On Saturday, February 8, 2003, at 06:55 PM, Matthew Hindson Fastmail Account wrote:
Matthew,I am interested to guess whether Finale OS X will automatically take- Find out if the software you use will take advantage of dual processors. (Finale does not -- in fact, virtually all OS 9 software does not.)
advantage of double processors. Indeed, I have made my own requests to Coda
that it should do so, as well as make use of the Altivec processor which is
on every G4 processor. Perhaps a Mac OS X guru like Phillip Aker could fill
us in as to whether this would make any difference within Finale. Certainly
Mac Finale needs something to catch up to the speed of the PC version.
The Altivec vector instruction set seems to be most useful in hard number-crunching situations like ripping MP3s, applying certain types of Photoshop filters, or working in mathematics applications like MatLab. My impression -- and I'm sure Philip will correct me if I'm wrong -- is that typical Finale tasks are not good candidates for Altivec acceleration.
And I've heard conflicting reports about the extent to which multiple processors are automatically enabled by OS X, without requiring applications to be coded specifically for DP. The short answer is that if Finale 2004 is a well-written Carbon app, than it should see some benefit from having the dual processors. Just how much is unclear. (Unfortunately, probably not enough to make up for the slowdown associated with OS X's Quartz rendering engine.)
The sad fact is that Apple hardware is currently lagging far behind Wintel hardware in terms of speed. The "Megahertz Myth" is only true to a point, and while it's true that a dual 1.42 GHz G4 may wipe the floor with a similarly equipped 3 GHz Wintel in certain Photoshop tasks -- Photoshop being far and away the app most optimized for Altivec and dual processors -- in most other applications, the Wintel box cleans up, hands down. Honestly, Motorola are faltering badly and seem to have lost all interest in developing faster PowerPC chips. Once Apple switches to the IBM 970, things should start to pick up again, but that won't happen till this summer, at the earliest. (Anyone care to place bets whether the 970-based Macs will debut before an OS X version of Finale?)
All that said, I don't find Finale unresponsive on my machine (a souped-up beige-era Mac with a 583 MHz G4). Most of the time, Finale is waiting on me rather than the other way around. Sure, there are delays when extracting parts, saving large scores, or (worst of all) working with an orchestral score where the voice (including lyrics) is cued in every part -- but for the most part I'm pretty happy with the way Finale performs. Count your blessings -- at least it's not like Sibelius, where Mac performance is unbelievably atrocious even on the simplest scores.
- Darcy
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