Need for Speed

D

dseltzer

Registered
I recently got SpeedRun 1.1 by Danicsoft (written by Nic Waller - nicwaller@shaw.ca). It's a nice little benchmarking program with a database of speed records from most G4 and G3 Power Macs for comparison. What puzzles the you-know-what out of me is that the speed on my dual 1G G4 is about three times faster if I run SpeedRun in OS 9.2.2 than if I run it in 10.1.5! Does anyone know whattheheckisgoingon???????
:confused: :confused: :confused:
 
yeah i just downloaded that program, and tried it after i saw your thread. OSX didn t fair well. i don t know how reliable this benchmark is, but i ll just say that it is not for the speed that i love OSX.

10.0 was so slow as to be unusable, and with 10.1 it became fast enough to be usable. OS9 had been optimized for quite a while. apple switched to PPC in what? 95 96 or so? os 9.2 was quite comfortable on that architecture. OSX is portable and stable and has a marvelous API and a beautiful GUI, and advanced networking features, and an open source kernel. but it is a huge resource hog, and it doesn t really scream even on the fastest machines.

hopefully we will see a quantum leap of improvement in jaguar. i hear that jaguar uses gcc 3.1 which is a big improvement over gcc 2.95.3 so the code might be more trim and optimized. i hear that multithreading is much improved which will make things more responsive. and QE is going to improve things for those that can support it.

but i m satisfied with the speed.
 
You're quite right about OS X for all the reasons you said. I use it as my default OS for the shear beauty, features, including protected memory, and I'm trying to learn about Unix. Having started with the public beta, 10.1.5 screams by comparison, and I didn't really think about it being a resource hog, but I can see that. I think I was narrowly thinking that since X is able to divide processing tasks, has preemtive multitasking and such, that it would do a bit better on my machine.

Now, to further show my ignorance, can you tell me what gcc is? I presume it has to do with the Unix kernel, or is at least something at that level of the OS?

Thanks for the feedback, and I really do agree that the speed is quite acceptable, just a little surprising to see how much faster 9.2 is. I understand much better with the explanation you wrote.
 
the results here are a little embarrassing. i think that 10.1.5 seems definitely usable, so even if it is not as fast as OS9, it really isn t too slow anymore, and so i was pretty surprised when that program that a 400 MHz G3 running 9.2 is better than a 1000GHz running 10.1.5. but honestly, i find that hard to believe. really hard. so i suspect that the benchmarks are somehow biased towards OS9. god, i hope so, otherwise i would be pretty emabarrassed. i might have to switch to BeOS (i bet you thought i was gonna say windows! yeah right!)

because of the preemptive kernel processing, and the mach microkernel, OSX is especially well suited to dual processor machines, and so i would expect a dual processer G4 to beat any mac at all running OS9. preemptive multitaksing means better coordination, and the microkernel means more modular architecure. the mach microkernel was actually designed with parallel multiprocessing in mind. too bad i don t have a dually.

gcc is the compiler that apple uses for OSX. it stands for GNU C compiler (GNU compiler collection, actually). a compiler is a program that turns programs that humans write into machine code that computers can execute. the gcc is a fine compiler, and i used to think it was the finest compiler available, but lavacdm recently divorced me from that misconception. i was under the sway of too much FSF and rms propoganda.

anyway, if you look at the website, you will see that recently improved altivec (which is another name for the G4 s velocity engine) support has been merged into the gcc tree. apple uses a modified gcc, they optimize it for OSX and for PPC as well, trying to merge their changes back upstream to the gcc people from time to time. the gcc was probably first written for x86, so it probably has lots of room for PPC optimisation, and 3.1 is a new release which is much improved in general for all processors.
 
Is there an BeOS to G4 processors?
or didn´t steve jobs stopped them from doing that?

ive read something about that along time ago...

What os can i have on my machine? G4 450 sawtooth.
 
I'm too sure I'd ever expect you to say you'd switch to Windows... hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha! And if anyone could really appreciate a "dually" it surely would be you... makes me feel (only slightly) guilty for having one, but that'll just spur me on to learn more!

