“Earlier this week Apple released updated Mac Pros that use Intel’s new Penryn processors. Also new is the fact that the standard Mac Pro configuration now comes with eight (instead of four) cores. Of course, what I’ve been wondering (as I sit here and think about getting a new Mac Pro) is how does the new standard eight-core Mac Pro perform compared to the old high-end Mac Pro? I’ve gathered Geekbench 2 results for both Mac Pros to find out.”
Am I the only one who doesn’t understand that benchmark?
Maybe just because it its a “Becnhmark”? ;-P
The guy seems to have replaced is “old mac pro” dual core processors by quad core processors, and compares with the new “early 2008” retail eight core mac pro.
new one stil got two quadcore’s
It really doesn’t matter since the machines aren’t so close to the same configuration.
The least they could have done is provide the same clock speed, same amount of RAM, etc. and then tested the two.
It seems it’s as useful as sitting there counting the bounces in the Dock saying “well, it takes 4 bounces instead of 3 for X application.” This is just a pseudo-scientific test with a lot of variables. You might as well call a telephone psychic.
What is missing is threading performance, i.e how long does it take to run a multi-threaded computation, say a matrix multiplication, etc.
For me, 2 core, 4 core or 8 core doesn’t make a difference. HOWEVER, I’d like these hardware corporations to make boot FASTER. When I start my computer, I have to wait 30 seconds before I can work. On the other hand, when I switch on a cell phone, it takes…A second. I know the BIOS needs to check all hardware, then the OS needs to load, etc… But still, there are ways to make it much faster (ie: assume no HW has changed, don’t check HW changes unless the user asks for it, keep the OS in some sort of non-volatile RAM, etc…).
OMG 30 whole seconds?
What cell phone are you using? A full cell phone bootup takes at least 10 seconds on anything I’ve ever owned.
Stop shutting-down your computer and you won’t have to wait for it to boot. After all, how often do you shut down your cell phone? I mean seriously, even my laptop (MacBook) has two weeks uptime…
Yeah and if you’re worried about the OS becoming slower over time for lack of reboot you can just schedule it to automatically reboot every night, week, whatever in the OSX energy saver preferences pane then let it fall asleep so it’s fresh when you get to it. This is such a non issue on mac.
Impressive, that is really an energy efficient way to deal with the long boot-up times.
This is not serious, especially these days that you have to save energy. An idle laptop uses at least 10 watts. Over several years, it does make a difference in a budget and it does not help the Earth.
And as some one else mentioned, if you don’t reset your memory, after a week or more of uptime, your system will be slower because some applications are not optimized as they should be.
Mac laptops hibernate by default. Pull the power cord and battery if you want. In any case, Macs tend to sleep particularly efficiently: put it to sleep at 5pm, unplug the power cord; wake it up at 9am and plug it back in. It’ll charge for a relatively short while, but you’ll still have plenty of juice if you need to go wandering.
Restart your apps. My Macs only get rebooted when there’s a significant software update, with no ill effects. A modern operating system shouldn’t need rebooting just for the sake of ongoing housekeeping, and last I looked, none of the UNIX-based ones (including Mac OS X) do.
No, they don’t. They go into sleep and will go further into hibernate mode if the battery charge falls under a certain level (you need an App like DeepSleep to make a Mac go into hibernate mode at once).
Nevertheless, this is waisted energy which is ridiculous just to “save” a few seconds boot time.
You mean you waste energy particularly efficiently?
Your method of pulling the power cord is even more wasteful, since using the battery and recharging it is even less energy efficient and leads to battery degradation (use e.g. CoconutBattery and have a look at loading cycles and battery capacity degradation).
The important word here is “shouldn’t need”. However, in reality, there is no such thing as a bug free OS. Unix based OS are normally used in server environments, where the amount of apps and services is mostly within a narrow range, the hardware is certified for a certain OS, is well tested under 7x24h conditions and the behaviour of the OS over time is known by the administrators (e. g. our industry grad OpenServer was rebooted every few weeks in order to prevent performance downgrading or unexpected reboots).
