Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

EndlessMac · Nov 28, 2009, 05:23 PM

I recently read this article from Forbes. I thought it was an interesting read about how all the move to multi-core processors is going to effect us as we go into the future. For some of you this maybe old news but I don't know if this is common knowledge to the public as of yet. It seems that currently most multi-core computers aren't used to their full potential as they did back in the single processor days. It might be awhile until everyone gets the full benefits of multi-core processors. This article isn't the first time I've heard and read about this but I think the article sums it up nicely for people unaware of the issue.

The Godfather · Nov 28, 2009, 06:27 PM

Have you ever tried an EeePC running BeOS?

Me neither, but that may be the most benefit you'll ever get from your dual/multi XXX hardware.

olePigeon · Nov 28, 2009, 06:58 PM

BeOS is still the best OS ever made when it comes to multiprocessing.

I keep hoping that whatever company owns the source to it will re-release it.

Haiku is not BeOS, it's just Linux that is binary compatible with BeOS.

Eriamjh · Nov 28, 2009, 07:34 PM

If you cannot go faster in series, you must go in parallel.

Oisín · Nov 28, 2009, 07:36 PM

Originally Posted by The Godfather

Me neither, but that may be the most benefit you'll ever get from your dual/multi XXX hardware.

Are you calling me a hermaphrodite?!

ul1984 · Nov 28, 2009, 08:13 PM

Originally Posted by olePigeon

Haiku is not BeOS, it's just Linux that is binary compatible with BeOS.

Haiku is definitely not Linux based, Haiku's kernel is originally based on the NewOS kernel, which was written by a former BeOS developer.

AFAIK it is/was even binary compatible with some BeOS drivers, but I think they have since developed some driver architectures of their own, and also a FreeBSD compatibility layer for ethernet and soon wifi drivers.

olePigeon · Nov 28, 2009, 08:36 PM

You're correct, I misread Wikipedia. My concern with Haiku is whether or not it as also developed in the same way BeOS was, with mostly everything about the OS written under the assumption the computer is utilizing more than one CPU.

I tried out Haiku recently, and I was unable to replicate the same performance I get with R5. This may be strictly placebo.

The Godfather · Nov 29, 2009, 12:28 AM

For some reason, Haiku boots faster than Chrome OS.

iMOTOR · Nov 29, 2009, 01:15 PM

There was an article in IEEE magazine a while back that theorized that multi-core processors are actually making things worse because while chips are getting more cores, they’re not getting better I/O throughput, causing data bottle-necks in the system.

In other words; multi-core does not equal multi-processor.

EndlessMac · Nov 29, 2009, 01:42 PM

Originally Posted by iMOTOR

There was an article in IEEE magazine a while back that theorized that multi-core processors are actually making things worse because while chips are getting more cores, they’re not getting better I/O throughput, causing data bottle-necks in the system.

In other words; multi-core does not equal multi-processor.

That's just what the article is suggesting. For some applications it seems that these fancy expensive multi-core processors are actually slowing down our computers for those tasks. Software programming hasn't kept up with the growing popularity of multi-core processors. The general public just thinks more is better but their upgrade could actually be a downgrade in performance until this problem is solved.

iMOTOR · Nov 29, 2009, 02:23 PM

To be clear though, this has much less to do with software programing not keeping up. Multi cores on a single die will be limited in hardware. Engineering software for parallel processing will not help the fact that you are limited in hardware to how fast you can feed data to multiple 64-bit registers on one die compared to multiple 64-bit registers on multiple independent dies.

Chuckit · Nov 29, 2009, 02:39 PM

But you can still do more than you could with a single core (unless that one core was obscenely fast). In fact, you can turn off a core if you're convinced that having another one is screwing up your system — you won't get a speedup.

Incidentally, Apple's GCD in Snow Leopard is a pretty good solution for taking full advantage of multicore systems.

Chooglin' · Nov 29, 2009, 02:57 PM

I don't understand why people argue over which OS is the fastest, then pull out some reference to an obscure OS that virtually nobody uses and wouldn't find useful.

