7 ms·
I'd politely like to ask.. What, besides A/V work, is a 6+ core OS X machine necessary for?
by AndrewNoNumbers 14y ago
I'd politely like to ask..
What, besides A/V work, is a 6+ core OS X machine necessary for?
- aphyr 14y agoScientific computing, system modeling, numerics, CAD/CAM, visualization, developing highly concurrent software, event processors, rendering, machine learning (esp vision/video/spatial stuff), genetic algorithms, databases, GIS, crypto, traffic processing, theorem proving, compiling stuff, exploratory data mining. Gaming, maybe. I routinely saturate my MBP's 4 HT cores. It's also nice to develop on the same architecture you'll deploy to; helps with concurrency tuning. Not that you can't run these on smaller devices; these are just easy ways to use up a lot of CPU.
- jsz0 14y agoGood reasons but I wonder is the current/new generation 12-core Mac Pro inadequate for this? It could be better but it still seems to serve its purpose.
- aphyr 14y agoDepends on what you're doing. I'd be satisfied with a 12-core Mac Pro for everyday development--but if a 128-core Xeon were available I'd take it gladly. When I was working on quantum state diffusion, it took many hours on a 24-node cluster for a single run. In many of these tasks, the problem will expand to consume all reasonably available resources; more cores allow greater precision, wider sampling of parameters, higher fidelity, etc.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jes5199 14y agosome of the iOS developers at my work use them just so they can compile faster.
- gonzo 14y agothen they're doing it wrong.
- theEconomist 14y agowhat? Clang parallelizes compilation 6 > 4. duh.