I guess the situation looks quite different when it comes to a “desktop” Unix. Sloppy programming, not very thouroughly tested drivers, hardware that was not meant for 7x24h usage, a whole bunch of services and apps, etc.
Do the environment and yourself a favour. Just shutdown your PC/Mac if you don’t use it. No matter how capable or good your system is: waste stays waste.
“Waste stays waste” is catchy, but non-sensical.
How about, “if you its lost in the noise, it doesn’t matter?” Not as catchy, but it has the advantage of actually making logical sense!
Conservation in general is feel-good bunk, but micro-conservation like this is especially-so. The sad truth is this: you’d need extreme, radical conservation steps to decrease energy usage by even 10% in a country like the USA, and given the current energy market, that won’t even be a global savings. China and India will just use up whatever excess energy (oil, mainly) production the US and Europe don’t. At the time scale of real, measurable, environmental and social impact, it won’t change things, not a whit. So why inconvenience yourself over something that doesn’t matter? Why feel bad about contributing so imperceptibly to something that is a huge, systematic, global problem?
Entertainingly enough it might even be the case that those people who are environmentally conscious end up hurting the environment in the long run. Conservation is never going to be a solution to the energy problem. By 2025, the increase in global energy use by China and India will have wiped out any conservation-related savings in the West many, many times over. Unless you want to be the guy in charge of telling the developing world that they’re stuck being poor, conservation isn’t going to work. The only solution is increasing global energy capacity, and believe it or not its the big bad energy companies that are doing the research to achieve that. So paying your tithe Exxon-Mobil may actually contribute more to solving the energy crisis in the long run than turning off your damn laptop instead of letting it sleep.
Edited 2008-01-12 17:50 UTC
Good heavens. So much nonsense on such a tiny space. This is so wrong, that not even the opposite is true.
Strange. Studies for Switzerland show that it is possible to decrease energy usage by 30% without any decrease in comfort or standard of living. I don’t see that much difference between the US and Switzerland and I guess while my 30% study was done by Greenpeace or WWF, your 10% study was funded by the oil or nucear industry. The truth, I guess, is somewhere in between. But it’s surely far more than 10% and withoug any “extreme” measure (I wouldn’t call using the “shutdown” instead of the “sleep” button an extreme measure – neither is using the on/off-switch for any CE device)
You probably didn’t saw it, but the oil price reached 100$/barrel. Conserving energy is a simple part of having an economical advantage. If energy consumption in India and China rises, energy prices will, too. Whoever wastes more energy than necessary, will be in a n economical disadvantage – products will be more expensive. So either start saving or say goodby to your non-competitive economy.
An if you want to see a simple example of how easy it is to save energy, just have a look at the energy consumption during the first oil crisis in the 1970’s. All of a sudden, things were so simple..
Shuting down a PC instead of put it to sleep is inconvenient? May I laugh?
Yes, why? Maybe because – if you like it or not – the term “global” means, that you are part of it? “Global” is not somewhere else. And global solutions are not done abroad.
You can’t just point your fingers to China or India. Because they will point back at you (and rightfully so!). The “hugh, systematic problem” (and that’s the real problem here) is in fact a problem caused by almost everybody in the industrialized countries.
Now you’re getting dogmatic. Your statement is unfounded. Just ask yourself the question why nature survived billions of years without an energy problem. Maybe because energy was used efficiently (even in thiniest amounts) and without depleting sources on the back of the following generations?
Those numbers are wrong:
1. They don’t factor in the enconomical impact on energy price due to higher demand.
2. They don’t reflect the limited availability of energy.
3. They don’t factor in the impact on local and global economy and the disadvantage of shipping goods around the world when energy prices rises over a certain level.
4. They don’t factor in any impact of political and social instabilities which are probable if energy demand rises.
5. ..
In fact, everybody who says he knows how much energy China or anybody else will use in 10, 20, 30 years is most probably wrong and will use those numbers only to make us feel “comfortable” despite that we know exactly that our energy consumption is way over the long term sustainable level.
