Apple Announces MacBook Pro

[Oscar Castillo]

Originally Posted by ibookemo

Certainly looks like a great machine but my PowerBook is only a year old and I want it to last at least 3 so i'll be seeing quite a few revisions and bug fixes before I move to Intel. In the mean time I suppose the only way to keep my machine from getting slower is to not update to newer software which requires more processor power. I hope the Adobe CS 2 suite I use now will still cut it in 2 or 3 years time - what do you all think? I'm on 1GB of RAM right now so maybe i'll bump that in the future to try and keep up with things.

After the software you use is available as a universal binary then you could consider upgrading if you feel the hardware is stable enough for you. Since universal binaries are what we'll all be seeing available soon, my only question is whether the performace of a universal binary is any worse than an intel only binary. Aside from possible bloated file sizes, is there any overhead?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Nope, there's no performance penalty whatsoever -- the Intel machines simply execute the code located in an "Intel" branch of the binary, and likewise for the PowerPC machines. The machine doesn't have to "pick and choose" the bits of code intended for it and discard the PowerPC bits -- the code is completely separate, so execution is isolated..

File size bloat is the only consideration -- we can already see it in the current universal binaries going around.

[fryke]

Yes. And there's already free-/shareware which is able to strip the code unnecessary for the platform it's installed on, I hear, so that's no problem either.

[kainjow]

Originally Posted by fryke

Yes. And there's already free-/shareware which is able to strip the code unnecessary for the platform it's installed on, I hear, so that's no problem either.

It's as easy as
lipo -remove <arch> <input_file> -o <output_file
where arch = "ppc" or "i386"

[ksv]

Regarding the Xbench CPU test, it's merely a benchmark of Apple's vecLib routines, not at all representing actual performance of the processor when comparing processors with different instruction sets.
It all depends on the level of optimization for each processor type.

vecLib for Intel processors is still in development. Intel's compilers for Mac OS X just entered beta stage.

[Veljo]

Originally Posted by fryke

Yes. And there's already free-/shareware which is able to strip the code unnecessary for the platform it's installed on, I hear, so that's no problem either.

No doubt a lot of developers will go for this. The Installer will determine if your machine is Intel/PPC and simply install what is needed.