Dual core is a way for processor manufacturers to get the most performance out of a given die size and power/heat budget. The race to market with the first dual cores, OTOH, is about the hype. It really has nothing to do with rack machines and gamers. When transistor counts double in future processes, do you want 10% more computing capability or 2 processors worth of what you have now? The reason for multicore going forward is very clear. Whether it's compelling to buy one now is not.
WinXP isn't designed for MP? At least MS has had some practice with MP, preemptive multitasking and virtual memory. BSD isn't famous for its MP support.
"and is RISC based..."
So what? It's the performance that matters.
"...and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price."
You can't read the benchmarks for yourself? It's not as though the G5 is a secret. The dual G5 performs well---comparable but not superior to Intel and AMD DP machines. Your pricing is out of line as well.
I'm confident you are right. If not, it reflects poorly on Apple's ability to make the system perform well in previous versions. If I found 25-50 percent extra performance through OS mods I'm not certain I'd want to brag about it.
"So the best way to think of OSX vs XP is that OSX is a generation ahead of XP in many ways..."
Why is that the best way? Fact is that prior to OSX, MacOS was way behind in many ways to even Win95, much less NT/2K/XP. Perhaps a better way to look at is that OSX is a catch-up generation that's brand new. Doesn't mean it's worse, but virtual memory and preemptive mutlitasking are pretty basic facilities that MacOS didn't have until OSX.
This isn't about leaked secrets, it's about compelling someone/some company to testify. You seem comfortable with the notion that it's suitable under circumstances that you agree with yet not for others. I'm not. Just who should determine "clear public interest or exposes wrongdoing"? Not you and not me. I don't want the government having any such authority. It is not a journalist's job to support law enforcement or a company's lawyers. I also see no reason to distiguish a journalist from any other citizen. If a company doesn't want its secrets published it shouldn't allow the leaks. Apparently Apple doesn't work hard enough at that.
Why there's so much interest in these Apple leaks I have no idea.
A dual core CPU in a single socket MB will be less expensive than two CPU in a SP motherboard. The dual core solution may perform worse but will represent a good value potentially. What a person would be better off buying depends on what he wants/needs.
Performance is a far more complicated subject than you suggest as well. Not all operations are memory limited as the article's benchmarks clearly prove and a single P4 can saturate memory only under some conditions. If one core was always starved for memory bandwidth then the second core would never help, now would it? How do explain that it clearly does?
How do you know this is a patent covering Spotlight? Did you read the patent?
It's just a patent covering an extensible search architecture. Companies try to gain patents that hit on competitor's products all the time and they aren't necessarily coupled to products.
Nothing exciting about that patent unless, perhaps, you're an OS vendor.
Apple's support is perceived as more important by Apple people. The computer world cares very little about boutique manufacturers. When they sell more than a few computers then maybe the world will care more.
Except you are wrong. USB was developed entirely by Intel with significant resistance from the PC community. There was a large gestation period for USB generally and USB devices specifically. Very near the end of that Apple introduced the iMac. It was simple opportunity and nothing else. Apple contributed nothing to USB. Many PC manufacturers, one of which I worked for at the time, argued at length about introducing a legacy-free system long before Apple introduced one.
Of course, this is typical of a large group of people who believe that Apple innovates everything. Apple has virtually no influence on these things.
"tasks" and "applications" are used interchangably in this context. There is no confusion.
Currently running applications are found in the taskbar in windows. You can also put icons for frequently run applications there via quicklaunch. You don't have the trash can but that's a stupid place for it anyway and the dock doesn't really have anything similar to the start menu in it. Yeah, sure you can add that if you like...
The dock is not any simpler or more intuitive than the windows taskbar, in fact it's basically the same except for the gross way it groups running instances into the program icon like the original poster pointed out. It takes up too much space, has gaudy animations and causes the trashcan to disappear when you hide it. It's a MacOS abomination just like the menu at the top of the screen.
