On 9/29/05, John Christie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Sep 29, 2005, at 9:38 AM, Eric Dunbar wrote:
>
> > Don't they realise that the Mac mini is *faster* for most operations
> > than the DP 867 (except those that rely on multiprocessors or
> > multithreading).
>
> To tell the truth, it depends a lot on what you are doing. I'd put
> the DP 867 over the mini for most day to day things and would far
> prefer it. Benchmarked on a single thread in cache, yes the mini
> would destroy the DP. But, I've used both. And, in my experience
> the DP is smoother for most day to day tasks because of the superior
> HD speed and parallelisation of processes.
>
> One of the things I do sometimes that really amazes me about the DP
> pro machines is modelling. I'll set some program going that takes a
> day or so on a single CPU Mac and the machine basically becomes
> useless. On a dual CPU Mac you wouldn't know it is running. Now,
> most folks can see that I'm just using the single CPU and that seems
> to explain the difference. But, the fascinating thing is that if I
> split the problem space and run two instances of the model and the
> load meter clearly shows both CPUs pinned you STILL can't tell that
> the DP machine is doing anything while interacting with it. You
> won't run into a problem until you try to play a movie or something.
> The superior parallel instruction handling has ramifications far
> beyond what one might expect if they haven't used a DP machine.
If space wasn't an issue I'd prefer a dual processor, but, to be
honest, _most_ of my tasks are not going to be helped much by being
able to split tasks.
I have a feeling that your work doesn't require the creation of a
whole lot of threads, does it ;-).
I recently saw an analysis of OS X vs Linux for Apache and Apache
seemed to tank on OS X (including Server) when it was handling a heavy
load compared to its Linux counter part and it was (supposedly) all
due to the way OS X handles the creation of new threads.
But, I guess the dual shines when it comes to handling single
processor tasks in the background. One processor gets assigned the
mega (but single processor) task whilst the other handles all the
day-to-day operations that the user throws at it.
Eric.
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