I guess I could make my own OS that ejects a CD tray 0.05 seconds faster than any other OS, have that be the only thing that it does, name it some cutesy name like KetchupOS or Relish686 X, create a webpage for it's distribution, then go about promoting it as being the fastest OS, and at least one person would be guaranteed to believe it.

The Godfather · Nov 29, 2009, 03:00 PM

What applications already take advantage of Grand Dispatch Central?

The Godfather · Nov 29, 2009, 03:01 PM

Originally Posted by Chooglin'

I don't understand why people argue over which OS is the fastest, then pull out some reference to an obscure OS that virtually nobody uses and wouldn't find useful.

I guess I could make my own OS that ejects a CD tray 0.05 seconds faster than any other OS, have that be the only thing that it does, name it some cutesy name like KetchupOS or Relish686 X, create a webpage for it's distribution, then go about promoting it as being the fastest OS, and at least one person would be guaranteed to believe it.

They should have phrased their question better.

Chuckit · Nov 29, 2009, 03:13 PM

Originally Posted by Chooglin'

I don't understand why people argue over which OS is the fastest, then pull out some reference to an obscure OS that virtually nobody uses and wouldn't find useful.

I guess I could make my own OS that ejects a CD tray 0.05 seconds faster than any other OS, have that be the only thing that it does, name it some cutesy name like KetchupOS or Relish686 X, create a webpage for it's distribution, then go about promoting it as being the fastest OS, and at least one person would be guaranteed to believe it.

Just because you weren't paying attention at the time doesn't mean BeOS wasn't very cool. It was actually a frontrunner to become Mac OS X. IMO, the only reason NeXTstep wound up winning is because of Steve Jobs.

iMOTOR · Nov 29, 2009, 03:24 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

But you can still do more than you could with a single core (unless that one core was obscenely fast).

No argument there. I wasn’t suggesting that a second core slows down the first, but rather that when testing software optimized for parallel processing; two cores on one die aren’t as fast as two cores on two independent dies due to the I/O bottle-neck.

Eug · Nov 29, 2009, 04:13 PM

Not sure about that. Unless you're talking high end server hardware, you'll often still have the I/O bottleneck with independent discrete CPUs. I'm most interested in consumer-level hardware, and in that context independent discrete CPUs are often worse, because they often have the same I/O limitations, they have a fixed and lower amount of non-shared cache per CPU, and they cannot ramp up speeds when the second discrete CPU is idle. Furthermore, core-to-core communication is often comparatively slow.

OTOH, on my Core i7 there is a much larger amount of cache which is shared with the ability of one core to make use of most of that increased cache size as necessary, internal core-to-core is superfast, and when one or more cores is idle, the max GHz goes up dramatically (from 2.8 GHz to 3.46 GHz in the case of the Core i7.

ie. I have 3.46 GHz single-core CPU or a 2.8-2.93 GHz quad-core CPU as needed, depending on the work done.

OreoCookie · Nov 29, 2009, 04:21 PM

Originally Posted by The Godfather

What applications already take advantage of Grand Dispatch Central?

Not many except for Apple's own apps, I suppose -- yet! But, and this is a big but, it has been adopted in FreeBSD at least. Since it has been published under the Apache License, I suppose it's also Linux compatible. In principle, this may lead to wide-spread adoption of this idea beyond OS X -- which is a good thing

Person Man · Dec 1, 2009, 09:26 AM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Just because you weren't paying attention at the time doesn't mean BeOS wasn't very cool. It was actually a frontrunner to become Mac OS X. IMO, the only reason NeXTstep wound up winning is because of Steve Jobs.

Actually, it has nothing to do with Steve Jobs. They were courting both NeXT and Be quite heavily. They offered $200 million to Jean Louis Gassee for Be, but Gassee got greedy and wanted far, far more. Enough more, apparently, that the $400 million Apple paid for NeXT was a bargain in comparison.

Chuckit · Dec 1, 2009, 12:11 PM

Originally Posted by Person Man

Actually, it has nothing to do with Steve Jobs. They were courting both NeXT and Be quite heavily. They offered $200 million to Jean Louis Gassee for Be, but Gassee got greedy and wanted far, far more. Enough more, apparently, that the $400 million Apple paid for NeXT was a bargain in comparison.

