[SmileyDude]

Hi everyone,

I have a question about which Mac would be the best for compiling C++ code... obviously, the quad PowerMac G5 would give the biggest speed boost, but I'm really looking for best bang for the buck here.

Let me give some background -- currently, we have a C++ program that takes around 2 and a half minutes to compile (yes, I know for some places, that's pretty short) on an iMac G5 (iSight) 2.1Ghz. But, in some informal testing, I've found that the Core Solo Mac mini beats it by a minute. The new MacBook is even quicker.

So, given that, what systems have people found to be a good tradeoff between speed and price around here for C++ development?

[Catfish_Man]

GCC loooooves the Intel Macs. Adium takes ~10-15 minutes on my 1GHz PowerBook, and 2m 49s on an Intel iMac.

[SmileyDude]

yeah -- i've noticed the love GCC is giving the Intel Macs. It's actually quite scary. As an update, the fastest machine I was able to compile our program on was a 2.3Ghz dual G5 Xserve -- until I tested again on the MacBook using the local drive instead of a network drive. Unreal that the low end MacBook would beat out the high end XServe -- and to top it off, I was compiling off our RAID on the XServe, the same place where I was compiling from over the network originally.

I'm putting together a chart that compares the different machines that I have access to -- it's not very scientific, but it does give a rough idea on how long things take on different machines. I'll try to post it sometime next week.

[jamil5454]

If you're just looking for a compile machine, I'd go with a Core Duo Mac Mini. Or heck make that two.

[davechen]

Yeah, compiling is much better suited to the Intel processor than the G5. It's a lot of branchy, integer instructions. Practically no floating point or vector type instructions. So it's no surprise that an Intel Mac would blow away a G5. Also disk speed is a good thing, especially for non-optimized compilation, where it's more reading and writing files than crumching instructions.