[CUBE] Best bang for the buck CPU

[Joseph B. Gurman]

     Tom Hostler wrote:

>I guess it kind of depends on what you want to do with your cube.
>
>A faster single processor upgrade will have a snappier finder, and long
>processing tasks will be shorter. Duals will be more beneficial in
>multi-tasking - such as iMovie/iDVD work perhaps.
>
>I have a single Sonnet 1.2 and in comparison to the stock 450, the
>day-to-day experience is much snappier, and Photoshop work is now a pleasure
>in X.
>
>However moving iMovie/iDVD, and you still find yourself waiting whilst it
>pre-renders/encodes actions your experimenting with. Granted your not
>waiting as long as before, but they grab & hog the processor and as a result
>it feels slow.
>
>I've not used a dual, but with multi-processor aware apps, and an
>multi-threaded finder, I would imagine you can check your mail whilst iMovie
>does a render more comfortably than I can.

     No argument with anything Tom says, but I would substitute 
"multi-threaded" for "multi-tasking." Multitasking goes on all the 
time in unix systems, and is done most simply by time division on a 
single processor. That kind of multitasking has been around for a few 
decades.

     Multithreading involves breaking a single process down into two 
or more threads in order to speed processing, and yes, multithreaded 
apps certainly gain speed on multiple CPU's.

     Some of the performance gain is doubtless due to a faster memory 
bus and other hardware differences, but my dual-1 GHz G4 is much 
snappier at Finder actions as well as, say, Photoshop tasks, than our 
single-1 GHz (PowerLogix) Cube at work --- because the current 
versions of the Finder and (some parts of) Photoshop are 
multithreaded.

     All that said, our 1 GHz Cube is much snappier than our (stock) 
450 MHz one, and the difference in sound level from the fan is barely 
noticeable (at least to my ears).

						Joe Gurman
-- 
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
                                                             - Douglas 
Adams, 1952 - 2001

Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA