The eagle-eyed folks over at MacRumors spotted an advertisement on Apple's UK store that showed an eight-core Mac Pro desktop. Presumably the Macintosh would use two Intel Quad-core chips. Apple has since removed the ad from the store website.

Rumors that Apple would incorporate two of Intel's Quad-core chips into a Mac Pro to produce an 8-core Mac Pro have been gongoing since late last year.

Now that is a powerhouse... I bet it friggin' flys! Good show Peevles, I luff Mac shtuff

That's completely awesome and amazing. I wonder if they're going to release that chipset on the 27th? I believe it's pretty much accepted that's the date they're going to release Leopard and Adobe CS3, and possibly a new laptop or at least the Santa Rosa motherboard for the portables or at least the iMac line. What Apple are you using now? I'm on the newest 17" MacBook Pro, stock configuration. It's quite nice, but I'm unimpressed by the display which flickers occasionally. It's a desktop replacement, though, so I like the independence and power all in one package. You have to really watch your settings on the battery if you want it to run for long during a power outage as I found out the other day. I think it shuts down one of the cores and probably scales back the other when you've selected the correct settings. Probably would last twice as long as it did without me setting it right! I noticed that the fans weren't audible one battery and the core temps didn't increase, so I think they were scaled way back. Anyway, regarding the work station, maybe after they release the 8-core, the price for the Quad will fall a bit. I'd love to own that amazing piece of technology, but I can't possibly afford something like that at this point, partially because I'd have to buy a monitor (23") too.

Wow, that laptop is going to fly. Well, lately its not about the processor speed anymore. Its seems they couldnt go over the 3.8 gigahertz boundary, so instead they are adding more and more cores, which isnt bad by the way, we are going to be seeing extreme multitasking..

Is that possible?

I mean, it's gonna overheat very fast... not to mention, possibly no operating system can be supported by such high-tech gizmo

Nero has a point, while that would be amazingly fast, they would have to redesign an OS to run such a setup. Yeah you could run it now, but it wouldn't add any benefit if your operating system didn't utilize the speed of 8 logical processor cores.

Pretty amazing stuff. Mac usually seems to do that: they come up with a lot of new ideas, the windows/PC's make them more cost friendly/efficent to the average user.

Cool stuff.

According to this article, Intel is ramping up their final foray into the world of 45nm processors with the pending release of the Penryn and Nehalem processors due to be completely ramped up by early in 2008. The initial offerings will affect laptops with the dual-core chips and desktop with dual core and, later, quad core. The workstation and server markets will be served later with processors that may be as large as 16 cores. That sounds like one expensive (to buy and to run) computer right there... Good thing Apple jumped on board with them.

One more thing: The OSX 10.4.x OS is already set to use multi-threading as a feature to take advantage of as many processors as you can stuff in that enclosure. Today, you can buy a Mac Workstation or server with as many as 8 cores! I believe the U of Virginia or some such institution has a room full of servers all hooked together via Fiber GB Ethernet to form one giant computer with hundreds of processors. OSX works just fine with that arrangement too.

Update: April 4, 2007. Apple released the 8-core (Dual quad-core) Xeon "Clovertown" Intel powered Mac Pro workstation PC. If you were waiting for a reason to buy the most powerful desktop computer by a magnitude available to the common consumer today, this is it. It should be at the top for about a year until Intel releases the Nehalem series.

This post has been edited by Watermonkey: Apr 4 2007, 11:49 PM