Which Software Takes Advantage of the Extra Cores

The Mac Pro is a very specialized product that only makes economic sense if you spend most of your time working in Final Cut Pro or one of the few other applications that support the OpenCL standard for hardware acceleration. Of the apps you mentioned, iMovie is the only one that fits the description.

Hello danallenhouston,

You are correct that some specific applications may not gain much speed. However, you can't really tell which applications might benefit. The old assumptions that only certain applications, like video apps, can benefit from multiple cores is no longer valid. Modern Mac programming is built around an asynchronous code block architecture. Virtually any program that makes good use of that architecture can see a benefit from multiple cores. The problem is that there is no way to tell from the packaging whether an app uses that kind of modern architecture.

Recent MacBook Pros are quite fast and have multiple cores. My 2014 machine has 4 cores and even my 2011 has 2. Chances are, any single application that is slow on a MacBook Pro will be comparably slow on a Mac Pro. With luck, relatively fast applications on a MacBook Pro will be even faster on a Mac Pro. If you are doing development and running all of the above apps at once, then having 12 cores will give each app its own processor. But then again, if you combine that with a traditionally parallelized app like a video editor, the video editor might not run as fast as it could because you have all of those other apps running. But all that is relative, of course. 12 is more than 2 or 4. If you can afford a Mac Pro, I'm sure it will be faster than your old machine, albeit less portable.

Many Mac Pro owners have posted here asking what processor they can install to speed up their Mac Pro.

The most frequent answer is that most Mac Pros are not compute-bound, except when doing specialized work like Compressor. They are I/O bound.

The best way to speed up a Mac Pro is to put different data streams on different Drives so that they stop fighting with each other, and rotating drives stop repositioning the drive heads away from the current file to do something else.

Boot and Applications on one really fast drive.

Source on its own Drive.

Destination on its own drive.

Scratch on its own drive.

Libraries (if applicable) on their own drive.

and if you need your computer to do the streaming, that should have its own drive as well. But an iPod or iPhone would be a better solution to that part.

Beware of counting logical or virtual cores that are not physical cores. Hyperthreading may bring 20-35% boosts at times, at the cost of heat, but a dual-core processor is just that even if you "see" and even as Apple has had a habit of marketing some processors as "4-core" but were only an i7 with dual-core.

Yes many of the i3 5th generation Intel processors of i3 and i5 can be very effective and even "powerful" - more instructions per clock cycle, high turbo speed. And I guess most laptops now have the option of 2x PCIe-SSD's with 700MB/sec that also helps feed data to the processor (memory is just a place to hold things).

But traditiona wisdom has been a 6-core processor with 3.4GHz has been the sweet spot giving the option that the system never has to vie for a processor (some platforms actually tend to reserve core 0 for the system even, old school feature) and most apps even today don't need to have more than 4 cores except endcoding video and others.

Graphics may need more memory and you want 32GB perhaps, while some pros find that even 128GB improves work flow over even a 64GB RAM system.

A Mac Pro can offer 1500MB/sec PCIe-SSD blades, even a 2009 4,1 can be upgraded to the SM951. And upgraded 6 or 12-core 3.4GHz, whille starting life at $500 - and for many users offer a customized and more viable workstation based on the Classic Mac Pro. Only when you get into adding two graphic cards for Motion, FinalCut-X, that it starts to hit the ceiling.

Many users though will be very happy with an iMac if they can afford to max it out to the teeth! Otherwise I think a 2009 Mac Pro can save $$ and do the jobs peachy.

The hatter wrote:

Beware of counting logical or virtual cores that are not physical cores. Hyperthreading may bring 20-35% boosts at times, at the cost of heat, but a dual-core processor is just that even if you "see" and even as Apple has had a habit of marketing some processors as "4-core" but were only an i7 with dual-core.

Yes. Thanks for reminding me. I remember when the i7 first came out I didn't want to spend the extra money for virtual cores. At the time, some software performed very poorly with those virtual cores and some people switched them off. Indeed, I still only have a 2-core machine. Ah well, there is a story behind this machine anyway so the i7 wouldn't have made a difference.

Last year at my day job, I have several Linux servers with 30+ cores. I forget how much RAM they had. Apple has stopped chasing the enterprise market.