Muahaha.

Yes, it adds up to slightly more than 400%. It’s not instantaneous sampling. For those wondering how I’m managing to exploit all four chips from Compressor, take a look at qmasterprefs from the command line. As I’ve mentioned in the past, you can issue a command like:

qmasterprefs -service “Compressor Processing” on instances 4 autorestart off unmanaged off

and then build a cluster with four separate compressor nodes from a single machine. Submit a job to the cluster, and so long as it can be segmented (so, h264, mpeg2, mpeg4, etc), you’ll exploit the full power of your multi-cpu machine. Without doing this, I was hitting at best about 250% cpu utilization. Now I’m getting the full 400%. Woot.

Aside from being smoking fast, this machine is otherwise relatively ordinary. It did ship with one bad DIMM, which is a bit of a bummer. However, since it’s ECC ram, the system kept on humming – I didn’t even know about it until I happened to open System Profiler and noticed:

DIMM Riser B/DIMM 1:



Size: 512 MB

Type: DDR2 FB-DIMM

Speed: 667 MHz

Status: ECC Errors

ECC Correctable Errors: 40380

Quite a bit more user friendly than the old days, where a bad stick of ram was only discovered through voodoo. Apple’s shipping a new stick out, so all should be well there.

Anyways, the Mac Pro. It’s swell.