Friday Apple Quickies

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs' $78 million Apple income tops Fortune magazine's list of CEOs whose companies lagged behind the S&P 500 performance last year. The number 'reflects the value of five million restricted shares Jobs got this year in exchange for 27.5 million underwater options.'" markomarko writes "Well, despite Charlie White making all us Mac users eat crow over his comparison of render times between a dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac and a Dell 3.06 GHz P4, it seems that that Dave Nagel has given us a reason to take another look at the Mac. His article shows how After Effects render speeds can be doubled with the Mac, by using both CPUs."

Comments

How Does AfterEffects Run...

[Anonymous Coward]

... on my Quad Processor Xeon? Can I do this trick to improve my performance, or is it just for mAcs?

Re:So in other words....

[GlassHeart]

not every mac user has a dual G4. Or even a G4.

Since graphics professionals are somewhat more likely to require and afford top-of-the-line hardware, it's not an unreasonable assumption to optimize for at all.

Adobe could have rewritten some key functions to be altivec optimized. But the Macintosh market is smaller, (and therefore less potential profit).

Be careful with your math. Although the Macintosh market is comparatively small, it's not necessarily a correspondingly small part for a maker of software for graphics professionals. I would not be surprised if the Macintosh products bring 10% (double the apparent Macintosh market share) or even 20% of Adobe's sales.

Re:Frustrating

[Gropo]

If we could, how about a fair comparison: Mac G4 dual 1.42 GHz versus dual P4 3.06 GHz. Dual versus dual, or dumb down the Mac, single versus single.

Better still, let's compare a cluster of G4's versus a cluster of Pentium 4's... Taking in to account OS X's native Multilink Multihoming capabilities and freedom from the shackles of the PCI bus.

Or, we could just compare prices, in that two 1.25 Ghz G4's from Apple cost roughly the same as a single 3.06 Ghz P4 from Dell... Any idea what two 3Ghz Xeons would cost? Any idea what two XServe Dual 1.3 Ghz "Cluster Models" would cost?

Re:Are you kidding?

[jlaxson]

Umm, no. The Mac vs. Dell comparison was done using one instance of the AE renderer. It was only using 1 CPU. Thus, he was comparing a 3GHz P4 to a single 1.25GHz G4.

That's kind of interesting, considering that the Mac scores were (usually) only 5-20% slower than the Dell, even though the Mac CPU was running 60% slower.

I would like to see the results of the test if one were to use both CPUs (2 AE Rendering Instances) in the Mac. Perhaps the 'Puts it to shame' comparison will be pointing the other direction.