originally Posted by TETENAL View Post
I read news on the web.

How could one even read news as RSS? I know of no news site that provides full articles as RSS, since it is hard to include ads. When I have to go the web site to read the full article I see no point in starting with the RSS feed just to read the headlines.
How could one even read news as RSS?

You've never actually tried it, have you.

feed://www.macnn.com/macnn.rss
feed://apple.slashdot.org/apple.rss
feed://www.macrumors.com/macrumors.xml
feed://www.appleinsider.com/appleinsider.rss
feed://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/apple/
feed://www.mactechnews.de/rss/news.request
feed://feeds.hardmac.com/hardmac/
feed://news.worldofapple.com/feed/
feed://www.fscklog.com/index.rdf
feed://safariextensions.tumblr.com/rss
Daring Fireball
feed://www.loopinsight.com/feed/
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/monday-note?format=xml
feed://www.appleoutsider.com/feed/
feed://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
feed://www.tuaw.com/rss.xml
feed://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
feed://www.asymco.com/feed/
feed://feeds2.feedburner.com/EdibleApple

My set of Mac news sites, set to open in tabs.

Gives one FULL listing of articles (which includes a couple ads), and one tab with DF.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 04:54 AM
 
Just to revisit hardware support briefly: Mountain Lion requires the 64-bit kernel to boot. There are two things that might prevent the 64-bit kernel from loading - lack of 64-bit EFI, or lack of a 64-bit driver for some fundamental hardware. In particular, this means graphics drivers for GPUs without unified shaders, in effect Geforce < 8000, Radeon < 2000 and Intel < Sandy Bridge.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 06:05 AM
 
I believe that also excludes my 1st gen mac pro. I'll be able to play around with it tomorrow when I get home.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 06:54 AM
 
Correct, the 1st gen MP does not support 64-bit EFI, and the official Lion system requirements exclude it.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 08:46 AM
 
I've never seen a Lion system requirement that excluded a Mac Pro?
     
OreoCookie
Moderator
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
Status: Online
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 08:54 AM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
I've never seen a Lion system requirement that excluded a Mac Pro?
That's because Lion comes with a 32 bit and a 64 bit kernel, and older systems that cannot boot Lion in 64 bit mode (e. g. a first-gen Mac Pro) can fall back to a 32 bit kernel. This is because they do not have a 64 bit EFI. Mountain Lion only comes with a 64 bit kernel, and thus the oldest of the Mac Pros is excluded.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 08:58 AM
 
I think we are glancing over some details here. What OreoCookie just said, is that Lion DOES support 1st Gen Mac Pros, and what P just said is that it does NOT support them"officially". And what I was able to find does not mention excluding Mac Pros at all. And I ran Lion on my Mac Pro for months but that's beside the point.
     
cgc
Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Down by the river
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 09:12 AM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
I believe that also excludes my 1st gen mac pro. I'll be able to play around with it tomorrow when I get home.
Those of us who bought the 1,1 MacPro got <beeped> in terms of upgradability and support.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 12:10 PM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
I've never seen a Lion system requirement that excluded a Mac Pro?
I mean Mountain Lion, of course. Sorry.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 04:03 PM
 
Oh. You said "official", which threw me.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 05:33 PM
 
There are official system requirements for the Mountain Lion developer preview, which leaked in about 10 seconds flat.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 05:51 PM
 
Originally Posted by cgc View Post
Those of us who bought the 1,1 MacPro got <beeped> in terms of upgradability and support.
Five years down the line, though.

Which is in line with the way system requirements have been handled over the past decade or so.
     
Art Vandelay
Professional Poster
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: New York, NY
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 06:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Five years down the line, though.
Make that six years. The Mac Pro debuted in Summer of 2006. Mountain Lion is debuting in Summer of 2012.
Vandelay Industries
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 07:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by Art Vandelay View Post
Make that six years. The Mac Pro debuted in Summer of 2006. Mountain Lion is debuting in Summer of 2012.
I go by when a model was replaced, not by when it first became available.