How does that have nothing to do with Jobs? One company's CEO screwed it up, the other one didn't, but it had nothing to do with that CEO?

Art Vandelay · Dec 1, 2009, 01:42 PM

I think he's saying that they didn't pick Next simply to get Jobs back as implied in the previous post.

Another advantage of Next over Be was that their OS was more mature. BeOS required much more work to get it to the level Apple needed.

Person Man · Dec 1, 2009, 01:46 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

How does that have nothing to do with Jobs? One company's CEO screwed it up, the other one didn't, but it had nothing to do with that CEO?

Well, at the time everybody thought Apple was going to go with Be, since it looked like the BeOS was technologically superior. I seriously doubt Apple was courting NeXT for Steve Jobs because, at the time, Jobs had been ousted from the company from trying to take over the company, so why would they willingly put themselves in that position? Just my opinion, of course, but it makes sense given the situation at the time.

I think Apple underestimated Gassee. And I also think Gassee underestimated Steve Jobs. Apple was the one over the barrel, so Gassee figured he could ask what he wanted because Apple was so desperate and there was no way that they'd actually go with NeXT. It's almost as though Jobs knew that Gassee was going to be too overconfident of his position and ask for too much... enough that the $400 million Apple paid for NeXT would seem like an absolute bargain. In the end, Apple's fears were realized. Jobs ended up taking over.

So yes, Apple buying NeXT had to do with Steve Jobs because that's what Jobs wanted (and knew) to happen, not because Apple wanted Steve Jobs back.

CharlesS · Dec 1, 2009, 02:09 PM

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay

I think he's saying that they didn't pick Next simply to get Jobs back as implied in the previous post.

I thought it was pretty clear that Chuckit was talking about Jobs’ persuasive powers, which pretty much were the reason that Apple ended up going with NeXT. Arguing that Apple did it specifically to get Jobs back wouldn’t have made any sense.

Originally Posted by The Godfather

What applications already take advantage of Grand Dispatch Central?

A good hint would be to see what applications list 10.6 or higher in their minimum requirements. The main purpose of GCD is to make threading and parallelism much easier for a programmer to implement, and from the looks of things it really does make things simpler, so I don’t really see much reason why anyone would bother with NSThread and company if they didn’t need to target earlier OS X versions.

Eug · Dec 1, 2009, 02:47 PM

I guess I'm the only one, but personally I never was impressed with BeOS. Sure, there was some interesting stuff under the hood, but every time I saw it seemed more like geeks delight - engineering demo than anything else.

There was just something missing in its implementation... for an end user.

To put it another way... If Apple had bought Be, I probably would have just looked forward to Windows 2000. OTOH, when Apple bought NeXT, I was truly excited by the possibilities, and that's from a guy who knew very little about "unix" at the time. Certainly, many of my programmer friends were quite intrigued about the NeXT purchase, considering they were all unix and linux jockeys already.

Chuckit · Dec 1, 2009, 03:14 PM

Originally Posted by Eug

I guess I'm the only one, but personally I never was impressed with BeOS. Sure, there was some interesting stuff under the hood, but every time I saw it seemed more like geeks delight - engineering demo than anything else.

There was just something missing in its implementation... for an end user.

To put it another way... If Apple had bought Be, I probably would have just looked forward to Windows 2000. OTOH, when Apple bought NeXT, I was truly excited by the possibilities, and that's from a guy who knew very little about "unix" at the time. Certainly, many of my programmer friends were quite intrigued about the NeXT purchase, considering they were all unix and linux jockeys already.

What did NeXTstep 3 have "for an end user" that BeOS didn't? I found BeOS to be a pleasure to use.

olePigeon · Dec 1, 2009, 04:05 PM

Oh, hey Art. Just noticed you were also posting on the DeployStudio forum.

