Memory options of 970 machines.

brendon

I have been wondering what type of memory controller the new machines would have, and at the same time I have been reading that a fair amount of software does not take advantage of multiple CPUs let alone threads. It appears that doing this on the Mac will take a back-seat to Wintel apps due to the fact that software developers tend to put more money into developing for the bigger market, no trolling intended. With that in mind I began thinking how could Apple address this issue in a way that would allow developers to have a greater profit margin, they do less work and yet at the same time Macs benefit from software that takes full advantage of the hardware.



I came upon the notion that if, and it is a really big if, the memory controller were to be put on the Apple system chip, and it had control of scheduling events though the CPUs than a program would not have to be multiple processor aware to take advantage of both processors. The system chip would see that the program is calling for a bunch of floating point operations and then schedules those to be taken care of by the 4 (as in 2 per 970) FPUs that it has available to it. With this in mind it may also be able to use the altivec units as another resource that is available to the system chip which is just attempting to ensure that each process is pared with an appropriate resource. I believe that this could be what MOKI was hinting at, or something like that.



Thoughts

ast3r3x

TROLL!! haha jk



i would think adobe and professional grade apps would want to take advantage of the speed of the 970 to the fullest extent





...i mean that is the machines the pros will be buying isn't it <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />

programmer

I'm not going to get technical, but suffice it to say that "it doesn't work that way".

brendon

[quote]Originally posted by ast3r3x:

<strong>TROLL!! haha jk



i would think adobe and professional grade apps would want to take advantage of the speed of the 970 to the fullest extent





...i mean that is the machines the pros will be buying isn't it <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>





No troll, sorry I'm referencing a discusion that some folks were having and comparing the dual Macs to the Single Macs. The speed difference was about 20% for most apps, the only thing fast about PhotoShop was the filters that Apple had helped writing. This could be verified here I would guess.

amorph

It's true that some large developers aren't heavily threading apps yet. That's partly because of the way the Other Platform works, and partly because it was the way OS 9 tended to work, too. Threads are available on both platforms, but there's not much incentive to use them. I expect this to change over time, as OS X matures and the P4 moves to a hyperthreaded architecture.



By the way, threading == MP support. The only way OS X can distribute a task across multiple CPUs is by scheduling threads. There's unfortunately no way to silently invoke AltiVec - the compiler can use it for optimization, but not the scheduler or the processor at run time. (I'm not sure how PhotoShop's "plug-in" works, but since OS 9's MP support used threads as well, they must have just tacked on a few filters running in separate threads? Whatever they did apparently didn't work well.)



For those stuck with single-threaded apps, you can at least run two of them at full power simultaneously, or run one at full blast with a lot of small tasks running as well.



If you want the big Carbon apps to be threaded, tell the developers! They might cater first of all to Wintel, but they will - or at least, should - listen to a good chunk of their customer base if their customers speak up.



[ 01-20-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>