[Ti] Will Apple drop its OS?

[Paul H. Yoshimune]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:24:36PM -0700, Robert Ameeti wrote:
> At 5:44 PM -0500, 4/6/06, Chris Olson wrote:
> 
> >On Apr 6, 2006, at 1:42 PM, Robert Ameeti wrote:
> >
> >>It crashed just because you were asking it to Open 40+ applications 
> >>at the same time? Shame on Apple. They should allow us to do that 
> >>without crashing.
> >
> >My Mac mini PowerPC 1.25 Ghz w/512 MB RAM does it without a hitch.  
> >So does my old PowerBook G4/400 Mhz w/1.0 GB RAM.  Not fast, but it 
> >completes the task.  So does my PowerBook G4/1.67 w/2 GB RAM.  So 
> >does my dual PowerMac G4 w/2 GB RAM.
> >
> >Since virtually every PowerPC G4 or better Mac I've ever tried it on 
> >is capable of doing it, I expect the new stuff to do it too.
> >
> >BTW - this "test" is ...
> 
> I'm gunna start out by saying that you love to talk over people's 
> heads. While all of what you went on to ramble about may be true, it 
> does nothing to answer the question above. The point that I made 
> above was that your showing us the you can crash a Mac by asking it 
> to open 40+ applications is a meaningless, worthless test as no 
> person would ever need to do that. It is irrelevant that your 
> previous computers could do it. So what? No one needs to do it. Show 
> us something that causes the Mac to crash 'in front of God and 
> everyone' that we will realistically need to do and we'll listen.

While opening 40+ applications at once may not be something that happens all
the time (if ever), it definitely demonstrates a point.  How different
processors and operating systems deal with load is a very important issue that
often is left unaddressed in the face of artificial benchmarks.  If you do one
thing at a time, Intel processors are quite fast.  If doing a single-thread
compile, even my 1.86GHz ThinkPad running Linux cranks out the builds in a big
hurry.  Try doing anything else with that box at the same time, though, and
you're in for a very unpleasant experience.

My 2x2 G5, much like all the Sun hardware I use, isn't as fast as the latest
Intel offerings in the various benchmarks.  So, everyone thinks, "Wow,
Motorola/IBM/SPARC sucks, because you can buy this cheap-o Intel PC for much
less, and it cranks out big benchmark numbers!"  But, the performance
degradation under load is linear and smooth.

Real world examples?  For me, doing a big compile while trying to download and
convert images from my digital camera, or working with Photoshop/iView and
downloading/filtering lots of email, or ripping a CD and ftping a file,
etc. work smoothly on the PowerMac.  Similar operations under Windows cause
things to basically stop, and/or get so chunky as to be useless.

This was my big complaint about going from SCSI to IDE - same problem.  IDE
works great if you're the only one doing something with the drive, and are only
doing one thing.  Try doing that compile, and watch how useless your computer
gets as it starts paging/swapping.

In a nutshell, it's not all about the ultimate numbers if you plan on doing
more than one thing at a time with your machine.  I'm big on multitasking, so
for me, it's more important that the system as a whole functions quickly and
smoothly, as opposed to just one single process.
-- 
Paul H. Yoshimune
paul at yoshimune.com