Art Vandelay · Dec 1, 2009, 04:09 PM

I'm hurt that you didn't realize who I was over there.

olePigeon · Dec 1, 2009, 04:12 PM

When I was getting sick of Mac OS (OS 8 just came out and was buggy as all hell), I got to use BeOS. It had the Copland style icons, with a slick and very uniform GUI. It was just as easy to use as Mac OS was, in my opinion. However, it ran circles around Mac OS in terms of responsiveness and capability.

I think that's what initially lured Apple to BeOS as well. It was familiar enough, but had the performance Apple wanted.

olePigeon · Dec 1, 2009, 04:14 PM

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay

I'm hurt that you didn't realize who I was over there.

I don't put 2 and 2 together very well.

Art Vandelay · Dec 1, 2009, 04:24 PM

Except when it comes to stacking MacBooks on top of each other.

Eug · Dec 1, 2009, 04:37 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

What did NeXTstep 3 have "for an end user" that BeOS didn't? I found BeOS to be a pleasure to use.

Not much, but it had near-direct access to a plethora of software. Granted, that software was mostly geekfest type stuff too, but BeOS didn't even have that.

As for BeOS being a pleasure to use... Even BeOS 5, which came out in Windows 2000 era, felt like running Windows 95 to me in terms of usability.

CharlesS · Dec 1, 2009, 09:48 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

What did NeXTstep 3 have "for an end user" that BeOS didn't? I found BeOS to be a pleasure to use.

What NeXT had was a fantastic object-oriented development environment (now named Cocoa). This made it nice and easy for developers to build stuff for it. BeOS, with its less mature APIs and its enforced parallelism, made it quite difficult for developers to build stuff for it.

Chuckit · Dec 1, 2009, 11:12 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What NeXT had was a fantastic object-oriented development environment (now named Cocoa). This made it nice and easy for developers to build stuff for it. BeOS, with its less mature APIs and its enforced parallelism, made it quite difficult for developers to build stuff for it.

I know, that's what I was thinking. The cool parts of NeXTstep were for developers, not end users. BeOS made it harder on developers but seemed to concentrate more on end-users.

CharlesS · Dec 1, 2009, 11:22 PM

Well, the users get to use the cool stuff that developers make, so a system that makes it easier for developers to make cool stuff also benefits end users.

All those iApps, the other nifty stuff Apple’s been inventing over the past few years, and the global features like the systemwide spell check and the dictionary service? Cocoa.

Chuckit · Dec 1, 2009, 11:40 PM

That's true. Then again, iMovie '08 and QuickTime Player (Black Rectangle Edition) are downgrades, and iPhoto and most of the things on the App Store are crimes against humanity. Maybe it would be better to say Cocoa helps people make software and making it cool is still up to the people.

Eug · Dec 1, 2009, 11:44 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

I know, that's what I was thinking. The cool parts of NeXTstep were for developers, not end users. BeOS made it harder on developers but seemed to concentrate more on end-users.

How so? It was a geekified OS which seemed a bit faster than some, but it's not as if you could actually do anything with it as an end user. I just remember how painful it was just trying to configure and dial a modem in Be.

CharlesS · Dec 2, 2009, 12:10 AM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

That's true. Then again, iMovie '08 and QuickTime Player (Black Rectangle Edition) are downgrades

What’s that got to do with anything? iMovie 6 and QuickTime Player 7 were already Cocoa. And I hear iMovie ’09 is supposed to be pretty cool, although I haven’t played with it much.

and iPhoto and most of the things on the App Store are crimes against humanity.

Hey, I like iPhoto.

As for the App Store stuff, well yeah, Cocoa doesn’t automatically make an app good, that would be asinine if I claimed that. Fortunately, I didn’t. What I did say is that Cocoa makes it easier for developers to make cool stuff, and everyone benefits from that. I do know that Cocoa is what attracted me to start writing software for the Mac platform — I probably wouldn’t have bothered if it had been Be.

Person Man · Dec 2, 2009, 05:56 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

QuickTime Player (Black Rectangle Edition) are downgrades,

QuickTime X is still basically a version 1.0 piece of software. It's a complete rewrite from the ground up. Apple recognizes the fact that it's not mature yet by including QuickTime 7 with Snow Leopard.

Over time, QuickTime X will become as feature complete as QuickTime 7.