12" G4 / OS X

[ben nevile <bbn@xxxxxxxx>]

joee said

> 12" G4's... while these look like nice litle machines,

beware, the 12" G4s do not have any level 3 cache.  this is what 
accounts for the very poor audio performance of the 550/667 G4 
powerbooks.  efficiency of audio processing is highly sensitive to 
cache size and speed.

> and the DDR,

because of a bottleneck in accepting data into the processor the DDR 
RAM will not impact performance in any significant way.  This page has 
some good information about Apple's DDR machines:  
http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr.html

> also if anyone has any idea how the max/msp port is coming along.

it's coming along very nicely.  try it out for yourself!

http://www.cycling74.com/products/dlxmax.html

kim said

> I've heard good and bad about OSX: slow,

I have noticed a performance hit in all the audio apps I've tried.  my 
guess is that this is something really low level, like an inefficiency 
in the kernel implementation that affects scheduling and how threads 
are managed.  at one point when reading through the developer 
documentation for optimizing code I came across an admission that Apple 
knew there were performance problems with the kernel, and that they 
would be addressed in the future.  some people are predicting that 10.3 
will be significantly faster than 10.2.

certain things are actually much faster in X.  for instance, reading 
data files from hard disk.  it takes way less time to load big, 
complicated patches in xmax than it does in 4.1 on OS 9.

> also being rock solid stable, much less likely to crash/freeze,

I started using X for all my day to day stuff in September and between 
all my various bots have had only one (!!!) system crash in the entire 
time.  I have one computer here at school that has been running 
continuously since day one, restarting only if requested by the OS 
updates that it automatically downloads.  When working on dev stuff in 
9 I used to reboot my computer literally fifty times a day.  we're 
talking about a major quality of life improvement for programming.  I 
still have to go into 9.2 for some audio work because MOTU hasn't 
released OS X drivers for the PCI-324 card, and every time I go back 
it's crash city.  9 feels like ancient technology, sort of the same 
sensation you get when you boot up an Apple II+ and wait for eleven 
minutes while it loads Karateka from floppy disks.

> for me I am going to wait until end of the year since I some of the 
> patches
> I've developed in Max/MSP use one-off 'boutique' externals that will 
> never
> be ported to OSX since the developer is no longer supporting it or not
> interested in porting it to the OSX platform...

ask the authors to distribute the source code!  in most cases moving 
objects to OS X is as simple as recompilation, it takes two minutes.

bbn

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