Are they? Funny enough, I haven’t seen a single solution from Shell, BP or anybody else in this corner. Why should they? They only survive when the world stays away from any alternative to “single source solutions” like oil or nuclear fuel.
In the meantime, more and more people started to build energy autarchic houses, use local energy sources like wind or biogas, instal intelligent energy management systems (those that turn of energy consumer when they are not needed).
Du to the laws of thermodynamic, increasing global energy consumption cannot be solution in the long term anyway.
Turning off the laptop will:
1. save energy
2. save battery lifetime (and thus money)
3. will produce less waste (waste from batteries is toxic)
4. comes for free, since it is as easy as putting it to sleep (no impact on comfort)
By your logic, we’d better not turn off flashlights in bright sunlight. After all, just putting a new battery in now and then saves the planet by supporting the energy companies.
]I don’t see that much difference between the US and Switzerland and I guess while my 30% study was done by Greenpeace or WWF, your 10% study was funded by the oil or nucear industry.
First of all, the US and Switzerland are two vastly different examples. For starters, the physical scale of the United States is completely different, at all levels of geography. I live in downtown Atlanta and I’ve got to walk a mile and a half just to get to the nearest coffee shop. My brother commutes almost 20 miles to his high-school. If you start in DC, all the major population centers in the state of Virginia are within about 250 miles. If you start in Paris, driving 250 miles in any direction will take you to major cities in: France, Belgium, the UK, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. And Virginia is a relatively small, heavily-populated state! The scale aspect alone means that a lot of the things that would greatly reduce energy usage in a country like Switzerland (improved public transportation, rezoning to make cities more pedestrian-friendly, etc), are completely inapplicable in the US without ripping up our cities and starting from scratch.
Second, I didn’t get my info from Greenpeace or the oil companies. Its a conclusion I’ve come to from talking to other engineers, people who actually study all the things that go into making cars, houses, planes, etc, more efficient. FWIW, btw, all the engineers I know seem to have pretty similar opinions of Greenpeace: they don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. Their completely unscientific oppositions to nuclear are reason alone to ignore them.
You probably didn’t saw it, but the oil price reached 100$/barrel. Conserving energy is a simple part of having an economical advantage.
I don’t disagree with that point in the slightest. With the prices of oil as they are, energy-efficiency can give you a strong economic advantage. That’s why Boeing’s “big new thing”, the 787, is focused so heavily on fuel efficiency. However, the same example should also tell you why conservation is never going to solve the energy crisis itself. The 787, the culmination of 20 years of research and billions of dollars of investment, is merely 20% more efficient than its predecessors. Us engineers consider that huge (we’d kill for 5%!), but in the grand scheme of things, small constant-factor improvements aren’t going to change the realities of exponential growth in population and energy demand.
Yes, why? Maybe because – if you like it or not – the term “global” means, that you are part of it?
And if you’re an insignificant part of it, who cares? This is perhaps a philosophical difference, but engineers and scientists ignore meaningless terms in equations all the time. The philosophy of “if its close enough to zero, just ignore it” has been good enough to make planes fly, trains run, computers compute, etc, so what’s wrong with it?
You can’t just point your fingers to China or India. Because they will point back at you (and rightfully so!).
It’s not a matter of pointing fingers at anybody. China and India have worked hard to achieve economic prosperity, and they deserve to reap its benefits. However, it is inevitable that their prosperity will come with a huge demand for energy, just as it did for us. Not too long from now, the energy demand of China will be comparable to the energy demand of Europe. What do we do then? Any cut-backs the developed world makes will be a drop in the bucket. Even if the whole developed world made a 30% cut, it would push back the ultimate “we run out of oil” point what, another 20 years? BFD! What do we do after that?
Now you’re getting dogmatic. Your statement is unfounded. Just ask yourself the question why nature survived billions of years without an energy problem.
