Aug 2006 - New Mac with Xeon processor

[Dwight]

Can anyone comment about Archicad operating on this processor from the PC world?
And why would they name a chip after a Warrior Princess?

[Eduardo Rolon]

Can't comment, but I am checking my hidden credit card's limit (since my wife hid the others), that's my next system.

UHH wasn't it Xena … I never saw it (really I never did)

[Dwight]

joke.

[David Pacifico]

Xeon processors were often seen on servers or work stations in the PC world where one wanted multiple processors.

[Thomas Holm]

They may be called Xeon, but they are not the same as the old Xeons. These are Intel's new dual-core full "64-bit architecture" processors. The macPro systems have 2 such processors each, that is in total 4 processor cores per machine.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/promacs.ars

Later this fall, Apple will also likely upgrade the present MacBook and iMac CoreDuo (which is a 32bit Pentium derivative) processors to the new full 64-bit Core2Duo. This processor type will probably have a longer lifespan than the present transitional CoreDuos.

To my knowledge, Archicad doesn't utilize more than one core presently except when rendering, Lightworks uses 2 cores.

But that will likely change. This article promises interesting developments in rendering:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060805-7430.html

[David Pacifico]

Some history of Xeon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon

[henrypootel]

I doubt that anybody would have used Archicad on a Xeon, as they have(until recently) been relegated to 'Really expensive server chip' land. With my experience with servers using them, i would say that Archicad will absolutely fly on 2 of them (not sure that 4 would be worthwhile though).

[Aussie John]

Thomas wrote:
To my knowledge, Archicad doesn't utilize more than one core presently except when rendering, Lightworks uses 2 cores.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060805-7430.html

Yes - GS lets see it happen!!!

If you havent done so, dont forget to vote on this poll on multiple processor aware Archicad

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=64303&highlight=processor#64303

As for the new macs - they look great and are even significantly cheaper than similar configured PC. It does concern me that it has four cores but Archicad will address only one of them.

[Anonymous]

henrypootel wrote:
I doubt that anybody would have used Archicad on a Xeon, as they have(until recently) been relegated to 'Really expensive server chip' land. With my experience with servers using them, i would say that Archicad will absolutely fly on 2 of them (not sure that 4 would be worthwhile though).

Well.....ok......
We just got two new computers (PC's) here that have Dual Duo Cores.
With a SATA RAID ARRAY

specs

proc 1 = dual core xeon 5050 (3 ghz 2x2mb l2 cache)
proc 2 = dual core xeon 5050 (3 ghz 2x2mb l2 cache)
Ram = 2 gb ddr2
vid card = 128 mb nvidia quadro
hard drive = 80gb SATA w/ RAID 0
hard drive 2 = 80 gb sata w/ raid 0


They have hyper-threading enabled which gives us 8 threads

AC10 blazes in 3d model space. Exploring the model is much faster than previous workstations we've had.

Rendering in other (better) rendering engines is much much faster. (Some renderings that were taking 20-30 minutes a frame take less than 1 min. per frame now.)

...but.... for some reason rendering in Lightworks isn't really faster at all.
perhaps I've missed some setting that enables multiple-threads in lightworks. But we haven't really seen any significant increase in that area if anything it seems slower. Anyone has any ideas how to increase that speed?

Other than that though... drawings update faster with slightly less loading times. Generally everything else is blazingly fast.