Thanks JWL, I appreciate it.

But you know, the magazine sells well on the newsstand, so it's probably not as far ahead of the curve as one might think.

@edhamilton said:

Mac Mini's looks to be discontinued
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/24/closing_the_book_on_apples_mac_mini.html

I had been waiting and hoping for the new generation of mini's but alas it looks not to be.

Maya - would it be possible to do some deep testing of your Macpro as a VSL Farm? (as in not also hosting the sequencer - just using it as a slave farm PC).
It looks like the macpro is going to be our only sample farm option if we want to stay mac only.
THANKS!

Bump...

Did you already perform a stress test of the 8-core Mac Pro? How many instances of VI can you host with, say, Plogue Bidule? Significantly more than with a quad-core Mac Pro or not...?

From all reports is seems that Ram will limit you before the CPU will.
So until 64 bit osx (and shitloads of ram) it looks like the octocore is overkill for sample farm use.
I haven't heard of anyone maxing out the CPU on a quad core macpro.
Scary.

i didn't have a chance to stress-test an octo core so far (neither mac nor pc, which have pretty much the same design regarding chipsets and other components), but looking at the design it could probably happen that the bus to the processors turns up as bottlenck (it is of the same width as for the quad core)

much if not everything would depend if an application is using data from the L1 or L2 cache of the processor for heavy number crunching or relies on *fresh data* to be transported from the memory to the processor (and back to some other busses like PCI)

in the past practice has often shown that larger caches are affecting performance more than number of processors, because especially with audio applications you have to take a _very_ close look which process can run *threaded* (i.e. use 1,2, more processors) and which not.

i personally am considering 8 cores as overkill currently ...
christian