Well almost. The owner of this 8-core Mac Pro successfully booted Haiku on this PC and it is for sale:
You could do some very fast Haiku work here. I’m working on some SMP code that will use all processors.
Pretty decent yes but dollar for dollar not the most speed you can buy with your money.
A friend of mine upgraded to 32 cores (quad socket) and 32Gb quad channel ram relatively cheaply. All you have to do is start looking at server boards instead of desktop and wait for the right price. The video card for now at least wouldn’t matter what it is.
there are also already 12 core per socket CPUs which you can get for a bit more $$
Well I just built a new machine with the latest Intel 8 core Sandy Bridge CPU and 8GB RAM and it booted Haiku. But the video and network didn’t work and I think there were interrupt issues that slowed it down. With that fixed and with Haiku installed on the SSD I got for this system as well it should be pretty darn fast. And since I got a deal on the CPU and SSD total cost was only around $600. No need to waste money on overpriced Mac hardware.
@ Ryan, you mean Intel Quad core w/HT. For desktop Intel only makes 6 core CPUs. HT (hyper threading) shows as core in OSes but not true core. ie, you get 25-30% performance boost compared to 85+% with real core.
Be careful because Xeons come with 1 to 10 real CPU cores.
versus the 2-6 real cores for the Core i7
This system uses 2 Xeon Quad core CPUs with server motherboard which is more costly than desktop parts.
@ rest,
People should only get the computer that they will fully use. No need to get 8 or more cores unless you really use them. Many cores and high CPU speeds also use up lots of electricity so it puts a greater strain on the electrical grid.
I really would like to know why people really need all this computing power. Except for compiling, 3D graphic design, video/audio conversion, scientific computing or running a server; the CPU gets used up fairly little for most desktop users.
I would like to say that although you may be able to build a server box from parts, that doesn’t mean it would be good enough to put into production in a data warehouse. Mac Pros are indeed expensive, but the parts are premium. Mac Pros have lot of cores because Adobe software like PhotoShop can use them all and more. You may not need all those cores all the time, but if you are a professional on deadline, it’s nice to know you have the headroom.
I look forward to the day when we have more haiku software that uses 8, 12 16, or more cores. It’s what BeOS was designed for.
I would also like to say that it is nice to know that Haiku boots on Mac Pro. The core developers are doing good work and it shows.
My friend went with a board that supports the latest 12 core AMD cpus (for 48 cores) however he went with the 8 core ones for the value… for now.
Also The Apple software really can use the machine he said the difference between his machine and a quad core machine is immense.
Intel may be faster at single threaded stuff but there is a reason AMD dominates on supercomputers 
cost/performance is much better.
Advanced computer guys know high quality brands and can build a quality system from scratch. I’ve built quite a few systems myself which have lasted for years without issues but requires lots of knowledge of brands & parts. Only good thing with Apple is you do not have to worry about the system quality. For typical user might be worth paying the premium to know they are getting a very good quality system but for expert computer techs not worth it because they can build a same or better quality system for less money.
For professional use then yes systems with dual or quad socket makes sense for them if they do CPU intense work but not for your typical (or average) computer user. Only a small number of desktop super users will take advantage of all that computing horsepower.
BeOS had a 8 CPU or Core limit. Haiku has 8 CPU or Core limit too. I tested with Qemu & setting CPUs to 16 booted Haiku but only showed 8 CPUs.
http://haiku.it.su.se:8180/source/xref/headers/os/kernel/OS.h#409
I believe this was done to stay compatible with BeOS. R1 Haiku will officially support only 8 cores.
The number of cores used will depend how well and smartly threaded the application is. Yes, having more multi-threaded software on Haiku (or other OSes) would be very cool but apps that are CPU intense only benefit from it.
SMP support is also available in Linux, BSD, Haiku, Windows NT family, etc. Not just on MacOS X. Depends on which applications are used and how well they are multi-threaded. Without knowing what software or use for the system it is impossible to say anything.
I will say that is a very powerful system and hopefully he is using lots of multi-threaded software on it.
Tones, you can’t get PhotoShop or FinalCut Pro for these ones. In the hands of a pro, you can charge $125+/hour. You would pay for a Mac Pro system in 2 weeks.
I don’t recall the software he was running it for a friend that was in a hurry and didn’t have time to wait weeks on his quad core to finish.
As far as what he runs he I know for a fact he is getting his bang for his buck LOL… he had it building all of the redhat repos from scratch mostly vanilla with some important fixes but I think scientfic Linux fixed up what he wanted working mostly as well as the slow release of centos 6 heh. Apparently at one point he even ran out of ram trying to build too many kernels at once which is mind boggleing but it happened O.o
Its overall the most impressive box I have ever seen though he built one for someone else with far more resources along the lines of 32-48 cores and 256Gb ram and 3x SLI
My mind has been on other things tonight and well I need sleep and am not getting it so I end up posting here… heh good night all and no I didn’t hallucinate this post I am sure.
