Back in October, HardMac reported that Apple was busy testing Intel’s new “Gulftown” Xeon chip ahead of its inclusion in a refresh of the Mac Pro, which is slated for release early next year. The 32nm Gulftown chip is an evolution of the 45nm architecture found in the currently-shipping 2009 Mac Pro model.

Gulftown will be sold under the Core i9 brand name for consumer machines, while its server counterpart will be labeled the Xeon 5600 series. HardMac’s sources suggested Apple would have short-term exclusive use of the chip, much as it did for each of the last two “Xeon” revisions of the Mac Pro line.

Now, according to AppleInsider, Polish website PCLab last week published performance test results on Gulftown, showing that the new chips operated at nearly twice the speed of the previous generation chips during parallel tasks. In addition, they consumed only 50 percent as much power doing so. Sadly, the performance results are no longer available. PCLab explains:

We have been contacted by the reps of Intel Corporation. We agreed to remove the article. We will bring it back once Gulftown hits the stores, somewhere in 2010 :-)

Earlier this year I bought a 2009 Mac Pro. And – as sheer luck would have it – my purchase was delayed by one week… the very same week, as it happens, that Apple refreshed the Mac Pro line. I scoured the online store, meticulously comparing specs and searching the web for in-depth reviews of the new machine from the sort of geeks who spend their days doing nothing but benchmark testing. In short, I learned that while the Mac Pro prices went up, clock speeds came down – but I was reassured by those “in the know” that it didn’t matter the cores were (marginally) slower than before. I was still getting a more powerful machine than I’d ever need. I don’t mind admitting, though, for what I paid, I wanted my Mac Pro to be light years ahead of everything else, and I wanted it to stay that way for a long time! That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Still, Gulftown will squeeze-in an extra four physical cores above the eight I currently enjoy, and provide an extra four megabytes of L3 cache over the eight offered by my suddenly lowly-by-comparison machine. And don’t forget that 50 percent power-saving…

I’m only partially joking. Setting aside my shameful greed for ever-more-powerful hardware, the fact remains that my many-cored 2009 Mac Pro is woefully under-utilized. I do a fair bit of audio and video editing, but none of the software I use takes full advantage of multiple-processor cores. In addition, none of it is optimized for the 64-bit architecture of my machine or its Snow Leopard operating system. Final Cut doesn’t even try to be 64-bit compatible. Adobe CS4 Master Collection (in itself almost the price of a Mac Pro!) stubbornly remains a 32-bit suite.

So the bottom line is that my gloriously powerful and impressive Mac Pro is still sporting its (virtual) training wheels because, frankly, developers are dragging their heels updating their software.

That doesn’t stop me wanting the new Mac Pro, of course. Like I said, I’m greedy. But I’m also learning. And even if Apple releases this behemoth early in 2010, I don’t think I’ll be too frustrated. News of breathtakingly-more-powerful machines is tantalizing, to be sure, but until software developers really get behind this new hardware, whatever advantages these powerful new chips and architectures promise remains almost entirely academic.

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This weekend featured the grand opening of Apple’s latest retail store, Scottsdale Quarter, in beautiful Scottsdale, Ariz. As evidenced by looking at the front of the building, this particular store quickly stands out among the rest of Apple’s retail lineup.

Hello, New Architecture

A few weeks ago, Ron Johnson was featured in USA Today discussing new changes that were coming to retail stores, including more Genius Bar space and larger tables to feature even more products. As you can see, the Scottsdale Quarter store is one of the first new retail store to incorporate some of these new design elements.

With features such as a front and rear made of all glass and a beautiful 75-foot skylight that spans the length of the store, Apple has clearly designed this location to take advantage of Arizona’s abundance of natural light. Additionally, the 20-foot ceilings and spacious entry area help to accent the more open feel of the store.

The Return of the Family Room Concept

The back of the store is similar to most stores but features a unique split Genius Bar with tables in the middle for One to One sessions. Recent store designs have utilized the back walls near the Genius Bar to feature additional third-party products, but this departure moves Apple’s idea of the “Family Room” back to its core with the rear section of the store entirely devoted to services. The split Genius Bar should help alleviate crowding during busy times and allow the store flexibility to run one bar as a Mac queue and another for iPod and iPhone queues if needed.

The first three images below are from Apple.com. A special thanks to photographer Brian Hancock for the opening day photos; you can view more from his web site.

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apple.com, 9 May 1998 [via]

Noted blogger and podcaster Daniel Eran Dilger writes today at Roughly Drafted on Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PowerPC.

For those of you, like our own Stephanie Guertin, who are running on older PPC systems, Dilger lays out why support for the PowerPC isn’t going away anytime soon. With an informative examination of historical Apple products, his article provides a sound argument for G4 and G5 owners to stay calm.

His article (as well as his blog in general) is worth a read whether you’re panicking about support for that PowerBook you bought just before the MacBook Pro was announced, or you merely want a refresher on the history of Apple’s products and CEOs during the dark ages (the years when Jobs was gone).

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What does it in for me, however, is that Apple is pushing their ringtone product at me when I don’t even own an iPhone.

In the iTunes store for every album that has any ringtones available for its songs it shows the little bell next to the songs I could purchase as a ringtone as well as an entire section in the sidebar dedicated to ringtones.

You could call it cross selling/marketing but I call it overcrowding and unnecessary. It wastes valuable screen space pushing a product I have absolutely no possible way of even using.

Maybe Apple is doing it in the hopes that some poor soul without an iPhone will accidentally purchase it thinking they can use it or maybe the marketing guru’s think a few 30 second loops of a song will make me buy an iPhone. I’m not sure. I am sure that I’d like a Preference option to turn off any and all traces of ringtones in the store though.

If they’re really looking to cross sell some things, maybe a more useful feature would be suggesting the movies and TV shows that certain songs by that artist include.

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