Because nature didn’t have computers and cars and 650 mile plane rides just to go home for Christmas… The fundamental problem is thus: our current energy sources are fixed. No matter how much we conserve, we’re going to run out sooner or later. The only solution is to find new, preferably renewable sources of energy. Spending a lot of money and effort on conservation programs, just to push the inevitable back a few years is utterly pointless. At the same time, history shows a positive correlation between prosperity and energy use. This trend greatly limits our options as far as new energy sources go. By the time the oil does run out, progress in the developing world will have led to a doubling of our overall energy demand. The usual suspects for alternative energy sources (hydro, solar, etc), can’t even handle our current energy demand, much less a doubling of it. And conservation won’t change the equation in any significant way.
…
In fact, everybody who says he knows how much energy China or anybody else will use in 10, 20, 30 years is most probably wrong
I’m sure the people who did the study factored the rising price of oil into account. The simple fact is, rising oil costs aren’t going to be enough to offset rising energy demand in the developing world for quite awhile. Just look at the numbers. In the last decade, oil has gone from $25 a barrel to pushing $100 a barrel, and it has done relatively little to dampen the US’s 3% annual GDP growth rate, much less China and India’s 8-9% annual GDP growth rate. Nor has it done much to dampen India and China’s explosive increase in energy demand during that period. Oil is going to have to get really expensive before it slows down China and India’s economy. It will, eventually, once the oil starts running out, but the time-scale for that is 70-100 years, and its going to be an exponential curve so we won’t even start seeing drastic increases for many decades yet. Meanwhile, 2025 is only 17 years away. There is no way in hell oil prices are going to rise fast enough to stop the projections from coming true.
Are they? Funny enough, I haven’t seen a single solution from Shell, BP or anybody else in this corner. Why should they? They only survive when the world stays away from any alternative to “single source solutions” like oil or nuclear fuel.
Oh, they’re not going to trot out these solutions until they’ve milked the oil thing for what its worth, but they are working on them. They know was well as anyone else that the oil is running out, and they’re willing to invest some of their $$$ to ensuring that they still have something to sell in the future. Like it or not, the energy industry is the one best-poised to solve the energy crisis. The scientists and engineers work for Exxon-Mobil and Shell, not Greenpeace. They’re the ones with the billion-dollar R&D budgets, not the conservation movement. Progress takes expertise and money and the energy industry (along with the Department of Energy, etc) has those coming out of their ears.
As for “single source” solutions, whatever you might think of nuclear, it is the _only_ alternative energy source we have right now that can meet all of our current and projected energy demands. Everything else depends on either scientific or social miracles.
Du to the laws of thermodynamic, increasing global energy consumption cannot be solution in the long term anyway.
I’d be really entertained to hear your reasoning behind this little tidbit. I can’t think of any reason why this would be true, but what the hell do I know about thermodynamics, I only spent two years studying it…
I agree with you on most of that, but this bit about thermodynamics does make sense.
Say that we perfect fusion power and everybody can have as much power as they like from fusing seawater.
At some point, thermodynamics guarantees that we would have global warming from all the waste heat.
We might have to put up some sort of global cloud cover like in Bladerunner to reflect more solar energy.
Simple war to avoid boot times: do not shut down the system.
Since some years, I do not shut down my systems anymore. I just send them to sleep mode.
So my systems are instant on to use.
Multiply 10 watts an hour x billions of users on Earth x years and years of sleep mode and you’ll see how much we could have saved of money, fossil energy, and CO2.
Sleep mode is nowhere near 10W. Your average laptop battery is only about 55W-HR, and a laptop will easily last a day or two in sleep-mode with a full-charge. That puts the sleep-mode power draw at 1-2W.
To put that into perspective, a single gallon of gasoline has about 36,600W-HR of energy, enough to power a laptop in sleep mode for two to four years.
To put it still further into perspective, powering all the laptops sold worldwide in a year in sleep mode for a year will use about 25 million gallons of gasoline. This sounds like a lot, but the US alone uses that much gasoline in only 90 minutes…
The power savings from shutting down computers is so phenomenally miniscule it’s barely worth even posting about.
