My friends MAC 8 core has 32GB RAM wow.

[tweakboy]

You heard me right, he had 4 slots , and got 8mb sticks x 4 for $1100 from Fry's; talk about a RAM investment...

I poke at him a lot. I told him its a overkill and you don't need it.

BTW this is a pro studio so he uses Logic Pro and uses a lot of samples. hehe MAC uses Intel Xeon server 8 core @ 2.6 or 2.8 I believe,

To each their own. He should have invested on a video card instead of the crummy one that 8 core MAC comes with. :hmm: Which is a ATI 1950 I think. maybe the HD 2900 series which was a bust if you all remember...

 

[jimhsu]

If his app demands it, by definition it's not overkill. Not sure about logic pro, but something like after effects can use 2GB PER core (I certainly wished I had more than 4gb when I was doing some rendering work). In contrast, he could have absolutely no use for even a midrange GPU if it isn't a gaming machine and he doesn't use GPGPU.

Over at our lab we have a 16 core, 32GB monster and it's overused to the point where we're considering buying another one. The high performance computing market has a completely different set of criteria than the consumer market.

 

[Emulex]

that makes no sense at all. 8gb sticks would cost $1100 a piece.

mac pro are dual socket - they have 4 or 6 dimm slots PER SOCKET. (8 or 12 or 14 dimm slots).

are you talking the old xeon with fsb (FB-dimm-ecc) or nehalem with integrated memory (ddr3-ecc)?

if the latter 4 slots would be insane to put 8gb on since nehalem (core i) are NUMA. each cpu has its own memory and you have severe penalty for asking for ram tied to the other cpu.

 

[MustangSVT]

32MB of power! damn mac os sure is optimized!

 

[Nothinman]

To each their own. He should have invested on a video card instead of the crummy one that 8 core MAC comes with. Which is a ATI 1950 I think. maybe the HD 2900 series which was a bust if you all remember...

He does a lot of audio work so he should've invested in a video card? How does that make any sense?

 

[Modelworks]

I would have spent the money on SSD drives and 16GB ram. For me in 3d rendering I could do 1 workstation with 32 or 64GB ram or I can do 6 boxes with 4GB each and have way more rendering power by dividing the task among them and still come out cheaper.

 

[jimhsu]

I would have spent the money on SSD drives and 16GB ram. For me in 3d rendering I could do 1 workstation with 32 or 64GB ram or I can do 6 boxes with 4GB each and have way more rendering power by dividing the task among them and still come out cheaper.

It all depends on the app. I'd imagine 3D rendering benefits way more from more cores than more RAM, except for the very largest scenes (the scene just has to fit in memory, that is all). Something else like a scientific app that solves 10 million simultaneous equations at once (modeling, simulations) benefits greatly from having the whole matrix fit in memory, but no more. What I work in (bioinformatics, genome assembly, etc) has raw datasets that are dozens of gigabytes and almost by definition need to fit in memory.

 

[Rubycon]

He does a lot of audio work so he should've invested in a video card? How does that make any sense?

Depends on the application - some audio spectrum analyzers use 3D mode and with very high resolution definitely benefit from a faster GPU. A high end gaming GPU would probably suffice though. I don't think there would be a real benefit to paying for a high end Quadro for this application!

 

[jimhsu]

that makes no sense at all. 8gb sticks would cost $1100 a piece.

mac pro are dual socket - they have 4 or 6 dimm slots PER SOCKET. (8 or 12 or 14 dimm slots).

are you talking the old xeon with fsb (FB-dimm-ecc) or nehalem with integrated memory (ddr3-ecc)?

if the latter 4 slots would be insane to put 8gb on since nehalem (core i) are NUMA. each cpu has its own memory and you have severe penalty for asking for ram tied to the other cpu.

Most likely it's 8X4GB (but that option currently costs $3700 on apple). Getting non-apple realistic pricing is about $300 for 2x4GB on the low end for DDR3 with ECC, so yes about $1100.

 

[Chaotic42]

I'm jealous. My 8GB of memory at work just gets eaten up.

 

[yinan]

Test box I have at the office has the following specs:
8 processor sockets
8 cores per socket
1 TB RAM
5 U

 

[lsv]

@ thread : who cares? We have servers at my office with twice that and anyone can get that much if they need it. It's just rare.

 

[Emulex]

well my question is how well is osx (not server) architected to handle numa optimizations when the applications are not numa aware.

you could thrash cache or QPI interlink ram access across numa nodes (socketed cpu's in this case) if the o/s did not assign proper affinity and ram allocation since each cpu would have its own memory.

SUMA sometimes is better than you need 32gb for 1 thread versus 32gb across two numa nodes for 1 thread

 

[yinan]

@ thread : who cares? We have servers at my office with twice that and anyone can get that much if they need it. It's just rare.

Umm, you can't get twice that? Intel does not make 16 core procs yet. And even the 8 core procs arent generally available.

 

[hymy]

@ yinan

Can we get more info about this workstation you keep talking about. We were talking about this around the office today. What the heck did you do for an operating system? And what mb did you use?