Apple announced the launch of its 8-core Xeon MacPro today [link]. Great for them.

I can tell you this: 8 cores is undoubtedly superfluous unless you’re ripping h.264 movies all day and all night (in which case, you’re probably not reading this blog).

I am the very, very proud owner of a quad core MacPro. This thing is a dream. It’s quiet. It’s incredibly fast. It’s stable. It’s the best computer I’ve ever owned or used (and we’re talking about a long, long history of computers to base this judgment upon).

However, my gripe is that there are any number of bottlenecks that need to be addressed before you throw more processing power. I pretty much keep the Activity Monitor open all the time. In all this time, I don’t think I have ever seen my CPUs get pegged. Occasionally, I’ll see a spike on one of the 4, but never have I seen all 4 rise above the 10% mark in unison.

So is it worth the money to get 8 cores? Apples to apples (sorry), no. Your money is much better spent on RAM, and RAID-configured hard drives, thus alleviating the two biggest bottlenecks on the system.

On my Quad as-ordered, I had a single 500gig hard drive and 2 gigs of RAM. This was a mistake. Parallels needs RAM. Rosetta needs RAM. And everything hits the hard drive. In recent months, I’ve upgraded to 4 gigs of RAM which makes it possible to run Parallels and Dreamweaver at the same time, and I cannibalized an old PC to add a pair of 250 gig hard drives configured in RAID-0. Holy crap is this thing fast now.

And still I rarely touch my CPUs. 8 cores is just not necessary in 2007.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.