[Ti] PowerBook "power"... or lack thereof

[Chris Olson]

On Dec 30, 2003, at 12:45 PM, Chris Olson wrote:

> The processor is set to Highest performance, but I never considered 
> the CHUD tools, nor did I consider the difference in processor cache.  
> Since ESRI ArcExplorer is a Java-based app, I have made sure all my 
> updates relating to Java are current.

I looked into this phenomenon last evening, and near as I can 
determine, the Power Mac's cpu just has more bandwidth and power than 
the laptop cpu, and it also has dramatically better disk I/O 
performance.  The Power Mac scores ~145 on the cpu test while the 
laptop scores ~135 in Xbench.  The Power Mac virtually blows the laptop 
right off its feet, spits on it while it's laying on the ground, and 
stomps it into a bloody mass in the disk test.  Since the datasets 
aren't actually loaded to memory until you click on the render checkbox 
in ArcExplorer, and the datasets won't fit into one GB of RAM, I 
suspect the difference in disk i/o time is what is causing the huge 
slowdown with the PowerBook.

I snipped part of the output of Xbench and pasted the appropriate data 
here:

*********  Power Mac  *************
	Disk Test	123.92	
		Sequential	138.10	
			Uncached Write	146.37	61.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	114.39	46.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	188.63	29.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	123.61	49.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	112.38	
			Uncached Write	124.40	1.87 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	115.27	26.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	99.44	0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	113.32	23.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]


********* PowerBook  *************
	Disk Test	38.54	
		Sequential	42.16	
			Uncached Write	34.78	14.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	38.28	15.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	71.40	11.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	38.48	15.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	35.49	
			Uncached Write	21.75	0.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	38.93	8.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	52.43	0.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	45.50	9.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
--
Chris