[Ti] slightly OT: which apps dual-processor aware?

[Kynan Shook]

Chris Olson <chris.olson at astcomm.net> writes:
> On Apr 11, 2005, at 9:11 PM, <maf291 at nyu.edu> wrote:
>> Does anybody know where I can find a list of which apps (including
>> apple ones) can take advantage of dual processors
>
> I know of no such list, but on the Apple side, the entire Mac OS X
> operating system is SMP aware.  So even things like GCC take advantage
> of dual processors, as do iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, Shake, Motion,
> Logic, etc..
>
> Do dual cpu's make any difference browsing the web with Safari or
> reading your email with Mail?  No.

Actually, at least to some extent, Safari and Mail *will* be sped up 
with multiple processors.

First of all, even applications that can only use a single CPU will 
speed up because they don't have to compete as much with with the OS 
overhead or other applications that are running at the same time.

Anyway, you can get a little bit of an idea of which applications might 
be more affected by dual processors by looking in Activity Monitor at 
the list of processes.  Anything with more than 1 thread *might* be 
sped up.  Each thread is a semi-independent set of instructions in the 
application.  Of course, there is almost always some level of 
communication between threads, and how tightly the threads are coupled 
varies.  On top of needing more than one thread to really take 
advantage of extra processors, you need to make sure that these threads 
actually have work to do at the same time!  This is a lot harder to 
determine.

However, at the moment, Mail has 9 threads, and Safari has 6 on my 
computer.  Yours may be different depending on what they are currently 
doing, and what they have been doing.  I don't know what any of those 
threads do, but if at least two of them need to do work at the same 
time, you'll get some amount of benefit.

As mentioned though, most CPU-intensive applications will benefit the 
most.

If you talk to somebody who has a dual-CPU machine, you'd get a better 
perspective than mine, I imagine: I'm working purely on theory here.  
If anybody wants to contribute towards my upcoming purchase of a dual 
G5, I'll report back to them when I get it. ;-)