MacTracker claims that the dual dual-core model 1,1 was available all the way until January 2008, which would make the last machines four years and eight or nine months old before they will no longer be supported by the newest OS, rather than the five years I claimed.

I thought it had been replaced by the new models released in April of 2007.
     
Chimpmaster
Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: AUSTRALIA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 09:51 PM
 
Its great to hear about a new OS but where the hell is the new mac hardware? iMac and Mac Pro especially.

Surely apple aren't moving toward a notebook only manufacturing company.
MacBook Alu, 13", 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, 256MB video
G5 Imac, 17", 1.9Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, 128MB video, built in isight, airport and bluetooth
Indigo iBook, 366mhz; 320MB RAM; CD; FW; Airport
     
Waragainstsleep
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 21, 2012, 10:11 PM
 
Apple is waiting on new chips from Intel. They are due in April or so.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 01:44 AM
 
Yep it's official, my Mac Pro won't boot Mountain Lion.
Let me tell you about my Mac Pro.
It has two 4-core, 2.66Ghz xeon processors.
14 GB of RAM
ATi 5770 GPU with 1 GB of DDR5 VRAM
SSD boot disk

And let me tell you why my Mac Pro is as powerful as it is:
Glossy screens are an absolute deal-breaker on a desktop (iMac), Mac mini's are not powerful enough, and Mac Pros are prohibitively expensive. So I recently decided that the best thing to do would be to upgrade this machine. It is now basically as fast as a high end iMac, yet it's going on 6 years old.

I'm pretty pissed off that they axed my machine. Nothing is final this early on in the process, but it's most likely final. Looks like I'll be smooth-sailing on Snow Leopard for a long time to come.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 04:32 AM
 
Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep View Post
Apple is waiting on new chips from Intel. They are due in April or so.
For the iMac, yes - although the MBP usually gets the first update, so I would estimate an iMac update in early May. The MP could be updated any day now. The relevant chips - Sandy Bridge-EP - are supposedly done now, after several delays.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Big Mac
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 04:44 AM
 
Wait, why do you think your Mac Pro won't be ML compatible? It has to vastly exceed the minimum requirements, no?

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 04:45 AM
 
Hypothetically, if I were an appleseeder, I would have tried it tonight and seen first hand that it would not have worked.
     
Waragainstsleep
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 05:30 AM
 
The 2006 MP is 6 years old. What did you expect?

My understanding is that the logic board in the first Pro is pretty similar to the following model. Perhaps someone will come up with a firmware flash.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 05:34 AM
 
6 years old, and yet still more powerful than most current models. Significantly more powerful than most of them. The real question is, how much actual effort would it take for apple to make 10.8 run on both a 32bit and 64bit kernel like previous versions? What are the advantages (besides saving manpower) for dropping 32bit kernel support.
     
OreoCookie
Moderator
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
Status: Online
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 06:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
6 years old, and yet still more powerful than most current models. Significantly more powerful than most of them.
Where do you get that from? Let's look at SPECmarks.
Your Mac Pro has two Woodcrest 5150 Xeons. A Dell system (PowerEdge 2950) equipped with two has a speccing_rate of 64.3 (there are other systems with the same processor, but they score lower, e. g. a Fujitsu-Siemens PRIMERGY BX620 S3 scores only 55.3. The SPECfp_rate scores are 40.7 and 43.1 (the Fujitsu-Siemens system being a little faster here).

The high-end iMac has a SandyBrdige Core i7-2600. Systems with this cpu score around 160 in SPECint_rate and 112 in SPECfp_rate.

This makes the high-end iMac more than twice as fast in this benchmark. Of course, this is hardly surprising, we are comparing a six-year old system to a brand new system. While I see no reason to cut off the first-gen Mac Pro, you're overestimating the performance of your system a little.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
l008com
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 06:18 AM
 
Yes, when I say my mac is faster than "most" current Macs, I didn't mean "all" of them, I meant "most" of them. The highest-end iMac that you have to BTO to get, is faster than my Mac.
Also if you want to look at geekbench benchmarks, my Mac Pro is only slightly slower than the high end i7 iMac. Of course there is more to a computer's speed than it's processor, and I've upgraded a lot more than the processor.