I did happen to know about compilers, since my computing experience goes back to the venerable Apple II, Apple Basic, and I learned that plus some machine calls and code, but that was twenty+ years ago! I see what you're saying about gcc, it's roots and the likely room for becoming more PPC and G4 "native," or at least much more compatable, though I'm nowhere near knowing much more than how to speak some of the words!

In addition to the speed results possibly being biased, I wonder if there could be an issue if it's a carbonized app vs. written in Cocoa, though I don't know enough to know what differences that might make. Actually, I suspect the program isn't polished, probably not at all optimized (or is it optimised?) for 10.1.5, and there are sure to be a plethora of similar programs in the pipe as I write.

I'm getting mighty curious to see and experience Jaguar! Even if the performance jump is only as much as the jump from 10 to 10.1, it'll be dramatic. I just wish I had a lot more time to spend working with and learning OS X, GNU, gcc, Unix, how Altivec works, etc., etc., etc. It's all just so intriguing and fascinating, and there's so much to learn! Of course, that's the most fun of all for me. Of course I get lots of pleasure out of just using the Mac and the OSs, but I started in '78 because I felt I knew computers and all the related stuff was the future and I wanted to be on the train and not left standing at the station. It's really a thrill to see all the boards, discussions and websites online and coming online to discuss and learn about Macs and OS X. I haven't felt this kind of escitement about computers for some time. OS X might be a little boggy now, but it's in it's infancy. Once it really learns to walk, Katie bar the door!

Thanks for all your helpful information, and for being so patient with one who loves Macs, but has so much to learn.
 
MacWhiz: i m not sure what macs BeOS will run on, but i do believe that there exist macs that it will run on. i m not sure about this, but i think that the original BeBox was a motorola 68k box, and after they got out of the hardware business, they supported 68k macs, and x86 PCs. after a while, they dropped down to just x86 support. so the latest version of BeOS probably won t run on your G4 (nor any other version, for that matter), but i think that earlier versions of BeOS ran on 68k macs.

i wish RacerX were here, because he would probably know all about this.

anyway, of course i was joking. BeOS is a dead OS, and i wouldn t run it, except as an intellectual experiment. i just used that example because BeOS is blazing fast. if i were gonna abandon OSX because it is too slow, it would have to be for the fastest OS there is, and thats BeOS.

to answer your question: no i don t think there was ever BeOS for PPC. i m pretty sure there wasn t

dseltzer: yeah, i learned to program as a kid on an apple ][. i also learned assembly on an apple ][. back then, apple was the platform of choice for the at-home hacker. i ve become a computer junky, and have been on apple the whole time. and i do think that OSX is the best think that could have happened to apple at this point.

but i would like to hear your opinion on this matter, dseltzer. purely subjectively speaking, how does OS9 feel to you on basic tasks, compared to OSX, since you do have a dually. i would expect it to feel rather responsive, but i have not been a dual processor machine, so what do you think?

feel free to be harsh. my arguments about why OSX should be faster don t mean that it is faster, so tell us what it feels like to you.
 
lethe: To my eyes, there's no question but that OS 9.2 is more responsive than 10.1.5 on my dually. Most things open (and close) faster, and windows really "pop" on the screen. Photoshop 7.0 opened much faster, and it also opened a file faster. This actually surprised me, since I expected that to be a disk speed function. Also, IE opens faster and seems to draw many pages faster than in 10.1.

All that said, and even though I (obviously) have way more experience and comfort working in 9.x, I'm quite happy with OS X for now. That's with the anticipation and confidence it'll continue to be improved, optimized and will no doubt become faster than 9.2 in time. It's just so much more robust, deep, intruiging, and many more of those kinds of positive adjectives! I couldn't agree more that it's the best thing to "happen" to Apple and/or the best thing Apple has done since bringing out the Mac in the first place! Actually, I'd go as far as to say (mind you, with no experience with the NeXT OS) OS X could well be the best thing to ever happen to personal computing. I think it is actually an evolutionary step in computer development.
 
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