Eight Isn't Enough
My main system for work and art projects is a Quad Core Mac Pro. I love it and it's been plenty powerful for my needs. So when Apple announced they were going with eight cores standard I thought, that's nice, but aside from video artists who will ever need that?
Turns out the answer is me. Currently I am:
- Recording the Olympics in hi-def,
- Transcoding 200 Gigs of Olympics video files for my Apple TV,
- Batch processing thousands of hi-res digital photos in Aperture,
- Installing the latest 500 Meg MS Office security patch, and
- Encoding poi videos.
My CPUs are running at 118° F and my RAM is at 170° F.
My computer has let me know in no uncertain terms that if I'm going bitch slap it this hard, I can damn well wait my sweet time to launch my email client.
Mmmmm ... eight cores ... drool....
Labels: technology
posted by Dale Sorenson @ 8:36 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I too have found that between manipulating (recording, watching and transcoding) video data, surfing the web, and running multiple operating systems via Parallels one can certainly tax a system.
Actually, it seems that digital encoding is the biggest user of multiple CPUs simply because it's the single best-written "application" for symmetric multiprocessing. Other computer-slamming applications run into hard-disk traffic jams far sooner.
Which brings an interesting point: are you optimizing your computer usage by dividing your workload among multiple hard disks? I've found that by having different physical drives for my system drive, media storage, target-transcoding, and caching, and making sure different Parallels Virtual Machines are on different drives (if you, like I, run 3 OS's heavily at the same time) that you can come closer to that ideal of keeping those multiple CPUs and cores maxed-out.
And yes, I think I'm entering training for the Geek Olympics here...
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