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Power MacG5 Dual Core


Eoin R

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It appears that Apple may be bringing out Dual Core PowerMac G5's shortly. We were about to purchase G5 single core as our current configuration (G4-1Ghz-632MbRAM) is slow. Can anybody advise if a dual core chip would make any real difference to using Vectorworks? I am unsure whether we should wait (for how long we do not know) or purchase the current G5 PowerMacmodel.

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With many of the dual core processor machines on the Windows PCs, introduced some time ago, these are single socket motherboard machines, so they are not like the Apple current range, two seperate processors and I would imagine that Apple would adopt the same style of motherboard.

From what I've read it helps most applications in the same way as a dual processor machine does.

If your application uses dual processing such as Renderworks then you'll see two render lines as each processor works on part of the render.

If your application does not support dual processors then it uses one processor but does leave the other to perform other tasks without effecting another programs performance. So you could surf the net whilst burning some files to disc for example.

If they take the current confirguration of motherboard with two processors but put dual cores in each that would really give Apples the boast in speed over windows stuff Mac users have been dreaming of, but I bet it won't be cheap.

It's so close, according to rumour, why not wait and see what comes out, and its pricing, after all you've waited till now, another month or so isn't going to matter is it.

Also if you wait you could pick up an old configuration model at a greatly reduced price !!

We brought a brand new Dual 1.8 G5 a weeks or so ago as a office server in our small set up, for ?650, thats half its price when current. Sure it's been on display with some grubby fingermarks on the tower but a quick wipe with cleaner and it was new again. Years warranty etc.

Alan

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  • 3 weeks later...

quote:

Originally posted by alanmac:

If they take the current confirguration of motherboard with two processors but put dual cores in each that would really give Apples the boast in speed over windows stuff Mac users have been dreaming of, but I bet it won't be cheap.

?2300. ?300 more than the previous model, while in terms of vector processing, "85% faster." Not bad for ?300.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

quote:

Originally posted by APE Design Ctr:

I dont believe that software needs to be written differently to take advantage of Dual Core processors. (unlike 64 bit which it does)

To application software, dual core looks like dual processor, and thus code needs to be multi-threaded to take advantage of more than one core. This requires programmers to modify algorithms to divide up the work between the processors, which is not a trivial task and which must be done to each section of code individually. (For example, a multi-threaded hidden line implementation wouldn't speed up OpenGL, DTM, etc.) Currently VectorWorks is only multi-threaded in RenderWorks rendering, and thus only that part of the code would run faster on a dual core machine than a single core model.

You are correct that 64 bit software would also require some code modifications, but these would probably be less dramatic than the changes needed for multi-threading. However, 64 bit code is not generally faster; the primary reason to go to 64 bits is to allow applications to access more than 4 gigabytes of memory.

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