[X4U] Re: YIPPEE! - Quad 2.5 GHz

[Robert Tillyard]

On 22 Oct 2005, at 18:07, TjL wrote:


> ...... Original Message .......
> On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 02:55:26 -0700 "Philip J Robar"
> <pjrobar at areyoureallythatstupid.org> wrote:
>
>
>>> All OSX-native apps are multi-threaded and thus benefit from any
>>> multi-proc system.
>>>
>>
>> Umm, no they're not. Applications must be explicitly coded to use
>> multiple threads. This is a non-trivial task.
>>
>
> are Apple apps?  That's what I first read this to imply (all native  
> Apple
> apps vs OSX apps).
>
> I have heard it said in the past that only some apps *should* be  
> coded to
> use multiple threads.
>
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>

 From memory I though that all Cocoa apps run the GUI in a separate  
thread, UI elements like progress bars are normally animated in a  
separate thread.

Because Mac OS X/UNIX is a multi-tasking system I would have thought  
it would benefit from more processors. If you're running Photoshop on  
it's own you probably still have your mail application and possibly  
iTunes running in the background.

Just take a look at Activity Monitor or top (via the command line),  
my single CPU PowerBook is not being heavily used at this point in  
time but I have 96 processes with 282 threads running, so even if you  
are just using a single program the rest of the system can utilise  
the other processors.

I've just loaded Photoshop Elements v2 and that is now running 7  
threads, Safari is running 7, iTunes 6, Mail 9, Dashboard 48 in total  
so I think anyone should see some benefit, I can't say if the benefit  
would out weight the cost but I don't think you'd have three CPUs  
doing nothing if there is work to be done.


Regards, Rob.