Asia Pacific sales and marketing group general manager John Antone spoke with Computerworld’s Juha Saarinen in Taipei about Intel’s focus on low power, more efficient processor designs and seems to have let the cat out of the bag:
“Intel is hoping that the Woodcrest CPU, which promises 8% better performance with a third less power usage, will drive many of the mashed-up apps in high-density server developments. It’s “Everything over IP” for Intel from now on,” Saarinen reports. “Apple customers may be the first to enjoy Intel’s new CPU goodies, with the Woodcrest family of processors making it into Macintosh workstations as early as the third quarter. Woodcrest systems will be symmetric multi processing (SMP), with dual processors with up to four cores each.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yum, eight cores of Apple Power Mac goodness! You’ll probably be able to accurately predict the weather months in advance with one of those babies!
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Andrew noted:
Choked your chicken too hard, and now you are chicken-less?
A REAL girlie-man, sez me.
Niffy
“new PowerMacs = MacTower Pro maybe? MacPro? Just wild guessing. Then again, i think they may decide to keep the PowerMac name.”
I was thinking of a simple one: “Macintosh Pro”
“Before you flame ‘me’, realize I come in PEACE.”
“That said, _why_ does Apple need to create an expandable mid level workstation? The important stuff – RAM, drive capacity is expandable. There are external ports, so what is left to “expand” – the video card?”
Well, yes.
It’s tricky because there is no clearly defined line anymore between “workstation” and “personal computer.” So I think you’re reading too much into the word “workstation”–as though it would be a line separate from the “Tower” Macs.
Why do you need expandability? Well, as you put it, graphic cards is the most popular. That said, there are other things. You may want multiple network cards. Serial I/O cards–I know there are USB to Serial, but if you’re doing some sort of real-time analysis, the USB conversion might not be acceptable.
There’s also some audio input cards, SCSI, Fibre Channel, etc.
Also, and this is just a personal thing, I like the ability to update hardware. For example, when my on-motherboard Ethernet went screwy on my old Blue & White G3, rather than give Apple $800 for a new motherboard, I picked up a PCI Ethernet card and it worked perfectly.
Firewire and USB expansion is for kids, real Mac men need slots!
High-end video capture systems have cards that need expansion slots.
Raid Sata arrays need expansion slots, so do ATA drive controllers.
High-end audio recording systems (like ProTools and Motu) need expansion slots.
We need new Intel Mac Pro machines with expansion slots soon!
Manly yes, but I like slots too!
niiiice
You don’t know the history of Woodcrest. I do.
Peter and Macs King:
well said, we are on the same page
I’d rather have the Royale with Cheese.
Quad core computers… Awesome for what they are made for, silly for the single-threaded stuff that most people do. I went into an Apple store and pounded on a quad G5 for a while – opened tons of applications at once, got iTunes and iPhoto doing some tasks at once while browsing the web – I never saw more than 2 cores active until I ran the multi-CPU render in Cinebench v95. Still, the marketing people will have a ball with it.
Woodcrest IS going into professional desktops and servers, including Mac’s
What would really be freakish if the new PowerMac’s sported a few Cell processors.
We wouldn’t need graphics cards that’s for sure!
@ Me (from way back):
Here, as I understand it, is the Intel roadmap as it probably applies to the faithful members of Macintosh Jihad.
1) Yonah – as featured in Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook Pro – is the first of Intel’s new Core Microarchitecture (shortened to Core for marketing) processors. At this time, models range from T1200-T2600 (1.5GHz-2.16GHz) and the low-voltage L2300-2600. T2700 is due for launch shortly at around 2.3GHz. No 64-bit support, referred to by Intel as EM64T. Expect ‘Celeron’ versions at some point.
2) Conroe – the first desktop implementation of a Core chip and with EM64T support as well. Models range from E6300 (1.86GHz) to E6800 (2.93GHz). Volume production around week 40 for most of the range, with E6800 due in Q4 at some point. Conroe has the same 14-stage pipeline as Yonah (Intel are backing away from the ridiculous pipeline lengths they used to have) and will have up to 4MB of L2 cache.
3) Merom – think portable Conroe and you’re about there. Again, up to 4MB of L2, but using around 45W as opposed to Conroe’s 65-70W. Very likely to show up in new MacBook Pros around Macworld SF 2007. Expect 2MB L2 versions (T5500/T5600) to show up in iMac. Expect 4MB versions (T7200-T7600) to go into MacBook Pro.
4) Woodcrest – the ‘Xeonised” version of Conroe, and truly destined for Xserve. Allegedly allows for “stupidly large amounts of RAM” through a fully-buffered DIMM architecture. The 5160 variant (3.0GHz) is supposed to cost around $850, so I wouldn’t want to pay for that in a tower Mac.
5) Kentsfield – Due sometime in the first half of 2007, imagine two Conroe-type dies joined together to make 4-cores.
There is more, but I can’t be bothered at the moment.
I have to question MDN’s ability to look up facts or even come close to representing professional journalism.
Juha Saarinen has no relation to Intel, and is only a writer for a small tech website in New Zealand. How MDN came across this article in the first place is amazing. The article is littered with errors that makes MDN, and its followers who don’t know better, look like fools because of a simple failure to fact check:
Woodcrest is NOT a quad core processor. Woodcrest is the server variant of Conroe (just as Xeon was to the Pentium 4) with SMP support. The “Woodcrest” demonstration at IDF referred by Mr. Saarinen was NOT Woodcrest, but Clovertown/Kentsfield….due out in 2007.
Also, the first 65nm “quad core” processors from Intel are actually two dual cores on a single die, just as thier first “dual core” chip was really two single core processors on a single die. On an 8 core system, heat and power consumption will be equavalent to 4 dual core chips instead of 2 quad cores, putting them at a disadvantage with AMD right from the getgo who will debut “true” quad core chips by end of 2006.
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,3578.html
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2713
http://www.digitimes.com/bits_chips/a20060411PR208.html
So no MDN, you’re not going to see 8 core “goodness” in Powermacs at the end of this 3rd quarter. Next time MDN try to at least pretend to have some sort of journalistic integrity, and stick to renouned tech sites like Anandtech instead of some half-researched foreign website article you just happen to stumble across.
@MCCFR
“1) Yonah – as featured in Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook Pro – is the first of Intel’s new Core Microarchitecture (shortened to Core for marketing) processors.” ‘Fraid not. 🙁 It’s a pair of Pentium M cores stuck together.
@ Me Too >
My mistake, I should have read more carefully. Although Intel could do me a favour by not using the terms quite so interchangably.
Tx. for the correction.
Hell, I can barely predict yesterday’s, weather! 😮