Software acceleration of the CPU

Hehe... the listing on Versiontracker says that the software can improve your speed by up to 30%. Wishful thinking is what it is.

I personally don't think that renicing processes is always a good thing. A lot of things have to happen in the background and by giving the foreground app too much priority you might actually cause problems with the rest of the system.
 
Interesting - I found that in some cases, reducing a process's priority can improve its responsiveness (or maybe that's just me getting false impressions of things).

Playing Master of Orion 3 on hardware that falls well below the recommended system specs, I find it becomes a bit more responsive if I drop its priority a bit - maybe it's taking CPU away from the window server or something, and delaying its own interrupts getting through?
 
Is "priority" the OSX terminology for Unix's "nice"? The lower the nice level, the more the process hogs CPU time.

There's 2 kinds of performance: perceived and actual.

Perceived performance is what this is, renicing a process so it seems to be faster. Desktop GUIs also have perceived performance. My mom was using a Packard Bell Pentium 120 MHz running Windows 98. I gave her my iMac G4 700 OSX.2 and she complained it was slow, go figure. The iMac was more powerful in terms of raw CPU power, but the OSX GUI weighs it down.
 
Supposedly (this was from a prof who specialized in compilers, so it might be a bit of an exaggeration) something like 20-30% of the increase in efficiency of computers is actually due to better compilers - they're getting better at producing more efficient machine code from the same high level language code.

So, if you have an old computer with an old OS install on it, one way to speed it up is actually to get the latest compiler toolchain, and recompile your programs. Of course, that's only if you use an open source OS. If not, you're at the mercy of the OS vendor.
 
That's absolutely correct. Updated compilers do make a difference. Just read the OSX system updates release notes from Apple, particularly the ones pertaining to GCC. As gcc gets better, it becomes more aware of the newer PPC chips and what there're capable of. It goes beyond simply knowing what CPU instructions and micro code to produce, but CPU characteristics such as timings - for knowing when and how to time the flow of instructions - that will improve performance. Modern CPUs obviously can run legacy code, but the code itself has to be updated for modern CPUs to produce better performance. Apple's own engineers contribute to the GCC project to improve code generation for PPC chips.
 
yes. gcc 3.4 provided about a 10% increase in the performance on apps that I use on Linux. gcc3.5 is still under development and provides about the same level of performance as gcc 3.4. If the performance benefits seen on Linux gets brought over to Tiger, even if they didn't redesign any part of the OS, we should still see a slight speed increase.
 
Basically, such a tool _CAN_ accelerate (perceived, responsiveness) some things, but only on the back of the rest. I don't like such tools, though. And I think Apple does quite well in accelerating both overall and in perceived responsiveness, if I take the steps from 10.0 to 10.3.5. The system is constantly getting better. No need for such tools, really. However, I understand that there are people out there who _like_ such things. But this is not OS 9, where 'SpeedDoubler' could actually double the speed of some stuff (like Finder copying by giving the Finder's copy command to a different application, so that the Finder remained responsive)...
 
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