8-core Xeon MacPros are out

[Adam Bridge]

As a heavy user of Photoshop and a less heavy but sometimes use of
FCP, I have to wonder about how balanced the entire machine is. I look
at I/O through-put, memory, disk, and wonder if, in the real world,
one of the 8 core machines will REALLY make an appreciable difference.

Has Adobe broken down the filtering to use all those cores? Is memory
bandwidth elegantly enough handled to let them do it? Is the disk I/O
sub-system fast enough to let me be doing intense filtering on three
or four images at once (like I do this already? no..... but I'm
grappling with a way in which I might use it.)

Or how about doing compression of video for DVD production. What's the
through-put difference between this machine and a quad-core. Can it
handle two streams of compression at once instead of just one?

Or maybe this is really for serious number crunching only?

I'll be REALLY interested in how one of these puppies gets benchmarked
because finding out where the hardware and software bottlenecks are
might be non-trivial.