On Sep 2, 10:29 am, "Mac User #330250" <[email protected]> wrote: > > At least the towers where competitive. The Power Mac G5 "Late 2005" was so > advanced that the first Mac Pros where a backstep. > > Cheers, > Andreas
when the G4 was first introduced, apple put together a small cluster, 24 machines i believe it was, and in benchmark tests it rivaled a Cray supercomputer. part of what drives the development of newer faster hardware is the fact that a sizeable fraction of the userbase will run out to buy the latest and fastest even if they don't know why they need it. this has advantages and disadvantages that affect us all. while it helps drive the cutting edge deeper into the realm of possibility, the sad truth is that software developers are ususally unable, or more likely, unwilling to keep up. the altivec engine on a G4 or G5 enables the processor to perform a vector operation in a single clock cycle, compared to a simple floating point operation on an intel chip. if you were using this feature to its maximum benefit, a 1GHz PPC chip is inherently 64 times (6400%) faster than a 1GHz intel chip. but the PPC came and went so fast that virtually no developer ever exploited its full capabilities. i run some fairly high end computational apps for molecular modeling, and these applications were all originally written for unix based mainframes and ported to destop computers. now the algorithms that approximate solutions to the schrodinger equation involve solving huge matrix equations; a task that should be ideally suited to exploit the altivec's capability. yet to my knowledge, NONE of the developers who produce such desktop apps ever wrote code that did exploit the altivec. i've talked with the developers and tech support staff at a couple of firms, and they were hesitant to admit that, but ultimately did. i was shocked. i still can't figure out what the hell they WERE doing to earn their paycheck, if not developing the software to fully utilize the hardware. but basically i was told that if i wanted to get the maximum performance out of my PPC, i had to write my own code. the same is true of virtually every other software developer. you can count on one hand the applications that fully utilize the capabilities of the altivec engine, and still have maybe a finger or two left over. now that the PPC has been abandoned by apple, that potential will never be exploited by the big software developers, and we will never know what the real preformance capabilites of the PPC were. unless of course you want ot write your own code. i did that, 40 years ago. now i'm too old and lazy to be willing to take a giant leap back to turbo-assembler. c'est la vie. john --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
