[thechat] Mac new stuff

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Wed Jun 25 03:32:20 CDT 2003


On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 06:17  pm, Seb wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:29:49 +0100, Martin Burns  
> <martin at easyweb.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> ...so, any non-current Mac users tempted to switch with all the stuff  
>> announced yesterday?
>
> Not after I did a little investigation into all the benchmarks and  
> claims...

Apple response:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/24/ 
2154256&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=181

> it would seem that Apple's SPEC_2000 figures are compared to a  
> crippled P4, where SSE2 has been disabled

The flags were correctly set to use SSE2 as per the gcc site

> (double floating point and vector units not available, so the  
> benchmark falls back to the i387 instruction set, which is **slow**)  
> and hyperthreading has been disabled (which in the tests with the  
> dual-xeon effectively turns the processor into a single-cpu pentium > 3).

They performed the tests with and without hyperthreading and reported  
the *better* result. I'd be interested to see the with hyperthreading  
result too btw.

> Oh, and the malloc library (memory allocation, very, very important)  
> is a single-threaded version that (by Apple's admission) is next to  
> useless in the real world.

Not sure that that's what it said. Depends on what you're using the  
machine for, I guess.

As I guessed, the Dell results were better for Linux than for Windows.

Cheers
martin



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