Quad G5!?!?
- Thread starter The General
- Start date
- Status
OP
OP
The General
Banned
- Messages
- 5,191
gcc - the most advanced C compiler in the world.
OP
OP
The General
Banned
- Messages
- 5,191
The Kid said:
mac mini - 499.99
looks like you already have the monitor keyboard and mouse ... because you are posting on here.
the general said:
Do you understand what the -Os switch means? You see, this is one of the many ugly hidden facts about Apple and OS X, take a close hard look under the hood so to speak at OS X, and its hardly what many think it is. Is it decent, sure, but its a performance slug hiding behind lots of processor power and lots of myths.
Qiranworms
Fully Optimized
- Messages
- 1,635
So what are they going to do when the Intel-based Macs roll around? They've got to change something, if they don't compile for better performance, it'll look bad compared to other operating systems that now run on the same CPUs, and of course benchmark comparisons are going to pop up everywhere the day after the first Intel-based Macs are released.
Have no clue what they are gonna do about it. Right now some of what they are doing involves an extra layer of software to act as a sort of compiler on the fly or emulation to make the usual OS X code made for PPC work on Intel, which slows things down a bit as well. In the past the benchmarks have always been rigged or fudged and impossible to really get a good comparison tween Apple and windows or linux. I havent seen very many of them done as impartially as possible. My own experiments running linux on PPC though show that there's enough of a difference for it to show. Anandtech did a decent but still somewhat incomplete comparison a few months ago. OS X did ok in most tests till you got into multithreaded apps like running php/mysql server apps, where OS X prettymuch choked and showed some real problems. Now, the average user will never be using it as a server, so this shouldnt be much of an issue cept the new Intels are slower,emphasis is on power consumption. One thing they may do, is use Intel's compiler, it tends to generate some damn fast code, that might be enough to make some difference. Windows itself has some of the same issues, its precompiled, everything installed is, and in many cases because of that, you take a performance hit to begin with(code is often biased against AMD).
Ive been wondering about whats gonna happen too since they made the announcement to switch to Intel. One thng they could do is get rid of the mach3 microkernel in favor of one similar to what linux uses, that would help alot. They are gonna have to do something, all the layers of emulation and translation already in OS X plus what they will be adding to run on Intel means a noticable performance hit. Apple despite advertising has never been about performance, its always been more about usabilty and style, thats their niche in the market, that and riding the Apple myths theyve managed to create over the years. Windows has some of the same issues, as a single user system it can hide the fact that it chokes when multitasking most of the time, windows as well may be in for a wake up call too, time will tell.
Ive been wondering about whats gonna happen too since they made the announcement to switch to Intel. One thng they could do is get rid of the mach3 microkernel in favor of one similar to what linux uses, that would help alot. They are gonna have to do something, all the layers of emulation and translation already in OS X plus what they will be adding to run on Intel means a noticable performance hit. Apple despite advertising has never been about performance, its always been more about usabilty and style, thats their niche in the market, that and riding the Apple myths theyve managed to create over the years. Windows has some of the same issues, as a single user system it can hide the fact that it chokes when multitasking most of the time, windows as well may be in for a wake up call too, time will tell.
Qiranworms
Fully Optimized
- Messages
- 1,635
As far as I understand, the PPC emulation or whatever it technically is (project is called Rosetta), shouldn't be a problem for too long. I don't think any of OS X and the software it comes with will still be in PPC code since they've actually been maintaining an Intel version of the operating system for a number of years now and should definitely have that all ready, it's a number of third party applications that may be slow to update or that users may not buy various software upgrades that necessitates Rosetta, and I would figure that it would only be used for that software. Apple claims it won't significantly tax on the performance of the applications running through it, but I'll believe it when I see it. They demonstrated Photoshop running on the emulation layer when the big switch was announced.
All of OS X will be compiled for x86 for the OS X86 version, but whatever traits it had before will carryover when compiled for little endian x86 arch. Rosetta may be pretty good, the guys Ive chatted with that are heavily mac fanatics are having their doubts. I dont think its a huge performance loss myself, enough to notice, ya certainly, but its likely just be a very slight bit of "snappiness" in the system and likely more RAM usage. Kind of like running a big app in java or python, once loaded apps willl run fairly quickly, but loading them takes a slightly longer time, and certain actions may be slower. Some things arent gonna be super speedy like running apps written in C on the command line are.
emeraldice
Daemon Poster
- Messages
- 609
Look at it this way. Apple has relased like 5 revisions of OS X in like 6 years? The figures are probably off. But way more than windows. They're realeased Tiger, Panther, uhh...wow this is a really weak argument from me. But they're realease at least 2 revisions of OS X in the time it took for windows to name 'longhorn' its proper name of 'vista'. I think Apple will release a new, specially designed OS for their new Intel macs.
- Status
