AnandTech Test – 2 Intel Core 2 Quadro processors work in the Mac Pro!

[Kevin Monahan]

How cool is that? I think this means that current Mac Pro guys can upgrade to Clovertown procs when they come out, no?

I found this, however, even more interesting:

We definitely had a difficult time stressing 8 cores in the Mac Pro, but if you have a handful of well threaded, CPU intensive tasks then a pair of slower Clovertowns can easily outperform a pair of dual core Woodcrest based Xeons.

Good find, thanks Mitch.

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters

[Mitchji]

Hi Kevin,

[Kevin Monahan] “How cool is that? I think this means that current Mac Pro guys can upgrade to Clovertown procs when they come out, no?”

Because Mac’s hold there value so well and because Apple gets a much better price on CPU’s than a user could I don’t think that will be cost effective. To me this means it is a slam dunk that Apple will be releasing Mac Pro’s with Dual Quad Core Chips by January or February at the latest. At that point sell your Duo system on Ebay and replace it with a Quad Core model.

Toms Hardware did some pretty exhaustive benchmarks on the Quad Core Chips here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/

Some very brief excerpts:
“Compared with the already not-too-shabby Intel Core 2 Duo/Extreme, the Core 2 Quadro can give performance a mighty tweak…”

“The future belongs to HD content. If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor. Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz)…

” For me, working with one of the first quad core systems was amazing. No matter how many applications you run at the same time, the system reacts to user commands quickly. Some applications require half the time to finish tasks. To me, it’s like being catapulted a year into the future and is unlike the past few years when computing power increased only marginally. Intel pumped out 30% more performance with Core 2 Duo and will double that again with Core 2 Quadro soon.”

Best Wishes,

Mitch