What Apple should do

Captain Code

Captain Code

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Apple should build a Quartz rendering chip/board into all new Macs, which would take all of the hassle of rendering away from the CPU, and speed up OSX so much.


I don't know how feasible this is, but it would be sweet.
 
Yeah, but graphics cards can be different on any computer. I mean why not have a single chip that offloads the Quartz rendering instead of having Apple worry about making drivers for all the different graphics cards.
I mean, we can't really expect all the graphics card manufacturers to make fully optimized drivers for the Mac.

If there was only one onboard chip, Apple could write their own drivers for it and make it wicked fast.
 
Originally posted by ksuther
This isn't supposed to be a smartass answer, but isn't that called a graphics card...
Click to expand...
Not entirely true - Graphics cards don't perform 2D anti-aliasing or alpha chanells. Even if they did, they wouldn't calculate the drop shadows. I think he was thinking of a dedicated quartz chip, which took all the load off the CPU.

Never going to hapen though - you'll get more bang for the buck by getting another processor. I want to see macs with more than two processors - do you realise these Linux guys can have 32 processors!? I'm sure that would sort out a few speed issues (Hi, I'm Bernie, and I have a 32x1GHz G4, and a cooling tower in my back yard ;o)

Bernie :o)
 
ROFL :D

How would that work in a laptop though, a really long cord with a constant water flow through it :confused:
 
OK, not knowing what it meant I checked ROFL on acronymfinder.com, and got 2 options:

ROFL - Rolling on Floor Laughing
ROFL - Rene Ord for Lommepengene (Danish TV program)

Now I like Danish TV as much as the next man, but it's hardly relavent to the post ;o)

and BTW, this would be the logical next step in Apple's quest for a digital hub - expansion into the Kitchen. The laptop cools via a water vapouriser that doubles as a portable kettle. The prototype 32 Processor TiBook will be able to fry an egg on it's base whereas now is can only lightly scramble them.

Bernie :o)
 
This Wallstreet i'm using for now is hot enough to fry an egg, and of course there's that Athlon that they DID fry an egg with, reported at theregister.co.uk :)
The Wallstreet gets up to about 91°C :-/ Pretty steamy... and also, the graphics card DOES help in some of the rendering, just not all, and AltiVec is a big help also. G4's are much faster in X and G3's.
 
Originally posted by bighairydog

Not entirely true - Graphics cards don't perform 2D anti-aliasing or alpha chanells. Even if they did, they wouldn't calculate the drop shadows. I think he was thinking of a dedicated quartz chip, which took all the load off the CPU.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's exactly what I meant.


Never going to hapen though - you'll get more bang for the buck by getting another processor. I want to see macs with more than two processors - do you realise these Linux guys can have 32 processors!? I'm sure that would sort out a few speed issues (Hi, I'm Bernie, and I have a 32x1GHz G4, and a cooling tower in my back yard ;o)

Bernie :o)
Click to expand...

You're probably right, but I wonder if Apple has even considered this.

Also, the thing with having that many CPUs is that you need to have multiple RAM busses and CPU busses or they are of no use.

It's a fact that having about 8-9 processors is actually slower than one processor by itself if nothing is done about RAM bandwidth etc because the CPUs are in constant conflict with eachother trying to access RAM.

So, I think that without any sort of multiple bus G4/5 system boards, probably the most in a single Mac would be 4 CPUs, or one 4 CPU core.

Edit:

Still, having more CPUs would be awesome, as long as the system bus and RAM bus speed is increased above the current 133MHz.

I can just imagine how much DDR RAM, and a 266/400 MHz system/ram bus would help out OSX.
 
Originally posted by devonferns


Yeah that's exactly what I meant.



You're probably right, but I wonder if Apple has even considered this.

Also, the thing with having that many CPUs is that you need to have multiple RAM busses and CPU busses or they are of no use.
Click to expand...

Well, yes and no. AMD at the moment is developing a chip which uses only one RAM bus, but has two CPUs on the chip which communicate with each other at full clockspeed. You have different ALUs for each chip etc. etc.
The idea behind this is that it is a solution between an expensive SMP system and a single processor system. Applications could still take a seperate processor, so, for example, encoding a movie won't affect your Internet Explorers performance and vice versa...the idea is cool, IMHO....but I think it will remain a prototype for a very long time...
 
Originally posted by ulrik


Well, yes and no. AMD at the moment is developing a chip which uses only one RAM bus, but has two CPUs on the chip which communicate with each other at full clockspeed. You have different ALUs for each chip etc. etc.
The idea behind this is that it is a solution between an expensive SMP system and a single processor system. Applications could still take a seperate processor, so, for example, encoding a movie won't affect your Internet Explorers performance and vice versa...the idea is cool, IMHO....but I think it will remain a prototype for a very long time...
Click to expand...

You're talking about multi-core CPUs. One RAM bus is OK for say 2-4 CPUs or a single chip with 2-4 CPU cores, but once you go above that, you need multiple busses, and multiple RAM banks as well.

I believe that the G5 is supposed to be multi-cored as well, as I've read about such things on the rumor sites. Still even if they can't be trusted, I'm sure this is the way things will be going in the future.
 
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