Barefeats has posted benchmarks showing that the Power Mac G4/733 does not quite stack up to the dual processor G4/533 machine in Photoshop, Cinema 4D XL tests and other dual-processor aware applications. (Most applications and tasks are not dual processor aware under Classic Mac OS.)
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that's why the dual 533 is the best deal at the Apple Store... the 'SuperDrive' will be available separately later on anyway... in other words you can have a dual processor G4 533Mhz w/SuperDrive for the same or less $$ as the single processor 733Mhz w/SuperDrive, if you're willing to wait a month or two...!
Told ya so. Wait until OS 9 is gone...dual CPUs will be back in force at Apple if moto is still not dishing out chips. The 733 is only for marketing.
I have been wondering whether the dual-G4 is faster than the 733 ever since they were released, and my suspicions have been proven. While they do require multi-processor applications, Os X will ensure that all app's designed for it will take advantage of the dual. This will only further engrain the dual 533 as the fastest Mac machine
folks, the applications needs to directly support MP.. just having a MP OS aware doesn't do it. And I believe that just being carbon ain't enough.
And even MP support isn't the whole story.. exactly how fast in what functions an app is is still up to the programmer.. so there's going to be a LARGE learning curve while programmers start experimenting with HOW to take BEST advantage of a MP machine.
I thought that for Mac OS X, the Kernel will asign the work to all processors, that there was work to be done at the application level?
Correct??
That's why I bought one. Bring on OS X baby...
As far as the MP support in OS X. I code for OS X on the side and I know that the Cocoa API has heavy multithreading support (you only have to call a function through a function that instructs in to become a new thread). In theory, a heavily multithreaded app will take great advantage of dual processors on an MP aware OS (ie. OS X). The only issue here is someone trying to sync the threads so that they get the highest efficiency. Of course, you can avoid this by just writing a thread for almost every argument you create. This is how Omni products seem to work quickly and how SETI@HOME is able to get full utilization. It isn't that much of a learning curve. I don't think that this applies to carbon, though. Unless multi-threading is implemented directly by the carbon app, the best they can get is one CPU for that app (which is still really good if it is the only app on that CPU).
As far as the actual performance test. I am not surprised. A G4+ is to the G4 as the P4 is to the P3 (except for the added AltiVec units). They lengthened the pipeline to allow higher frequencies simply for marketting. The actual work done by the processor is reduced (significantly in certain tasks) so you end up not being that much faster. If these apps were fully AltiVec optimized I think that the G4+ would rock because it has four units while each G4 only has two (and these added two are different types). Hard to say for sure, I don't work for Motorola. I, personally, have had my eyes on the dual 533 just because I don't do much with AltiVec and I don't need to burn DVDs. However, I do multitask like crazy.
Just a brief history of my computer usage,
~/indigo
http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000660.html
there's a thread discussing this extensively at xlr8yourmac. Even against the single 533, the 733 doesn't show the performance lead it should. The discussion is about why this may be so. (is it OS9.1? does software need to be recompiled for new chip architecture, etc.)
My question is why would Apple let this happen without some sort of warning like " ...the 733 won't show it's full promise until blah blah happens" Seems like a misjudgement on their part.
If you study the Photoshop and Cinema 4D graphs, you'll see that the 733 looks bad even next to the SINGLE cpu 533.
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well, duh
even Apple acknowledges the duals crush the siincles in applicatiooons that are SMP-aware...like Mac OS X (hint, hint)