Quad Core or Eight Core?

Question

I have a G5 PowerPC Dual 2.0 and wanting to upgrade to a MacPro. My question is should I buy a Quad-Core or 8-Core? I could purchase a 2.66 Quad-Core "Nehalem" MacPro which is 800.00 less money than the 8-Core. Who benefits from 8 cores? I run Lightroom & Photoshop CS4 and primarily use the computer for photography,  I occasionally render video but that is not very often. I also could look at the 2008 MacPro's but I have been told the "Nehalem" processors are a big improvement. My thought was this.....if the software does not take advantage of the extra "core" technology then going from 2.26 to 2.66 would be a good speed bump. Any advise is greatly appreciated........
Thanks in advance,
Kevin

Answer 1

Well I'd like to clarify a few things...
I remain very, very happy with my purchase. I have the latest version of Final Cut Studio on my Dual-Quad Mac. I am presently learning Motion, which ought to give Adobe's After Effects a good run for its money. I have been using After Effects extensively at work, where I work on a Pee Cee (A Dell XPS 600 that is about five years old and has 4GB of system RAM out of which the applications tend to see a maximum of 2GB).
I remain committed to the concept of buying as much processor as one can possibly afford, despite Joerollerblade's comments. He's correct in that spending the extra money for a slight processor increase is expensive. But he's not valuing his time as a professional. If he saves just one hour a day in processing time for his workflow, he's paying off the processor cost pretty quickly, assuming he is charging a professional rate.
As to Final Cut Pro, Apple's applications are written under the Cocoa framework and take advantage of Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch for sending multiple threads to multiple processors. Thus, the more processors you have, the faster the application will work for processor-intensive tasks.
Now for some clarification.
Adobe's applications are all written under the Carbon API. Apple, when they released OS X in 2000 told developers that Cocoa was the way they ought to put together their applications and that Carbon was a transitional API to help them get from Apple's earlier System Software to the new Unix-based OS X. Apple has continued support for Carbon in order to support infrequently-updated legacy applications. We're talking applications like Leister Productions' Reunion (though I note they have recently updated their software to version 9, which supports Snow Leopard). Back in 2000, Adobe released Photoshop 6. There have been five releases of Photoshop since, which works out to a new release every two years. Surely, the folks at Adobe can develop for a new API in 9 years.
Carbon applications cannot take advantage of Apple's Grand Central Dispatch in Snow Leopard, so what Adobe has to do is detect and code for multiple processors and multiple cores in their application the hard way. And Adobe's programmers (as talented as they are) can hardly be expected to write code for eight processor cores when most computers out there have no more than four (and many have only two). Apple has just released its first all-in-one Mac with four cores at a very attractive price point. The way computers will get faster in the future is to add more cores.
But Adobe is sticking with Old Skool.They're essentially stuck in code that worked under System 8 and 9. Photoshop 11 (CS4) for Windows runs in 64-bit but, on the Mac, it's still a 32-bit application and that is probably because it's trapped in Carbon (kind of like how Jabba the Hut encased Han Solo). Frankly, it's time for Adobe to come out of the cold and have a nice, steaming hot cuppa Cocoa.
So, if we're assuming Adobe applications, does the Eight-Core Nehalem system give you advantages?
I read the review of Apple's new Quad and Eight-Core Nehalems in Macworld and they tested the two computers using their "Speedmark" test. The stock Eight-Core comes in with a Speedmark rating of 343 to the Quad-Core's rating of 348. Macworld explained that raw processor speed alone seems to place the Quad ahead of the Eight because:
"Many applications have a difficult time using even four processors efficiently, the advantage of having eight was not apparent in most of the application tests that make up our Speedmark benchmark test suite. In fact, the new eight-core system posted a lower Speedmark score than the quad-core system, and bested it in just one test—Cinema 4D, where it posted a 28 percent faster time."
I'm betting Adobe's Photoshop was one of those applications. Since the stock Eight-Core Mac Pro runs 15% slower than the stock Quad-Core, it's the raw processor speed that gave it the bump in performance over the Eight-Core. That is reason enough to upgrade the Eight-Core system's processor. The second reason why it's a good idea to get the more expensive computer is RAM.
The Quad-Core Mac Pro has slots for a maximum of 8GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM modules. The Eight-Core can fit 32GB. That's eight times as much RAM in the more expensive computer, which will lend itself to a longer life. If you are using Photoshop to make really large images or you are using Photoshop with Adobe's suite of applications that include Illustrator and InDesign and you need to keep all of these applications open so that you can quickly modify images to suit your publication, 32GB of system RAM will come in handy as time goes on.
My current system has 8 GB installed in it by Apple. That's as much as you can fit into the Quad-Core and I'm all set for another 8GB as the demands of my software increase (which they will).
To jthunders particular question, I have Final Cut Studio on my system. I am running Leopard and not Snow Leopard and this is because Intuit's Quicken 2007 will not run on Snow Leopard. When Intuit finally updates their software, I shall upgrade my OS (assuming I do not have any current projects running and assuming I have a complete clone of my boot drive with a good installation). I routinely have both Motion and Final Cut Pro open at the same time and have had Motion, Final Cut Pro and Color open at the same time for a stretch. I was hitting my hard drive for extra RAM, but the applications handled what was needed with no problems. I contrast that to being at work on the Pee Cee running Windows XP Pro, Adobe's Premiere Pro 1.5 and After Effects 6.5. If I open up Premiere Pro and then open up AE to do something quick, Premiere slows to a crawl until it collects enough memory to get done. Typically, I need to exit Premiere Pro in order to free up enough RAM for the system to get out of its own way when I'm working on anything complex. I'm editing in NTSC (Standard Definition) in Premiere Pro and AE. I can easily work on HD video in Motion and Final Cut Pro.
Back at the beginning of March, Macworld quoted Envisioneering Group's Richard Doherty:
"Apple’s decision to upgrade the Mac Pro falls in line with the growing adoption of high-definition video. Apple is delivering all the processing power it can get for users to edit real-time HD video through the upgraded Mac Pro workstations."
So if all jthunders intends on doing is SD video, he's probably fine with what he has. But if he intends to move forward with HD video on his system, the Mac Pro line (and arguably the new Quad-core iMac) will handle the processing requirements of HD projects.
I would mention one caveat here. Mac Pros can take expansion cards and, if you want to edit HD video, you're going to need a RAID array to play back HD. The only way you can play back uncompressed HD on an iMac is by connecting a RAID array to the built-in Firewire 800 port on the iMac. You cannot choose SAS or SCSI or a Fibre Channel solution on an iMac for video.