Performance of Intel-Macs

[xarcom]

I just read an article on appleinsider that state that the Intel Mac that Steve demoed on was a quad CPU 3.6 P4.... Thats alot of machine to run OSX on.... I wonder if its any indication of how well (or bad) performance will be on these yet to be released macs...

[MacFreak]

Quad CPU? I doubt it.

[Mikuro]

The P4 isn't an MP chip, is it? That's what the Xeon is for, unless I'm very much mistaken (which is possible, since naturally I wasn't all that interested in the Intel scene before yesterday). I assume that system had one single processor.

But it's not like we saw enough of the system to judge speed, anyway. No Photoshop bakeoffs (obviously) or anything like that.

AFAIK, the G5 and G4 are perfectly capable of going quad. Apple's just never done it, possibly because of supply issues (just about every new PPC release has short supply for months, so going quad would really strain things). Maybe Intel can supply enough for such systems, but...I don't think there are any quad-processor PCs out there, and there's probably a reason for that, right?

I remember the days when there were quad-processor Macs. I forget what company made them, but they crammed 4 200MHz 604e processors into one system, and advertised it as 800MHz. Too bad there were virtually no programs that could make use of even a second processor back then, let alone a third of fourth.....

[MacFreak]

Yeah it was DayStar Genesis MP with 600mhz PPC 604. I had one it's awesome and regert that I sold it..

http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/genesis.html

Only few programs that support quad processor plug-in. Few years later Daystar hardware got killed by Apple due to cut off Clone license.

[mindbend]

When Steve pulled up the About this Mac window, it showed a Pentium 4 3.6 GHZ IIRC. (Can someone grab a screen cap of that window from the keynote, my connection is too slow right now).

There was no indication that it was a dual processor.

I was not particularly impressed with the speed. My dual G5 2.7 was faster than most of his demos or at least as fast as all of them. Having said that, all of the non-Apple software demos were through Rosetta, which is going to be a performance hit initially (until they get ported).

That is my only issue with this transition, is that we'll go through another awkward phase where not all apps are native, though this time around it should be less painful and more consistent.

[MacFreak]

My question why dont Steve show the intel motherboard or inside of Mac chassis.

[MrNivit1]

My question why dont Steve show the intel motherboard or inside of Mac chassis.

iMacG5's tend to be hard to open up, no?

[fryke]

Then again, why _would_ he. He was emphasizing that devs should create Universal Binaries, not talking about the inside of the p4 devkit, which isn't a "product" for consumers, anyway. It really doesn't matter that much.