John Niven wrote: > > I find this thread rather surprising. If you research the web, this used to > be a popular Mac question: should I buy the dual or the single? The answer > used to be that you would see no difference unless you were using one of the > few multiple processor aware apps (i.e. Photoshop). Indeed I understand that > DP macs were Apples desperate answer to the lack of faster processors from > their suppliers. The thing is these are all referring to the days of Classic > Mac OS which did not support multiple processors at all. Only when OSX came > along did you start to see any widespread benefit. > > Nowadays everybody has multi-core processors. This is because the designers > have given up trying to make them faster. So the future is multiple > processing. > > If you open "Activity Monitor" and select the "cpu history" window it shows > you the level of activity for each cpu. I was just watching a video on-line: > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/sep/09/cycling-tour-of-britain-devon > > and it maxed out BOTH cpu bars. So I rather fancy that I'd prefer a slower > dual than a faster single. > > Or is "Activity Monitor" lying to me? >
No. A dual in particular is advantageous as the OS itself tends to load a processor up a fair bit just sitting there. And even if an application isn't multithreaded (written to use multiple processors) many of the OS calls the app makes are multithreaded so such a program can still take advantage of multiple processors. Quad and eight (or more) core machines may end up not using much of their horsepower unless you are using multithreaded apps or have several apps running simultaneously, and I mean actually doing something not just sitting open in the background. And, hopefully, now that multiprocessing is here to stay it will become more common for programs to be written to take advantage of multithreading. -- Clark Martin Redwood City, CA, USA Macintosh / Internet Consulting "I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