Anyway back to the point, yes I understand my Mac is old. But I find it hard to argue against supporting a Mac that is faster than most current models, despite how old it is.

What does it *actually* mean to be able to run a 32bit kernel vs 64bit kernel. What are the real benefits of making an OS that only runs with a 64bit kernel vs an OS that can run with a 32bit or 64bit kernel?
     
OreoCookie
Moderator
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
Status: Online
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 06:37 AM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
Yes, when I say my mac is faster than "most" current Macs, I didn't mean "all" of them, I meant "most" of them.
I don't even think this is true, at least CPU-wise. However, I could not find SPECmarks of mobile Sandybridge cpus. If you look at the gap and do a little scaling of the scores, you can see that at least all quad core Macs are faster than your system (i. e. 15" MacBook Pro and up, all iMacs as well as the 4-core variant of the Mac mini).

I would say that your system is slower than all Macs currently sold save possibly the MacBook Airs.
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
Also if you want to look at geekbench benchmarks, my Mac Pro is only slightly slower than the high end i7 iMac.
Geekbench scores include a lot of other factors, e. g. hard drive performance, but they are not such a good measure of cpu performance. I was referring to CPU performance. Since hard drive performance, for instance, grows much more slowly than cpu performance, it's not surprising that very often the scores of older systems are comparable to those of newer systems -- unless you add an SSD

Edit: if you go by Geekbench scores, it's quite clear: the MacBook Air is rated above your Mac Pro. The 15" MacBook Pros have scores that are twice as high. However, I prefer benchmarks that are a little more fine-grained and test individual subsystems of a computer.
( Last edited by OreoCookie; Feb 22, 2012 at 06:48 AM. )
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
P
Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 08:27 AM
 
Those old MPs are not particularly strong in raw performance. Their strengths are the RAM ceiling and that you can upgrade the GPU.

Some comparison points:
CPU: My 2009 iMac (the first quadcore, Lynnfield) absolutely crushes the first (2x2) MP. Any current iMac except the education model will beat it. The current i7 MBPs will also beat it on any reasonable workload. For the 2x4 MP, like yours, it depends on the workload, as anything that threads well to over 4 threads is likely to be a win for the 2x4 MP, but a current iMac will still beat it on a lot of things. If you think that the MP is that much more powerful, you're underestimating the weak spot - the very high memory latency for FB-DIMM. Conroe (et al) cache controllers use aggressive prefetchers to try to hide that, but they cannot fully compensate. On average, your MP would lose even to the default 15" MBP.

GPU: The base GPU in the original MP is very weak, but it can be upgraded to monsters that beat any current non-MP mac. Your 5770 beats the 4850M in mine, but it falls to the 6970M in the top current iMac.

HD: The HDs in those old MPs are quite good, and they will certainly beat a 2.5" HDD in an MBP, but they cannot match an SSD. You don't mention which SSD you have, but the difference between brands is small. I'd call it a draw against any modern SSD Mac.

RAM: modern Macs have caught up with the RAM ceiling, and an upgrade is much cheaper.

Viewed this way, your MP doesn't look that great. Threaded workloads will be a win, that upgraded GPU is quite powerful compared to the mobile GPUs in MBPs and iMacs, and the SSD handles the I/O problem, but for a general CPU-bound task that does not use more than 4 threads and does not fit in the L2, it looks quite weak.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Waragainstsleep
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 22, 2012, 08:45 AM
 
Might be worth pulling some of your upgrades and trading the chassis up to a slightly newer one. Can't imagine the EFI will go 128-bit for a while.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
 
Thread Tools
 
Forum Links
Forum Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Top
Privacy Policy
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 12:27 AM.
All contents of these forums © 1995-2017 MacNN. All rights reserved.
Branding + Design: www.gesamtbild.com
vBulletin v.3.8.8 © 2000-2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.,