OT: Bare Feats wants suggestions on 8 Core FCP/Mac tests

Just got this from Rob over at barefeats.com. Any suggestions?

Just wanted your constituents to know we experienced some amazing
results when we rendered TotalBenchmark project on After Effects CS3:
[www.barefeats.com]

We've been disappointed with Motion and Final Cut Pro rendering
results. The 8-core doesn't achieve results any faster than the 4-
core. The only advantage we saw using Apple's software was,
a) when converting 6 movie clips simultaneously with QT Player or
b) doing simultaneous rendering with multiple apps (FCP + Motion +
iDVD + Photoshop).
(see [www.barefeats.com]).

We are open to any suggestions from LAFCPUG members on what tests we
could run that might reveal the power and glory of the 8-core using
Apple Pro-Ware.

Michael Horton
-------------------

I'm officially ignoring any bad news about the octo since I just this minute walked in the door with my new one. See you all in a couple of days when I get tired of the speed bump from my dual 800 g4. Woo!

What has been said for quite some time about 8 processors, is that until the operating system and it's applications are coded to really take advantage of any number of cores (true multithreading), it will not be of any greater value.

Do we know for instance, that FCS 5.1 is running better on 4 cores rather than 2 cores? Where is the hard evidence of which application use more than 2 processors??

So, the big questions are: will Final Cut Studio 2 run any better than FCS1 on a 4 or 8 core system and will it be necessary for Leopard before this can happen???

One person local to our NAProViG users group ran encoding tests on his Quad G5 and a new 8 core MacPro and he saw no apparent difference in encode times for MPEG encoding.

I suspect that 8 and possibly 4 cores are hidden horsepower that we will only be able to leverage in the future.

Jude - even with 2 or 4 cores working, the speed upgrade from a G4 will blow you away. But you know that already.

I reckon Jude is future proofed beyond the present, if that makes any sense.

I agree with John - I think that the benefits of 4 and 8 core models will come with Leopard and hopefully FCS2. This might also explain why their aren't as many frills in the upgrade as we might have hopped - maybe its all under the bonnet.

Jude, glad to hear the machine arrived safely - welcome to power computing land! Its a lot more fun.....

From what I know about FCP 6 I highly doubt Leopard will factor in. But then I don't code.

Michael Horton
-------------------

So far so good here, sort of. The machine is fast and quiet - except the DVD drive, which is pretty noisy. Startup from pressing the button to actually being able to work takes about 9 seconds, which is very nice.

I seem to be having some buggy behaviour though - the sidebar icons have mostly reverted to generic folder icons and it took a couple of goes for my system preferences to take hold. Things like the dock living on the left of screen rather than the bottom, and the Expose' settings. Since I have virtually nothing installed yet, I'm doing a rebuild from the ground up so I know what goes where and we'll see if that helps.

For the Warcraft players - its smoooooooth. I never realised how much detail there is in things like the mounts, either.

Physically, very tidy inside - the ATI card is the prettiest thing I've ever seen inside a computer. Also, it's putting a lot of heat out the back, but it seems well ventilated.

Once I have the sys software re-installed I'll see how FCP 5.x.x runs on it.

I've never experienced a quiet optical drive on a G5/MacPro - anyone else? Even when i replaced mine is still seems terribly noisy.

I always re-install on a new machine, for exactly the reasons you mention. Get rid of the printer drivers and language translations you don't need too IMO.

Warcraft - can't stand it! Too many of my clients spend too much time playing it - I tried to get into it, but just decided I rather work! Its hard when they're not on MSN becuase they're on Warcraft tho......

MacPros are amazing machines - you'll have a ball I promise.

Yeah I like to do a reinstall for the same reasons - clean off all the extra language stuff and trial version rubbish. I do usually play with a new machine for a while first though.

But here I am, all done and seems to be running fine now.

I'm finding the bluetooth mouse quite heavy and it's actually starting to hurt my wrist, so it might be ixnay on that. The bluetooth keyboard is nice though. Less junk on the desk.

BTW I am enjoying it! It's so big and shiny....

Warcraft .. I love it. The quests for sure could be more intellectually challenging, but moving to a PvP world has helped - there's more at stake and it raises the level of difficulty if you're running from level 70 players whilst trying to do things.

Wow - that's lingo I don't understand - PvP? Person vs Person? Profit vs Poverty?

As for the mouse, we've got logitech 2 button and scroll wheel trackballs all over the house. They're excellent when it comes to 12 hour days....IMO only of course

Apple mentioned how ProRes (and H.264) was multithreaded specifically to take advantage of multiple cores. Would be nice to see some tests confirming this when FCS2 is out.

- Justin Barham -

Where I come from PVP stands for "Poseur Value Points". Having an octo Mac would be EXTREMELY high on the PVP scale.

It will be interesting to see how Apple walks the talk on multithreading since they have been blabbing to developers since WWDC 2006 how easy it is in Xcode to optimize your apps from mutli-core operations.

I will be seriously disappointed in Apple of FCS 2 isn't fully optimized for multi-core machines, either in the beginning or at worst by end of the year with a service grade update.

Yeah we've got one of those logitechs, Jus, and I agree, much easier on the wrist. I think it's something to do with the tilt. A nice mouse, normally connected to the laptop, but I might have to snaffle it for a while, I reckon..

I haven't installed FCP 5 yet as I have Studio 2 on order and I can't decide if I want to have more junk on the machine than ness. I'm also waiting on some SATA 2s, so I'm not going to bother moving old projects over to this machine for a bit. It's very crowded on my desk right now..

And Andrew - yeah! I feel like I'm int he Poseur realm lol. Very nice to have the latest and greatest again.