[G4] Upgrade Sawtooth to DP?

[Mel Krewall]

Four hundred bucks for a dual 1 GHz seems like a pretty good deal to 
me, although I opted for the 1.4 GHz single myself.
"Fully symmetrical" is somewhat of a misnomer. Each application must be 
written to be "threaded" to take advantage of mulitprocessing. OS X is 
multi-threaded, so each processor will be involved, but I doubt you 
would ever see them with exactly the same load. By necessity, there 
must be a primary thread that coordinates all other activities, so one 
processor will typically have a greater load than the other. Other 
applications may or may not be threaded and therefore might or might 
not take advantage of multiprocessors. Many of the major apps, like 
Photoshop, etc., are threaded, but many older ones are not, and most OS 
9 apps are limited to one processor (there are a few notable 
exceptions).
HTH,
Mel

"May thy ball lie in green pastures - and not in still waters."
~Author Unknown

On Mar 21, 2005, at 8:46 AM, Carlos wrote:

> Wayne:
>
> Thanks for the quick reply. Just checked out the DP upgrades on OWC's 
> site. For $400 minimum, I'll probably pass, but if prices ar dropping, 
> it might become a viable option. Does OS X take full advantage of 
> these DP upgrades in the older machines? IE, is it fully symmetrical, 
> or is there still a "primary" and "secondary" CPU?
>
> On Mar 21, 2005, at 12:09 AM, Wayne Clodfelter wrote:
>
>> Yes, Larry O'Connor at OWC--macsales.com--says faster, less expensive
>> DPs are just around the corner. Check the macsales.com site for 
>> current
>> offerings.
>>
>> On Mar 20, 2005, at 11:06 AM, Carlos wrote:
>>
>>> I recently acquired a second-hand Sawtooth G4/450 and I'm wondering 
>>> if
>>> it's possible to upgrade this with a second processor? it's running 
>>> OS
>>> X exclusively, so the DP would provide a significant boost, I would
>>> think.
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
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