Upgrade dual CPU to faster single CPU

Question

Level 1

8 points

Upgrade dual CPU to faster single CPU

Hi All,

I'm currently running a mid-2010 Mac Pro, 2x2.4ghz. I bottleneck in Logic Pro on a single core, so I want to upgrade my CPU faster. However, I'm not concerned about core count - I generally am only using between 8 and 12 of my 16 virtual cores, so having a 12 virtual core, 3.46ghz cpu seems ideal. Will the Mac Pro work fine if a cpu socket is empty? Or is it nessesary to replace the board with a single chip board? It would be nice to still have the option to add a second chip later if I start seeing more multicore activity down the line.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 2.4 8-Core Xeon, 20Gb RAM

Posted on Aug 6, 2016 4:42 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 6, 2016 6:37 PM in response to Composerbell

It is not at all clear that that model Mac will work with one socket open.

The standard one chip solution uses a one-chip board.

Are you quite certain that you are not I/O bound, with one CPU waiting for I/O to complete?

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Answer 2

Composerbell Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 6, 2016 6:42 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I don't think I follow what you mean by I/O bound in this case...?

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Answer 3

Aug 6, 2016 6:53 PM in response to Composerbell

If you ask the original drive to make 10,000 transfers, in Reading and Writing Source and Destination files while temporary files are also in use, while the system brings in required pages from the Application and memory is tight so that some items need to be paged out while others are being paged in, your Mac will be slow. But it is not due to lack of compute power -- It is I/O bound. The disk cannot read and write fast enough, and everything backs up. It can appear that one process on one CPU is holding things up, but in reality is is the inability to read and write data to too few drives that is the problem. I/O (Input & Output) Bound.

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Answer 4

kaz-k

Level 9

51,412 points

Aug 6, 2016 7:08 PM in response to Composerbell

You must upgrade same two CPUs at the same time.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/faq/mac-pro-mid-2010-westmere-how- to-upgrade-processors.html

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Answer 5

Composerbell Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 6, 2016 7:12 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Ah. No, I'm running on SSD and have ram to spare. The single core spike is a known aspect of Logic, so I'm confident that it is in fact a single processor bottleneck.

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Answer 6

Composerbell Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 7, 2016 7:32 PM in response to kaz-k

I don't actually see anything on that page mentioning whether you can or cannot leave a socket empty...

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Answer 7

Aug 7, 2016 10:33 PM in response to Composerbell

Why don't you just upgrade both? They are not the state of the art chips anymore and have gotten fairly affordable.

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Answer 8

Composerbell Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 7, 2016 10:51 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

They still run around $270-$300 a pop, and it would be preferable to not spend that on something I won't see any benefit from (since I don't think I've seen more than 12 of my virtual cores get used for anything ever). OWC will do the upgrade, but then they swap out the board and if I ever DID want to add a second chip, I'd be paying for that whole service again, which just makes upgrading old tech that much more expensive. And the OWC route is rather cost ineffective overall anyways. Just for the upgrade to a single chip and board would cost 1300, which to me is utterly crazy.

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Answer 9

Aug 8, 2016 8:15 AM in response to Composerbell

How much time do you actually spend waiting for this?

Are you ready to spend that kind of money to cut that modest (3.46/2.4 => 1.4 times best case) amount of time off your processing?

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Answer 10

Composerbell Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 8, 2016 9:20 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

My work is realtime processing, so if I max out the core it glitches and/or halts processing. So it's less about how long I'm sitting around waiting, and more about needing some kind of cpu overhead at all times on all cores.

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