Edited 2008-01-11 19:44 UTC
That is an interesting perspective you put this into, but I’d say it still is bigger than zero, which is what you get when you shut off your computer.
This is also true for all the other millions of electric devices people keep running on stand-by for no other reason as to be able to switch it on without getting out of the armchair. Which might add another perspective to your’s.
I actually have “normal” switches that don’t leave devices in stand-by for other appliances in my house. I’m conscious about energy savings and this is more important than laziness not wanting to move one’s ass to unplug the TV after watching television. Same for the radio, the modem, etc…
Actually, unless you use a power bar with a switch or unplug your electronics, then they are using almost as much power turned off as a laptop uses in sleep mode. Your pc has power running through it all the time, waiting for the signal that you pushed the button to power it on. Thats how we are able to have software power ups and power downs. Still, I wouldnt mind seeing some part of the OS being written to a semi permanent memory on the motherboard. It could just be flashed during updates then. Or if buggered, wiped from the bios and then you could boot completely off the HDD.
Who cares if it’s not precise zero? It’s close enough to zero that it has no measurable impact on the environment.
“Every little bit counts” is a mantra that might make people feel good, but it’s not one that is sound from an engineering point of view. If something you do to save energy has no measurable impact, it doesn’t matter, and no, the thought doesn’t count.
Another bit of perspective for you. You use as much energy in the couple of minutes you wait for your laptop to boot as it takes to keep it in sleep mode for a couple of hours. If you factor in the high energy usage of bootup/shutdown sequences (thanks to hitting the disk so hard), you might not even come out ahead!
Edited 2008-01-12 01:32 UTC
I, for one, do and maintain it is not equal to zero, which it should be.
Well, improve your measuring capabilities then. The switch to Becquerel from Curie was probably only a “feel-good” excercise, too. Or along other lines, setting the scale obviously dictates what leaves a measurable impact. Compared to the tons of kerosine dropped by a single airplane before every landing the fuel consumption of a SUV is neglible. It certainly has no measurable impact, don’t you agree?
And so we go full circle. You know, this little argument of ours started because someone actually asked for improved boot-procedures?
I don’t have a laptop.
I can understand a Quad core server or quad professional desktop (maybe), but what is the point of a quad laptop?
I have a dual core laptop and honestly I like the extra core as I an be compiling an app while surfing the web or doing another task. But how many times do you need to kick of 4 different heavy tasks on your laptop? Is it worth losing MHZ on the cores you are going to be using all the time, to have extra cores that you probably don’t need.
I must be missing the point of a quad laptop.
Nah, you just need a proper IDE that compiles on multiple CPUs at the same time. Then you can easily keep 16 cores busy.
Which IDE are you refering to?
Presumably any which you can configure to do ^aEURoemake -j16^aEUR in a subshell.
(I’ve also got a feeling that Xcode supports parallel compilation using whatever resources you have available^aEUR”it would make sense, given that it has a load of support for distributed compilation too)
Quad Core 64-bit capable processors will benefit software used by digital artists such as game designers, compositors, editors, etc. Example Mental Ray used for rendering large amounts of data for film, etc is capable of using multiple processors across a LAN. I currently use Maya with Mental Ray on a MacBook Pro using a Core 2 Duo processor and can clearly see the time saved than using a single core processor. As for the laptop versus desktop question it really depends on the user requirements. I like having the mobility to bring the laptop with me whether for working on a project in my spare time at the cottage or on location (ie: film set). Anyone who multi-tasks several applications at once will benefit from multiple core processors.
Subject is a typo.
I find it funny when people go on about boot times – is 30 seconds all that important? are there people here claiming that within the thirty or so seconds wasted they could have completed a HUGE amount of work?
No, but who likes to wait? What if you had to wait 30 secs for you cell phone to turn on?
Me? Whilst it is loading I can put a pot of coffee on, have breakfast, read the newspaper – there are lots of things that can be done – unless of course you’re unable to multitask.