Next-Generation Mac Pro to support 128gb RAM?

[callumacrae]

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/14...ary-exclusive-of-six-core-gulftown-processor/

Just curious, would anyone actually use that amount of RAM? The Mac Pro isn't designed for use as a server, is it?

~Callum

 

[Smith6612]

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/14...ary-exclusive-of-six-core-gulftown-processor/

Just curious, would anyone actually use that amount of RAM? The Mac Pro isn't designed for use as a server, is it?

~Callum

The Mac Pro itself is a server-grade machine running Mac OS when you look at it. A lot of people, mainly developers, scientists, etc use Mac Pros since otherwise they'd be bottle necking themselves on possibly slower hardware. The Mac Pro I also believe is one of Apple's only machines that will come with the Intel Xeon "Nethlahem" chip or for that matter with any Quad Core CPU at the moment, the rest of the cheaper Macs such as the Mac Mini, iMac, and the Macintosh laptops all come with really a Core2Duo CPU.

Truthfully, 99.9% of the people out there would have absolutely no use for 128GB of RAM except for those who are really doing some heavy lifting computing/designing or who want bragging rights, or the ability to set up massive RAM drives for loading speeds that will pretty much max out any processor while content loads.

 

[deltavolt]

The Mac Pro itself is a server-grade machine running Mac OS when you look at it. A lot of people, mainly developers, scientists, etc use Mac Pros since otherwise they'd be bottle necking themselves on possibly slower hardware. The Mac Pro I also believe is one of Apple's only machines that will come with the Intel Xeon "Nethlahem" chip or for that matter with any Quad Core CPU at the moment, the rest of the cheaper Macs such as the Mac Mini, iMac, and the Macintosh laptops all come with really a Core2Duo CPU.

Truthfully, 99.9% of the people out there would have absolutely no use for 128GB of RAM except for those who are really doing some heavy lifting computing/designing or who want bragging rights, or the ability to set up massive RAM drives for loading speeds that will pretty much max out any processor while content loads.

You pretty much nailed it. There are rumors, however, that the new iMacs are going Quad Core.

The 128 GB of RAM isn't it's only accomplishment btw, it'll be available with 12 cores.

 

[Sharky]

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/14...ary-exclusive-of-six-core-gulftown-processor/

Just curious, would anyone actually use that amount of RAM? The Mac Pro isn't designed for use as a server, is it?

~Callum

Well, everyone knows how Firefox is with memory...

 

[Smith6612]

Well, everyone knows how Firefox is with memory...

Firefox loves RAM :biggrin:

I remember when that browser ran just fine with 128MB of system RAM installed with no hiccups. Ever since version 3.0 it hasn't been able to do that as it works off of the swap a lot now and you need a box with at least 256MB to get anywhere decent with it.

 

[casey roberts]

120 gig photoshop files? Think of the pixels and layers!

 

[callumacrae]

I personally don't know anyone that would want to open a 120gb photoshop file

Perhaps a niche market?

Anyway, they didn't introduce it yesterday, so I guess if they do introduce it then it isn't going to be exclusive to them. They did introduce a 27" dual core iMac I'm saving up, but they will probably have introduced 19 new models by then

~Callum

 

[Smith6612]

120 gig photoshop files? Think of the pixels and layers!

That'd take a crazy amount of time to open unless you have some very fast spinning SATA/SCSI or a Solid State Disk in RAID 0...

That, plus you'd either need an OMGWTFBBQ sized Photoshop document with a high pixel per inch count with high resolution, or have the PSD stuffed with uncompressed images (RAW).

 

[callumacrae]

That'd take a crazy amount of time to open unless you have some very fast spinning SATA/SCSI or a Solid State Disk in RAID 0...

If they're having 128gb RAM I imagine they would also upgrade everything else, as well.

~Callum

 

[ah-blabla]

If they're having 128gb RAM I imagine they would also upgrade everything else, as well.

~Callum

Hard drives are getting physically quite near the limit nowadays though. You could always take a massive raid setup with data spread over a thousand drives, but then you would have i.o. capacity of the controller as the bottleneck + massive cost. I suppose if you have the money for one of these macs you would have the money to make a distributed network storage system locally using hundreds/thousands of utility pcs to store a distributed filesystem (think gfs), but that's really taking it a bit far.

It would be a pretty good scientific calculation machine, but they tend to use clusters nowadays because of price / efficiency.

One thing this Mac would be good for is showing off though...

 

[callumacrae]

Knowing Apple they're probably going to invent a new, pointlessly fast kind of hard drive anyway.

~Callum

 

[ah-blabla]

Knowing Apple they're probably going to invent a new, pointlessly fast kind of hard drive anyway.

~Callum

I doubt it since apple don't do hardware design (i.e. design of components). They just take ready hardware (Processors from Intel, etc etc...) and make systems from it. Apple's main "innovations" lie in ready products, but not the technology behind them.