[G4] New system...

[James Asherman]

On Saturday, November 8, 2003, at 10:34  AM, Joseph B. Gurman wrote:

>
>     I beg to differ.... and I have both machines sitting on my desk at 
> work.
>
>     If you do anything that requires moving substantial amounts of 
> data from memory to the CPU (the original poster mentioned DV and 
> MPEG2 content and DVD burning, but games, image editing, &c. all 
> apply), you will notice an impressive difference. We often create 1024 
> x 1024 animations of sequences of images from a spaceborne telescope. 
> They run 50% faster on the 1.8 GHz G5 than on the dual 1.25 MDD G4. 
> (Interestingly, it turns out that for that particular application, 
> memory bandwidth is the only determinant of speed: the animations run 
> as fast on the 1.8 as the do on a dual 2.0 GHz G5.)
>
>     Who doesn't use lots of memory bandwidth these days? Someone who 
> never burns CD-R's or watches DVD's, edits images or video, plays 
> graphics-intensive games, downloads QT movies from the Web and plays 
> them.... but just uses their machine for text processing, browsing 
> very simple Web pages, and e-mail. In other words, people for whom the 
> dual G4 was overkill.
>
>     One other area in which the G5's excel: disk bandwidth. Coupled 
> with the memory bandwidth, data transfers to/from disk on the serial 
> ATA drives are amazing (I was getting 55 MByte/s, sustained, yesterday 
> while reading and writing a 1.7 Gbyte animation file under 10.3.) Yes, 
> you can't put four hard drives in a G5.... but you can put in half a 
> Terabyte of disk space on two serial ATA drives. Once again, if your 
> demands on a machine are light, neither dual G4 nor G5 is really 
> needed.
>
> 						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
>
>

Really great real-world observations.
I wish I had stayed in high school so that I could get such a cool job.
Do you post these animations?

Jim