How come when I close an application in OS X the menu for that application continues to exist until I focus on another window? How stupid is that?
And yet we've had SMP PC's for quite a while but video editing packages do not consistently benefit from their performance. Same is true for image editing. As it currently stands, video editing on PC's is not a strong argument for SMP. Hopefully multicore will drive SMP penetration to the point where packages like that will actually use it. Premiere's SMP utilization is embarrassing and they have the big market share.
Serious amateurs and small professional shops are heavily constrained by their render farms
Yeah since they don't have them. Video editors don't use "render farms".
Whether L2 cache is shared or not makes no difference. You can build an SMP system without any L2 cache at all if you want to. What about multicore isn't "Symmetrical Multi Procesing" if it's such a falacy?
Remember this post to see how much of it is wrong. Sure the P4 is crap and always has been, but the cell is not a general purpose processor and clock speeds haven't finished going up. It's all about best computing bang for the buck when everything---die size, power, complexity---is taken into account. Oh, and game programmers already aren't the first "over the wall". All in all, they don't even really matter. We're getting multicore because it's the best way to spend the extra transistors going forward. Multiprocessing is old news.
Who says "People who break restraining orders are usualy one or two steps from commiting a violent crime" besides those stupid enough to say "Word up"? Like to see some evidence of that. It's not justification in any case.
What would give any company "a right to compel them to reveal their source"?
Apple can pursue anyone in a contract dispute that they like but they have no right to compel others to assist them in that effort. As long as Apple can find out what it wants without violating the rights of others it is free to do so.
Apple, the kings of usability, have a product that needs to be modified to work as you like? Something so intuitive needs to be figured out? How can that be? Being intuitive means you don't have to figure it out. Apparently Apple has failed here.
Slashdot Mirror
Dual core is a way for processor manufacturers to get the most performance out of a given die size and power/heat budget. The race to market with the first dual cores, OTOH, is about the hype. It really has nothing to do with rack machines and gamers. When transistor counts double in future processes, do you want 10% more computing capability or 2 processors worth of what you have now? The reason for multicore going forward is very clear. Whether it's compelling to buy one now is not.
"The Apple has an OS designed for MP..."
WinXP isn't designed for MP? At least MS has had some practice with MP, preemptive multitasking and virtual memory. BSD isn't famous for its MP support.
"and is RISC based..."
So what? It's the performance that matters.
"...and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price."
You can't read the benchmarks for yourself? It's not as though the G5 is a secret. The dual G5 performs well---comparable but not superior to Intel and AMD DP machines. Your pricing is out of line as well.
I'm confident you are right. If not, it reflects poorly on Apple's ability to make the system perform well in previous versions. If I found 25-50 percent extra performance through OS mods I'm not certain I'd want to brag about it.
"So the best way to think of OSX vs XP is that OSX is a generation ahead of XP in many ways..."
Why is that the best way? Fact is that prior to OSX, MacOS was way behind in many ways to even Win95, much less NT/2K/XP. Perhaps a better way to look at is that OSX is a catch-up generation that's brand new. Doesn't mean it's worse, but virtual memory and preemptive mutlitasking are pretty basic facilities that MacOS didn't have until OSX.
The Rio Carbon does that. I agree, iTunes is no great deal (unless you like iTMS I suppose).
he doesn't want iTunes on his machine at all. Is that so hard to understand?
No, he should not. You can sue H&R if you like. It's their fault and their problem.
Then you must have nothing to worry about.
This isn't about leaked secrets, it's about compelling someone/some company to testify. You seem comfortable with the notion that it's suitable under circumstances that you agree with yet not for others. I'm not. Just who should determine "clear public interest or exposes wrongdoing"? Not you and not me. I don't want the government having any such authority. It is not a journalist's job to support law enforcement or a company's lawyers. I also see no reason to distiguish a journalist from any other citizen. If a company doesn't want its secrets published it shouldn't allow the leaks. Apparently Apple doesn't work hard enough at that.