Personally I would sink my money in a TYAN board… I have an ancient one (2x300Mhz) that runs like a tank it was an amazing board its day. Tyan Thunder 2 ATX very similar to the board the BeOS demos ran on though a few Mhz faster.
Tones, you can’t get PhotoShop or FinalCut Pro for these ones. In the hands of a pro, you can charge $125+/hour. You would pay for a Mac Pro system in 2 weeks.[/quote]
However for say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux you can get things like Autodesk’s Maya
Although the direct reason for Haiku being limited to 8-way SMP is binary compatibility with BeOS, more pragmatically neither BeOS nor Haiku are really designed for many-way parallelism. Pure compute loads (where the operating system does almost nothing) should still run OK but as your needs grow the kernel will start to trip over its own feet so to speak.
So haiku is limited somehow? I’m not sure i follow sure there is scalability issues but I’m not sure I follow what you are saying directly with regard to haiku. I guess it could be similar to how IO performance was hampered on BeOS due to the suboptimal block size which was being used.
double post
Tones, you can’t get PhotoShop or FinalCut Pro for these ones. In the hands of a pro, you can charge $125+/hour. You would pay for a Mac Pro system in 2 weeks.[/quote]
Yes for professional use on MacOS X or Windows or as Linux server makes perfect sense but Haiku lacks the applications to make real use of a system like this.
Also, Final Cut Pro is made by Apple for MacOS X so no other choice for the OS. =)
You will not see FCP software on Windows.
Windows and MacOS X control most of the desktop market with 80% & 15% respectively or close to that. That’s why you see most commercial software on those two OSes. ie, because they are popular and have most of the desktop OS market.
There still is some software available for Linux (open-source type) which do similar jobs.
So a couple of options are still available but just not the big name ones. These shorts done with Blender look interesting but of course Blender not popular video editing choice like FCP.
[quote=AndrewZ]
I disagree here. I think the massive threading in the OS makes it a good candidate for ‘many-way’ parallelism and I hope to release some code for testing and benchmarking. I do agree that the kernel will need some improvements. Like for instance I think the scheduler could use affinity. Right now I think I see a single load bouncing between two cores. That is probably sub-optimal.[/quote]
Soft-affinity would be an improvement even on the very common dual-core systems. But there are lots of other problems. Locks for example. To scale from one CPU to two or more, the locks ensure that access to critical data structures and code paths is serialised. But this serialisation becomes a bottleneck for the most frequently accessed structures as you scale up further.
“Although the direct reason for Haiku being limited to 8-way SMP is binary compatibility with BeOS”
From previous discussion with Axel it is a simple recompile to increase this. It is not likely to break anything by increasing to 16 or even 32. Considering that you can soon get an AMD Bulldozer with 8 cores on a chip, and 4 chips to a motherboard, we might want to increase this number.
“more pragmatically neither BeOS nor Haiku are really designed for many-way parallelism. Pure compute loads (where the operating system does almost nothing) should still run OK but as your needs grow the kernel will start to trip over its own feet so to speak.”
I disagree here. I think the massive threading in the OS makes it a good candidate for ‘many-way’ parallelism and I hope to release some code for testing and benchmarking. I do agree that the kernel will need some improvements. Like for instance I think the scheduler could use affinity. Right now I think I see a single load bouncing between two cores. That is probably sub-optimal.
Perhaps you have some other ideas on how to improve the kernel for larger CPU processing loads?
“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software”
For best results, any video editing on Haiku should be 100% native. It should make full use of the rewritten media server and should use a native Haiku interface. We have source code for the old BeOS UltraDV video editor. It is a lot of code, it needs an experienced developer. It could be a shining star for Haiku when done right.
[quote=AndrewZ]“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software”
For best results, any video editing on Haiku should be 100% native. It should make full use of the rewritten media server and should use a native Haiku interface. We have source code for the old BeOS UltraDV video editor. It is a lot of code, it needs an experienced developer. It could be a shining star for Haiku when done right.[/quote]
Sure, native software for Haiku will work best when you can find developers to write it. I believe Clockwerk is another option but I have not used either of these.
If open source, you should list it on OSDrawer. That way any developer can have a look and get it fixed up or working on Haiku.
http://dev.osdrawer.net/projects
OSDrawer is site for open source BeOS & Haiku code.
The original developers have not made the decision to open source UltraDV yet.
Thanks for the Clockwerk reference, I need to check that out. As always, Tones, you are a walking ‘memory bank’