Re: Apple's ways

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Supertimer opined:

>>And Apple will have a hard time performance wise if those GHz P4's
>>become mainstream in the PC market....
>
>If Apple is a smart company, it will begin lowering prices and,
>since Motorolla can't match AMD or Intel in the clock speed
>department, push multi-CPU solutions.  Once MacOS X takes
>over, software should have no problem taking advantage of
>parallel processing and dual, tri, or quad 800Mhz G4s would
>certainly make up for lack of single Ghz+ chips.  So it is not
>too late for Apple to change.  The hardware isn't the problem.
>The mentality is.

At the risk of continuing a pretty seriously off-topic thread, which
is nonetheless interesting...  ;-)

Multiprocessing is never a substitute for uniprocessor performance
in a general purpose machine.  Most applications are not written
to exploit more than one processor--in fact, synchronizing multiple
threads sharing a lot of relatively unstructured data is not a problem
which is efficiently solvable, in general.  Even if the OS is efficient
scheduling an MP, the computing load which most home users
put on a machine is not spread evenly across multiple independent
processes, but is typically concentrated in _one_ process--the one
you are waiting for.

Of course, we must also consider the increased cost of multiple
processors and the more complex chip set to permit them to
share memory and I/O efficiently.  Such a (multi-chip) solution
is always at a cost disadvantage relative to a fast uniprocessor.

If we were talking about database servers or web servers, the
answer might (might!) be different, but for a home application
machine, uniprocessors are the most cost-effective solution.
(Unless you primarily use an app which is optimized for MP,
like, for example, PhotoShop.)

Apple's best strategy is (and has been for some time) to port
their software environment to "industry standard" platforms
to leverage the relentless technology advances financed by
the PC industry, which Apple and Motorola can never hope
to match.

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/