Mac Pro Eight or Four Core?

jlipkin · #1 01-15-2008, 10:00 AM

I'm planning on purchasing a new Mac. The Mac Pro Quad 2.66 can be had for about $2,300 new, while the Eight core 2.8 is running $2,800. Will I see any performance boost from the 4 to the 8? I'm going to be running mostly Photoshop and Lightroom. I generally have a few programs open at the same time, but I'm not doing a huge amount processing. I've heard that PS and LR won't be written to take advantage of 8 cores, and the speed advantage will be seen mostly in video and 3D apps.

Jerry Skrocki · #2 01-15-2008, 10:59 AM

This benchmark test shows the performance gain with the eight core system and Photoshop CS3 is "modest".

Macworld | From the Lab: Internal changes bolster latest Mac Pro

Martin_Doudoroff · #3 01-15-2008, 11:12 AM

You absolutely should read Lloyd Chamber's three articles, if you haven't already:

diglloyd: Multi-core Computers

diglloyd: Apple Mac Pro

diglloyd: All About Apple Mac Pro Memory

The first article directly addresses your question about cores and performance. The others provide excellent perspective on the equipment options of the Mac Pro.

A couple things have changed since Lloyd wrote those articles. The new Mac Pros have faster bus speeds and they've gone to using only quad-core Xeons. The former is a win for everyone. The latter... well, I don't really understand why they're doing it. I can confirm that Lightroom will employ all four of my cores (I have a first-gen Mac Pro with dual dual-cores) for some operations, such as creating 1:1 previews. I'm skeptical that these operations would be anywhere near 2x faster if I had eight cores.

Moreover, I haven't seen a good analysis, yet, on the relative performance differences between one quad core processor and two dual-core processors. Maybe it's a wash. In a sense, it's academic, because you can't get dual-core processors in a Mac Pro at this time.

If I were you, in the absence of additional info, I'd buy the single quad-core unit and put the savings towards gobs of RAM. My main experience has been that you can never have too much RAM.

Martin_Doudoroff · #4 01-15-2008, 11:17 AM

Jonathan, I'm curious: what do you plan to do for hard drives in this new system?

jlipkin · #5 01-15-2008, 12:47 PM

Martin, I'm limited to what I can buy through Amazon, as I'm putting a boat load of credit card rewards towards the purchase price. Looks like they are clearing out the 2-core systems, and not offering any single 4-cores at the moment. The dual 2.66 two-core is $500 less than the single 2.8 four-core.

Looks like the best bang for the buck is to get the 2 core dual 2.66 and buy an extra $500 of memory. Transintl is selling 8G for $300.

As for HD, I've been thinking about this for a while but no decisions yet. My main data drives are external SATA in a RAID 1 driven by a SATA to FW 800 bridgeboard. I've thought about an internal RAID now that I'll have extra bays internally, but Apple's $999 card is a bit pricey. There are some other options - Rocketraid offers a RAID 5 card for about $300 which I might use to create a RAID.

I keep my LR library on the boot drive, and RAW files on the external. For most of the disk-intensive tasks, I think LR reads from the library, and the speed from the external is ok for everything else.

Update - the 2.6g is now $2150

Noel_Carboni · #6 01-15-2008, 01:35 PM

Given the difficulty in upgrading computers - the physical change-out, porting data, reinstalling software, taking the time to set up the system just the way you like it, working out kinks in the new system... I always choose to buy absolutely top of the line cutting edge workstations, so that I can maximize the time before I have to do it again. A decade ago I used to shoot for a 5 year lifespan of a workstation before doing it all over again. Now it's more realistic to try to go 3 years.

Of course, there are always budgetary constraints, but keep a realistic eye on what your time is worth. Getting another year out of a workstation (not saying that's the difference between 8 core and 4 core) is another year you can just do your work for profit.

I'm always surprised that some of Photoshop's functions are less than efficient on multiple cores... How hard is it to divide up an image into sections and assign each to a separate thread? Image processing lends itself well to multithreading.

-Noel

Martin_Doudoroff · #7 01-15-2008, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jlipkin

Martin, I'm limited to what I can buy through Amazon, as I'm putting a boat load of credit card rewards towards the purchase price. Looks like they are clearing out the 2-core systems, and not offering any single 4-cores at the moment. The dual 2.66 two-core is $500 less than the single 2.8 four-core.

Looks like the best bang for the buck is to get the 2 core dual 2.66 and buy an extra $500 of memory. Transintl is selling 8G for $300.

There's really nothing wrong with the first generation Mac Pros. If you can save a pile of money by buying one of those instead of the new edition, it might not matter one bit. I don't really know enough about your specific requirements to make strong judgements. I can say I've found my dual dual-core 2.66Ghz Mac Pro more than adequate for work with 12 megapixel imagery. I have 4GB of RAM which is more than Photoshop will use, anyway. If I had 8GB or RAM, I could leave Lightroom and various other apps running all the time without worrying about virtual memory getting involved. But so far, I haven't been motivated to add more (I was careful to leave four open memory slots so upgrading would be as cheap and easy as possible.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by jlipkin

As for HD, I've been thinking about this for a while but no decisions yet. My main data drives are external SATA in a RAID 1 driven by a SATA to FW 800 bridgeboard. I've thought about an internal RAID now that I'll have extra bays internally, but Apple's $999 card is a bit pricey. There are some other options - Rocketraid offers a RAID 5 card for about $300 which I might use to create a RAID.

I keep my LR library on the boot drive, and RAW files on the external. For most of the disk-intensive tasks, I think LR reads from the library, and the speed from the external is ok for everything else.

Interesting. I originally was running SoftRaid and also using FirmTek's eSATA card to hook up additional external drives. Last week, I disassembled all of that and am now running a very straightforward system without any RAID and no external drives. Frankly, while my fancy configuration worked great under Tiger, it was unstable under Leopard, and I decided it was too risky to continue as I was. In theory, the FirmTek drivers will stabilize in coming months and SoftRaid is constantly evolving, but I'm not interested in risk. What I will advise you is to immediately lower your expectations: if you anticipate trouble with your storage plans, you may still get frustrated, but at least you'll expect it!

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