Why there's so much interest in these Apple leaks I have no idea.
A dual core CPU in a single socket MB will be less expensive than two CPU in a SP motherboard. The dual core solution may perform worse but will represent a good value potentially. What a person would be better off buying depends on what he wants/needs.
Performance is a far more complicated subject than you suggest as well. Not all operations are memory limited as the article's benchmarks clearly prove and a single P4 can saturate memory only under some conditions. If one core was always starved for memory bandwidth then the second core would never help, now would it? How do explain that it clearly does?
How do you know this is a patent covering Spotlight? Did you read the patent?
It's just a patent covering an extensible search architecture. Companies try to gain patents that hit on competitor's products all the time and they aren't necessarily coupled to products.
Nothing exciting about that patent unless, perhaps, you're an OS vendor.
What makes you say that? Any facts to back that up?
Can't get more new-fangled than Unix? Ha ha!
Apple's support is perceived as more important by Apple people. The computer world cares very little about boutique manufacturers. When they sell more than a few computers then maybe the world will care more.
What's Apple's market share again? If Apple made a few cars they'd be in the top five US auto makers too. So what?
Apple is due no credit for the development of USB.
Except you are wrong. USB was developed entirely by Intel with significant resistance from the PC community. There was a large gestation period for USB generally and USB devices specifically. Very near the end of that Apple introduced the iMac. It was simple opportunity and nothing else. Apple contributed nothing to USB. Many PC manufacturers, one of which I worked for at the time, argued at length about introducing a legacy-free system long before Apple introduced one.
Of course, this is typical of a large group of people who believe that Apple innovates everything. Apple has virtually no influence on these things.
"tasks" and "applications" are used interchangably in this context. There is no confusion.
Currently running applications are found in the taskbar in windows. You can also put icons for frequently run applications there via quicklaunch. You don't have the trash can but that's a stupid place for it anyway and the dock doesn't really have anything similar to the start menu in it. Yeah, sure you can add that if you like...
The dock is not any simpler or more intuitive than the windows taskbar, in fact it's basically the same except for the gross way it groups running instances into the program icon like the original poster pointed out. It takes up too much space, has gaudy animations and causes the trashcan to disappear when you hide it. It's a MacOS abomination just like the menu at the top of the screen.
How come when I close an application in OS X the menu for that application continues to exist until I focus on another window? How stupid is that?
What a moron JWZ is. Perhaps when he becomes an adult he'll see things differently. Not all software of value involves penises.
Serious amateurs and small professional shops are heavily constrained by their render farms
Yeah since they don't have them. Video editors don't use "render farms".
Whether L2 cache is shared or not makes no difference. You can build an SMP system without any L2 cache at all if you want to. What about multicore isn't "Symmetrical Multi Procesing" if it's such a falacy?
Remember this post to see how much of it is wrong. Sure the P4 is crap and always has been, but the cell is not a general purpose processor and clock speeds haven't finished going up. It's all about best computing bang for the buck when everything---die size, power, complexity---is taken into account. Oh, and game programmers already aren't the first "over the wall". All in all, they don't even really matter. We're getting multicore because it's the best way to spend the extra transistors going forward. Multiprocessing is old news.
Who says "People who break restraining orders are usualy one or two steps from commiting a violent crime" besides those stupid enough to say "Word up"? Like to see some evidence of that. It's not justification in any case.
you talk like that's a bad thing...
What would give any company "a right to compel them to reveal their source"?
Apple can pursue anyone in a contract dispute that they like but they have no right to compel others to assist them in that effort. As long as Apple can find out what it wants without violating the rights of others it is free to do so.
Rejected by a mac zealot were you?
Curiously, gays have more "market share" than Apple does.
Otherwise, this comment is undeserving of a response.
Apple, the kings of usability, have a product that needs to be modified to work as you like? Something so intuitive needs to be figured out? How can that be? Being intuitive means you don't have to figure it out. Apparently Apple has failed here.