[Ti] A real world comparison

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 10, 2005, at 3:46 AM, Henry Kalir wrote:

> Ditto for this one - what's the problem here? Is the Mac OS X etched 
> in stone or something?

Well, this is beating a dead horse because nobody is going to listen 
anyway.  Mac fans don't want to hear that their operating system is 
flawed.

Mac OS X's kernel is called XNU.  It's a marriage of Mach and BSD 
kernel technologies, and is micro-kernel based.  Let's just say there's 
some performance differences in kernel designs, and monolithic kernels 
generally outperform micro-kernels pretty dramatically on certain cpu 
architectures and applications.

It took me a bit to find some information that's written in layman's 
terms, but I did find a recent informative reference.  I would invite 
anyone who's blinded by illusions of grandeur of OS X on x86 to read 
this web page because it explains it better than I ever could:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8

In very basic terms, what really scares me about OS X on x86 is that 
threading problems inherent in the kernel design can be easily made up 
for on PowerPC by limiting your application's threads and switching to 
vector processing (AltiVec).  On x86 this can't be done.  AltiVec 
spanks Intel's SSE seven ways from Sunday, and Intel's "hyperthreading" 
technology will fall flat on its face with OS X.  Living proof of the 
poor performance is already there for anybody who wants to try it - in 
the form of x86 Darwin.

Ya'll are sitting around thinking Apple is going to pull a rabbit out 
of a hat.  It ain't gonna' happen.

> Can I ask you for something similar here? Where are you coming from? 
> What products are you selling/developing? You seem to have an agenda 
> that far transends a regular user's one (like myself). What gives, 
> Chris???

You mean where does my vested interest in PowerPC come from?  My 
company's primary business is developing software/hardware solutions 
for robotics processes and microprocessor-based controllers.  We're 
into several other ventures as well.  PowerPC is used almost 
exclusively in our robotics business, short of a limited number of 
applications that use ARM (another RISC arch).
--
Chris