Couple comments:
Whether a dual processor system is *as* fast as a single processor system at double the clock depends on the tasks entirely. For video rendering there is a *huge* advantage to dual processors over a single even at double the clock.
Gaming is an example where dual processors show nearly no benefit. Mac games are often ports and even when they are native are generally poorly optimized, therefore, code is brute forced through the processor, it does not take advantage of things like AltiVec and typically such code is not SMP aware so there is little to no load balancing, rendering the second processor useless.
Yes, background tasks still affect things to some degree, but you can not load balance on a single processor system so there too is an advantage of duals.
Due to the nature of SMP if the OS is well written to respect to multiple processors the system can make better and more dynamic choices about load balancing than can the user, which is why we as users can not choose what goes to what processor, it just doesn't make sense.
1GB of RAM also is not a *lot* of RAM depending on what you are doing with that G5. On video workstations I would say 1GB is by far the minimum [I am not talking about home or hobby use but production level systems] and on a highend video workstation [aka a G5 meant for heavy lifting in a professional production setting] 1GB is really far less than you want. Requirements aside, I have experienced using Motion on a dual 2GHz G5 with 4GB of RAM and its not terribly hard to slow things down substantially by filling the RAM and forcing the system to use swap space.
Also, because of the manner in which OS X manages VM there is often swap going on even when not all of the physical RAM is in use. For instance, I have a PB G4 12" 1.33GHz with 768MB, I often end up using swap space and I use this Mac to do network administration, running things like Server Admin, Terminal, SSH, SFTP, ARD, Server Monitor, WGM, etc ...
David
On Nov 4, 2004, at 10:33 PM, Simon Brown wrote:
There is some conjecture as to if you really do get twice the grunt with duals or even 4x grunt with the Daystar genisis machines, A twin processor 604e, G4 or even G5 box are not twice as quick as the respective single processor versions of same machine, so in some context it would be nice to be able to control how a process is handled and by what processor. Whilst OSX is multithreading, preemptive etc the background tasks still do affect the foreground tasks, yes even on my G5 do I see it (I've got a Gig so it's not swap disk activity either) so why not be able to allocate the system processes and say mail, browsing or even other background tasks to one processor and then leave the entire second processor for anything happening in the foreground and what ever slack is left in first processor to be used as needed if available.
Sorry this discussion is getting a little off topic but it looks like we are all up for some healthy debate?
Simon
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