I see glass cielings on most other, particularly consumer, machines.

I, personally, do not see machines getting dramatically more powerful in the next 5 years compared to what we’ve seen happen in the last 5 years.Īnd I can easily see a modern Mac Pro, with it’s just insane expandability, to seriously be a contender as a “last machine I’d ever need” save for a laptop.Īdd in that I can double the CPU performance with 4 more cores in a year, and it’s even more insanely expandable. CPU’s are not getting dramatically faster, they’ve plateaued and now we’re addressing performance with multiple cores. Who needs a machine with 2TB of disk space.īut, for me, that’s the beauty of a machine like the Mac Pro. I agree with the sentiment, who needs a machine with 8 cores. One thread for handling keyboard input, one handling syntax formatting, one handling autocompletion, one compiling your code in the background, etc.Īs we get more and more machines with multiple cores, those threads can become more and more powerful with less chance of stalling the primary, editing thread of the IDE. The whole multi core bandwagon just gives developers more insentives to multi-thread their applications.Įven something like a modern IDE can take advantage of multiple cores. They colloquial term for the systems that process such things today is “render farms”, implying dozens to hundreds of machines all running in parallel. Anyone doing a lot of 3D rendering or movie production (which is essentially rendering and converting of raw images in to compressed ones) will enjoy benefits of the extra cores.

Quad core vs 8 core mac pro