Clovertown Intel Core 2 quad-core will work in a Mac Pro
By Cyrus Farivar 
posted Sep 13th 2006 3:58PM
posted Sep 13th 2006 3:58PM
Ok Mac fanboys, listen up: if you somehow manage to have two not-yet-released Clovertown Intel Core 2 quad-core chips kicking around and you happen to have recently bought a Mac Pro, you can pop the pair of them right there into your nice little LGA-771 sockets, for some oct-awesome processing power. In fact, that's precisely what the good folks at Anandtech did. They have their silicon-stained paws on some "engineering samples" of the Clovertown chips and dropped them into their Mac Pro. What did they find? Mac OS X didn't hiccup at all, and neither did the other hardware. The CPU Monitor indeed showed all eight processors, but as Anandtech pointed out, there's not much that you can do at this point that will stress all eight processors at once, not unless you're running SETI@Home, Folding@Home and every other distributed processing program you can find -- and even then that probably won't do it.[Via Slashdot]
This is great news!
http://www.chasetheglow.com
Ok. Ok. Ok. Uncontrollable drool factor here. Man, if I only had an engineering sample of two chips and 3g just running around.
Would OS X balance separate tasks over the whole 8 processor cores though?
FINALLY! Something that will start Acrobat before the universe ends! :P
That's.... uhh... wow... I'm speechless. Dual quad cores?!?! That's absolutely insane!
"FINALLY! Something that will start Acrobat before the universe ends! :P"
ROFL
The Octo-core system would only divide the instruction code between the 8 if there was only one massive cache correct? With one cache, all the cores have access to one set of instructions, essentially splitting the data 8 ways, making the system operate 8x the speed of a single core, my math is probably off, as its probably some kind of exponential increase. Someone help me out here.
scratch that, I keep forgetting they are putting the L2 on the chips themselves these days...duh...
That makes me happy getting a MP is a good investment and future compatibility when the chips are a resonable price.
I am wonder though, how well did the proc work when booting Windoze on the Mac Pro?
Also, when are we going to see full hardware and 3D support for windows apps in OSX? I'm talking about things like 3D studio Max or other power tools.
There have been articles about pc apps running well, but I can't wait to hear there is full 3D support.
Should i get a mac pro this rev or what....?
disciple83
A 8-core system can not simply divide up the code and run 8x faster. Each core runs as a seperate CPU and at any one time is only executing thread or process. That is why having 8-cores for now is a waste. I think the major bottleneck that still has to be overcome is the I/O to the processors. It is great to have 8, 16 or 32 cores but if you can't feed them data fast enough they are just going to be a waste of die space.
Only 4 hours remaining in my data transfer from my old mac to my new Mac Pro.
I wish they'd loaded up BOINC on it and done something that would fire 8 workloads across it. Would be interesting to see how it ran, and how warm it got. But they're probably under an NDA and can't say how it did.
I'm happy to learn that the 1066MHz version was just a drop in, that means a year or so when Woodcrest is too slow you could upgrade to a lower cost 1066 chip instead of the top dollar 1333MHz ones.
pretty cool
My MacPro is running really fast as it is, I can't imagine how useful another 4 cores will be when most of the software out there can't take advantage of the current Quad xeons that are inside of it now.
And BTW I am running Windows & the Mac OS on it, and its awesomely fast on both ends. However, you need an SATA fix to get Windows running properly, check out Apple's Forums for instructions
The headline says Kentsfield, but the actual test involved the Clovertown, right?
From what I understand, they're both code names for two different quad-core cpu's. Or are they the same and just being targeted for different markets?
Someone please help sort through this muck!
"there's not much that you can do at this point that will stress all eight processors at once"
Uh, how about transcoding HD video?
Will the transcoding of HD split across 8 cores? never done it, I'm asking not being sarcastic.
No, I'm just not having a good day with small errors today. Sorry about that, it's been fixed.
@Sid
If I remember correctly one is the code for the desktop 4-core proc and the other is the code for the server one. But as always I could be wrong.
Anyone notice that it says "2 x 2.4Ghz Unknown"?
@Timerider
That's because the "About this Mac" tool doesn't know anything about the Clovertown processor. It's right though, it is using 2xSomething at 2.4GHz. It's just that the something happens to be quad core processors.
If you go to the linked page you'll see that the processor preference pane and the activity monitor both get it right.
Tom:
yes - in fact, right now, with Qmaster, if you have a bunch of Macs on a local network, it will already split the load between all the other machines if you've set them up to allow it.
Putting all the cores in one machine will definately be helpful.
And yes, us video nerds will STILL bring an 8 core machine to its knees without any problem..
hell - i've always wanted to try to encode a DVD AND get some work done, but have never been able to... like working on Motion 2 to build a DVD menu....
that would have been just punching yourself in the head on anything south of a quad core G5, and with an 8 core, it will still probably get bogged down..
so - no - they haven't made a computer fast enough for uncompresed HD video editors and video graphcis guys like us... the 8 core machine is simply a step in the right direction.
Yes Mac fanboys welcome to the world of EASY UPGRADES.
I know, you are not used to this, but now you understand why we like PCs better, and your machines can suck a little less now.
that's so funny, mang
Yeah really. I hope this is the beginning of not having to spend $3200 to go 1Ghz faster year over year.