Next Mac Pros to boast 12 physical and 24 logical cores?
10:47 am, December 15th, 2009, John Brownlee
Just a week after Apple quietly upgraded their Mac Pro line to use 3.33Ghz quad-core Xeon CPUs comes our first good look at the processor that will likely drive the next significant refresh of the Mac Pro: the Intel Core i7-980x Processor. Naturally, the ‘x’ stands for ‘eXtreme.’
Hot off the 32nm production lines of Intel’s manufacturing factories, the Intel Core i7-980x shifts away from merely improving frequency towards more tangible performance gains. Although the new chips max out at 3.33GHz, each packs in an astonishing six cores and twelve threads per chip, meaning that a dual processor Mac Pro might boast twelve physical and twenty four logical cores, which would represent a huge performance bump to the video professionals who are Apple’s most expensive desktop’s primary customers.
Additionally, each Core i7-980x CPU boasts a 12MB Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support and an integrated memory controller, while supporting DDR1066MHz memory and sucking up 130 watts of power.
In short, despite Apple’s last stealthy refresh of the Mac Pro, you should hold off on buying a Mac Pro if you can until the Core i7-980x is released commercially in February or March. Final Cut Pro will thank you.
Posted by John Brownlee in Apple, Hardware, News | Comment on this article
If you enjoyed this article:
Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Just thinking here…If Apple had stayed with IBM, it would soon have Power7 processors with 8 cores per chip, two chips per module, 4 threads per core, all at 3.8GHz (or 4.1 for the quad cores). Thats 64 threads per module, if they used two then 128 threads just in one machine. IBM demonstrated a machine using Power7 with 8 octacore processors in it, for 256 concurrent threads. Just some food for thought, I know switching to Intel was a good move though.
Nitesh, on March 7th, 2010 at 3:49 pm