It has always been a frequent question — “Will I benefit from multiple processors?” With the growing popularity of dual core processors, the topic is more important than ever! Will multiple processors or a dual core processor be beneficial to you, and what are the differences between them? These are the questions this article will attempt to lay to rest.
A major question for some people getting ready to buy a high-end system is whether they want or need to have two processors available to them. For anyone doing video editing, multi-threaded applications, or a lot of multitasking the answer is a very clear ‘yes’. Then the question becomes whether two separate processors (as in a dual Xeon or Opteron system) is the way to go, or whether a single dual-core CPU (like a Pentium D or Athlon64 X2) will do just as well. Dual CPU vs dual core — which is better?!
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This is where OS X will have a bit of an edge. Since it is ‘nix under the hood, getting multiple processors to play nice together is essentially easier. Macs have been using dual processor kludges to get around the lack of faster chips, in their high end G5s long enough that I would expect them to be able to turn out real production time improvements in the visual and audio production areas (e.g render times) rather than just isolated benchmark numbers that don’t mean jack in the real world.
Also amature film makers are going to love four and eight core models when they arrive (assuming the heat issues are really significantly less with the new Intel chips.) For the rest of us, it will be like having a street legal GP racer, trying to drive in LA traffic. Bragging rights only.
Bet OS 10.5 (leopard) is optimized for these, and they have had the quad cores to play with while building it. Bet we see that being able to exploit multi processors was one of the major reasons Apple went Intel, not just chip speed numbers.
Up until recently, when I got a Nikon D50 dSLR, the only time I felt the need for a faster computer was when I finished authoring a DVD in iDVD, and then had to wait a couple/few hours for the image to be generated…
Now, shooting in Raw on a 6-Mp dSLR, and using programs like Adobe’s Lightroom [beta] and Nikon’s Capture NX [trial-version] I am starting to experience the few-second delays – while processing files -which remind me how spoiled I have become.
Reminds me of sveral years ago, when I pulled my old MacPlus out of the closet, to loan to a friend. I powered it up – for the first time in years – to make sure it still worked. I was surprised to see I could “type-ahead” of the text appearing on the screen! How was I happy to use something that slow for a couple of years…? [grin]
OK,
For Office use, and general purpose machine, that HAS LITTLE need of rendering, and 3D games…
NO.
Faster ISNT better, when you can buy 2-3 cheaper machines to do MORE work. Watch the prices of the Old machines In August. Back to school, and dropping prices, make for some CHEAP systems. the Big companies are dumping them FAST. Perfect time to get a few DECENT machines.
As strange as this may seem, the NT kernel is already heavily optimized for multiproccessing. I do not actually see an advantage (unless you are talking about application already written). Most of NT is a VMS clone and this is Unix like. OSX is not Unix, but based on Mach.
Mach is not Unix, but a microkernel (hybrid now) of a Unix like operating system. The purpose was to allow it to boot two operating system: in this case OSX and Classic. It should also be noted that the OSX version of Mach is heavily modified (XNU kernel). The BSD subsystem is added during the install. This gives it the various Unix like commands (Bash shell) and other applications on top of the command line.