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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison Redux
Macmurph writes "Bibble Labs has released a lightning fast version of the RAW image convertor, MacBibble. According to MacBibble creator, Eric Hyman, "MacBibble 3.x is almost 10 times faster than the manufacturers software when converting RAW files under OSX.". Prelimenary tests indicate the Mac may be faster than PCs in RAW image conversion afterall. This calls into question the relevance of the the hotly debated article Rob Galbraith posted just 3 weeks ago and discussed here on Slashdot. Two thumbs up for the PowerPC G4's AltiVec vector processing engine, now being put to work in MacBibble."
I've always thought that exploiting parallelism would be the next step after we hit some kind of practical performance wall in desktop systems. However, I've been saying that for 7 years and the wall just keeps moving, although I kind of think its gotten a little closer.
It's probably a question of economics more than anything else. A 2 CPU system for most end-user applications probably delivers less percentage increase in performance than its percentage increase in cost right now. But up till now its been cheaper to replace a single CPU with a faster single CPU than to invest more upfront in a multi-CPU system -- you have to keep it longer, which means you fall farther behind the current performance curve.
If it became 'standard' to have them, OS and App vendors would be able to deliver a performance jump out of 2 CPUs through better parallelism that would outweigh the increased hardware costs associated.
In the PC world, there's also the historical problem of lack of mainstream OS support for multiple CPUs -- I can't remember if XP consumer even supports it, now that I think about it -- which creates that chicken-and-egg problem. NT4 was a highly marginal 'consumer' OS, Win2k had more reach but still not what the 9x series had and XP adoption has been slower due to people just keeping PCs longer.
I've had a dual CPU system at home for 3 years and I'm not entirely sure I'd replace it with another one once I looked at the economics of it. The biggest single benefit I can think of is that it doesn't bottleneck the way a single CPU can when a single process pigs out at 100%, I still have a nearly-idle CPU to work with -- which is the problem with 2 CPUs, one's nearly idle.