You will see lags when switching from app to app though on a heavy loaded system, or if the screen resolution is so big that you can see all the apps competing for the GPU at the same time
The OS and any application that isn’t a game (or something as taxing as a game), or some experimental program, shouldn’t have any lags in a modern system.
Not necessarily. Many common applications (Photoshop, for example) can be incredibly taxing when operating normally. And having lots of applications open at once, from music players (decoding compressed bits into audible bits) to movie players (decoding audio AND video) to any sort of disk utilities use CPU and RAM. And just keeping a lot of programs open at once, as I do, even if they’re primarily Webkit or text-based, continually uses RAM and even a little processing power. When you try to do a lot with all of that at once, you need some beefy specs or your system will start to slow down. Trust me, it happens to me a lot.
On the contrary, when I quit most of that stuff and fire up something like UT04 demo, it runs rather well (though it doesn’t have a lot to compete with, and I usually give it processor precedence).
Just recently I had the experience of working on a very large file (close to 1 GB) in Photoshop on a Windows XP desktop P4 2.6 ghz machine with 1 GB RAM. It took about 4 minutes to open and any other application was pretty well useless. The GUI itself was non responsive or very slow. The video card was 64 MB but the real issue (I believe) was RAM. I have opened this same file on other Windows machines with similar specs with similar results. On my Dual G5 Mac the same file opens within a few seconds and working on the file does not slow down the GUI but then again I have 3.5 GB of RAM.
I tried to open the same file on my Mac mini. It reported that I didn’t have enough scratch file space. I had a little less than 2 GB free on the Mac mini drive.
You will see lags when switching from app to app though on a heavy loaded system, or if the screen resolution is so big that you can see all the apps competing for the GPU at the same time
The OS and any application that isn’t a game (or something as taxing as a game), or some experimental program, shouldn’t have any lags in a modern system.
Not necessarily. Many common applications (Photoshop, for example) can be incredibly taxing when operating normally. And having lots of applications open at once, from music players (decoding compressed bits into audible bits) to movie players (decoding audio AND video) to any sort of disk utilities use CPU and RAM. And just keeping a lot of programs open at once, as I do, even if they’re primarily Webkit or text-based, continually uses RAM and even a little processing power. When you try to do a lot with all of that at once, you need some beefy specs or your system will start to slow down. Trust me, it happens to me a lot.
On the contrary, when I quit most of that stuff and fire up something like UT04 demo, it runs rather well (though it doesn’t have a lot to compete with, and I usually give it processor precedence).
Which is precisely why standard hardware needs some beefing up.
Which is precisely why standard hardware needs some beefing up.
While I will immediately and without hesitation agree that more is better in this case, do I have to ask you where you draw the line.
1. Only a Cray super computer is good enough.
2. Only the latest stuff from AMD or Intel is good enough.
3. You are happy with whatever runs your software well.
If you not like me, i.e. only a Cray or the latest from AMD or Intel is good enough, then I hope you have a well filled wallet, the high requirements seem expensive.
Note that with Macs is VRAM virtualized, i.e. the ordinary RAM will be used when needed. QE is a brilliant design if you ask me.
Well, G5 systems have fat buses. But it is always better for processing units to use the closest RAM. Latency and all that. So VRAM virtualizing is not desirable, just necessary.
What’s decided to stay in VRAM and which not I assume is not some stupid first in last out algorithm, but based on a slightly more advanced criteria.
You play Oolite in one window, surf the web in another, edit a few images in iPhoto and play a song in iTunes with the visual effects on may slow down the system noticeably but consume very little of the VRAM, just to view it a bit more realistically.
Now, I suspect the iMac will be one of the last Macs to go Intel. I think the switch-over will go down the notebooks and then back up the desktops. That means the PowerBook will be first, then the iBook, then the Mac mini, then the iMac, then, finally, the Power Mac and Xserve. (I assume here, of course, that the lineup itself won’t radically change. It could. I make no predictions for that event.)
I don’t know if laptops will go to Intel before desktops but it makes no sense to move the Mini to Intel before the iMac. The iMac sells over 4 times as many units as the Mini, is the flagship of the consumer-line, and has the highest margins. Moving the Mini to Intel first might create a situation were the Mini is more powerful that the iMac. Apple would never allow that to happen. Either the iMac goes first or they go at the same time, I think they’l move both machines at the same time. Xserves can also move over before PowerMacs do simply because the software used on Xserves is more likely to be ported faster (i.e. no waiting for Photoshop, Flash etc.).
Xserves can also move over before PowerMacs do simply because the software used on Xserves is more likely to be ported faster (i.e. no waiting for Photoshop, Flash etc.).
The software used on Xserves almost undoubtedly already has been ported. We’ve seen OS X running on PC’s for how long now? That means porting OS X Server won’t be very much trouble, if it hasn’t already been done. And that means all the server-side languages, like PHP, Apache, MySQL (which already have x86 versions anyway) won’t be much trouble to integrate either.
I don’t know if laptops will go to Intel before desktops but it makes no sense to move the Mini to Intel before the iMac. The iMac sells over 4 times as many units as the Mini, is the flagship of the consumer-line, and has the highest margins. Moving the Mini to Intel first might create a situation were the Mini is more powerful that the iMac. Apple would never allow that to happen. Either the iMac goes first or they go at the same time, I think they’l move both machines at the same time. Xserves can also move over before PowerMacs do simply because the software used on Xserves is more likely to be ported faster (i.e. no waiting for Photoshop, Flash etc.).
I agree, but you can’t use that “more powerful than” argument because there will be lots of emulation in the beginning and Apple have been very good at squeezing that last drop of power out of the PPC processors.
This has been discussed before, but I still think it will be hard to reach the same level of excellence with the “new” hardware platform. It will take years.
I don’t know if laptops will go to Intel before desktops but it makes no sense to move the Mini to Intel before the iMac. The iMac sells over 4 times as many units as the Mini, is the flagship of the consumer-line, and has the highest margins. Moving the Mini to Intel first might create a situation were the Mini is more powerful that the iMac. Apple would never allow that to happen. Either the iMac goes first or they go at the same time, I think they’l move both machines at the same time. Xserves can also move over before PowerMacs do simply because the software used on Xserves is more likely to be ported faster (i.e. no waiting for Photoshop, Flash etc.).
I agree, but you can’t use that “more powerful than” argument because there will be lots of emulation in the beginning and Apple have been very good at squeezing that last drop of power out of the PPC processors.
This has been discussed before, but I still think it will be hard to reach the same level of excellence with the “new” hardware platform. It will take years.
Judging by what I’ve seen with our Mactel developer machine running 10.4.3 I’d agree that it’ll take years before Mactel is worth buying. PPC programs run really really slow if they run at all.
