Evaluating Performance of a Xeon 5355-based Mac Pro

par Lionel - 20/02/2007

Thanks to Intel, we could install two Xeon 5355 in a Mac Pro - Is the 8 cores-based architecture faster than the 4 cores-based one?

Conclusion
For an average user, and on everyday basis, a Mac Pro powered by two Quad Core Xeon 5355s will not provide important performance gain. One will have to wait till applications really become multicore aware.
For video applications, such as iMovie or iDVD, Apple should go back into the code, as multicore acceleration might really be interesting when encoding DVDs or several simultaneous video conversion.
Although you could understand that Apple does not want to invest time in making the iApps multicore aware; on the other hand, Apple's pro solutions for video (Final Cut or Motion) don't currently benefit of multicore processing either. They are probably working on it, and Apple will probably add 8 core-based Mac Pro to its catalog at that time. Indeed, having such hardware today will not be useful as one will not really benefit from its power while the premium price will be very high.
Let's hope that Apple will unveil new versions of FCP and Motion at the NAB, paving the way for Xeon 5355 based Mac Pros for the future revision. Last but not least, Leopard might also introduce some multicore accelerations, making it possible to run non-multicore aware applications faster.

Edited and translated by: linathael and jwa