@Another User said:

But really the question we need to be asking is what this means to musicians. The idea of having eight processors to handle plug-ins (both instrument and processing) is appealing, but is that going to happen? I've read lots of conflicting reports about how this works - that the OS handles it automatically and it will make a big difference, that it does very little and won't make a difference, that developers can address individual cores, that they can't...I have no idea what it means.

Yeah, it required an update to Logic Pro to use 4-cores, and for what I know they're still not being used all the time... so how's 8-cores going to help us, that's a good question!

J.

The price of the Eizo monitor is $1504 at CDW, $1486 at PC Nation. Looks like a terrific monitor - but not inexpensive.

As far as the 8 core machine is concerned, since everyone seems to be speculating, I'll speculate a little more too. It seems possible that Apple released the 8 core machine now so that it would have it to demonstrate the new version of Final Cut - - and possibly of Logic (Amazon lists a book - Logic Pro X Power by Don Gunn and Orren Merton - for release on April 30, 2007, so there might be some cause to think that this correctly reflects the name of the update.) at NAB next week.

As Nick observes this machine is listed as a build-to-order option - not a new model. Similarly, Barefeats.com notes that this machine has the same chassis as the other models, no Blu-ray option, no support for bridging graphics cards (i.e.SLI), same limit of 26 lanes in the PCIe bus, same speed on frontside bus. Thus it seems possible (at least to me) that this machine really is a stopgap and that new models of the Mac Pro with a different physical appearance and improvements in functionality are in the not too distant future. In any case, Barefeats.com states that it has ordered this machine and will publish test results involving multi-processor aware applications as soon as it has received and tested it.

Did Dennis Gunn co-write a book with Orren?!

I had no idea. Orren's great, but Dennis is an ornery so-and-so. [:)]

No, I just talked to Orren - it is Don Gunn. And X means "unknown." It's been on Amazon over a year.

These 8-core machines look like a bit of a stop-gap to me... A good friend of mine, who keeps a pretty close eye on the technology game, has been urging me to hold off on a new Mac Pro until the fall, when PCIe 2.0 is likely to be showing up in production. He's figuring there will be some pretty major board-level improvements at that time, which will have a significant impact on RAM capacity, performance, and price.

Any thoughts, cm?

J.

true - 45nm process, new chipsets (ICH9), possibly some E (extreme = more cache) types, ... as already mentioned - too much heat for my taste currently