Apple's had an octo-core Mac Pro for quite a while now. Benchmarks conducted by Bare Feats show for most apps there is no significant difference in performance between the quad-core and octo-core Mac Pros, most likely because Intel's hoary shared-bus FSB is the bottleneck.

...for most apps, there may well not be a performance increase. But you don't buy a workstation to run stupid iTunes or iPhoto or iEmail or whatever kind of stuff you run on those overpriced, application deprived, but oh so stylish and cool boxes. You buy a workstation to do the work of men (and some women), not to download graphics for your scrap booking project....A little harsh, yeah, but my day sucked and I needed to vent. Besides, I'm getting sick and tired of some Mac zealot chiming in on every article "Yeah, the super computer at Lawrence Livermore might be big, but my Mac Pro uses less power and has a really good monitor! Mac rules!"

yeah totaly dude. Imagine what this could do in Linux ( Peace :P)

I would be less concerned about the comment by someone you refer to as 'a Mac zealot' pointing out that Apple have had a computer available with 8 cores for about six months (or more?), and more concerned about how ... if this is the case, why is it suddenly *news* when HP have such a machine for sale?

I mean, a news headline to announce an 8-core machine, when such things have been on the market for over half a year? Since when did El Reg become HP's marketing wing?

Ant Colonel Zander, who pissed on your cornflakes? Since Macs are basically PCs these days anyway, it's not all about iTunes and Leopard. I imagine Vista runs with almost acceptable performance on an 8-core Mac ... as long as you're not copying files to a thumbdrive, and you turn UAC off.

Big deal, thats just 5 hdd bays.

And I think that the difference between the 8 core Mac Pros and this HP is that the HP has the next gen Intel Quad cores, IE true quads. They'll have a lot less bottleneck issues than the dual dual dual core chips (Thats 2 chips with each 2 seperate dual core dies inside) that the Mac Pro has.

I can't honestly getting an 8 core Intel system though. If you need that kind of performance, NUMA has loads of advantages, and the Opteron is obviously just about perfect for that sort of thing. Or it would be if you could actually buy one.

So if you want / need 8 cores... you should probably just wait off a little bit and hope that the tech catches up with itself.

From what I gather, the HP doesnt use the insane FBDIMM type memory as the macs do. The stuff that costs a fortune and chews through power.

It will use more standard ddr2 memory. 16*8gb sticks will still hit the wallet however..........

Also the mac has sata bays. The HP has SAS bays....

Laughed my posterior off at that one.

FWIW, the energy conscious wouldn't be buying an 8 core, 2 processor desktop with two Graphics adaptors, 128 Gig of RAM and 5TB of disk.

It reminds me of when Jaguar cars stuck the Mays "fireball" cylinder head on their 5.2 V12 and crowed about getting 16mpg out of it rather than 12.......

Well, only a tiny percentage of the computing community cares about macs. El Reg are just reporting to the masses!

Simple if you just put some thought in to it.

G

In my industry - TV - this comparison is especially relevant. Tese two workstations (HP xw and Mac Pro) constitute the bulk of the workstations used for graphics and editing. So far, Apple has won this comparison convincingly. This news from HP suggests that Apple will also have a new workstation based on the same CPUs in the near future, and that's REALLY something to get excited about.

As for Colonel Zander's comments - give it up man, you're out of your depth here.

We need articles about technology or products from the "also-rans" (whoever they may be). If only the latest and the first were reported then there would be only half the articles to enjoy.

That would mean only half as many chances to enjoy the snarky comments, the feigned indifference (while salivating all the while) and the chance to champion a person's favorite hardware/software choice. It does remind me sometimes of a local sports bar on game day.

Besides, none of the articles are overly long, so it isn't as if a great investment was made. Keep doing what you are doing writers and I will continue to enjoy it on my Acer 5100 with Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit.

Yeah, I rock!!!!!!!!

I give a crap about his Mac... just because you're so in the closet about computing and jump o the anti Apple bandwagon (which appears to have more zealous fanbois than the pro Apple bunch) doesn't mean you have a right to decide for everyone what is good, bad or of interest. As someone who manages machines at a company with a design department, the Mac Pro is very much of interest as it's the best machine out there for this task. By a long way.

As said above, Octo Core has been around a while, christ even my HP server has it....

The 'article' implies that this is HP's first 8 core workstation range. HP has been selling dual, quad core 'Woodcrest' based workstations since that chip's release (i.e. just like the Mac Pro) and the workstations described here are the same ones but with the newer 'Harpertown' Xeons. Nothing to see here but a Xeon technology refresh.