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IBM/Motoralla & SP v.s DP
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Toronto Ontario Canada
Status:
Offline
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I want to cover a few things in this thread or at least ask a few questions :
a) Has IBM been brought back into the fold to boost production of PPC cpus?
b) Will "most" applications and/or games take advantage of MP in OS X?
The reason I'm curious is I will definitely be buying a Mac in the summertime and want to get as much info as I can on this issue. I understand that applications have to be designed to take advantage of MP and not even sure games will ever take advantage of MP. Having said that, I do use both a wide variety of applications and games.
Would I be best to go the SP or MP route? I'll be using OS X. Furthermore, if IBM is back in the fold, wouldn't that mean that we will very soon be seeing much higher speeds? Any feedback or input would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
PJStyles
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Senior User
Join Date: Nov 2000
Status:
Offline
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Everything running under OS X will get a significant boost from a dual vice single processor of the same Mhz. No speeds will double, impossible due to overhead, but the OS is smart enough to spread the work out over both processors whether or not an app is MP aware.
There are a lot of things going on in the machine that the OS can direct to one processor while a non-MP aware app can merrily do it's thing relatively uninterrupted on the other. This OS driven division of labor reduces the number of times each processor has to save and change states because of things like running the app, responding to an OS API call or simply handle the keyboard and mouse interrupts. cutting down on the state changes alone eliminates quite a bit of overhead and gives a nice speed boost.
The true blistering speed-ups come in when the app is multi-threaded as well as the OS, allowing the OS to attempt to optimize processor usage on each processor, vice just play traffic cop.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Toronto Ontario Canada
Status:
Offline
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I have to compliment you on your response... Not only did you articulate your message well but I understood it  I gotta say, I absolutely love this Mac community, definitely unlike any other. Thanks!
PJStyles
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Massachusetts, USA
Status:
Offline
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As far as production of cpus goes...IBM is not manufacturing G4 processors. But the new G3 processors running up to 600Mhz are from IBM, bith of which the iBook and iMac now use.
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