wow..dual amd 1800+... why does your dad need so much firepower?

ehh he doesnt really...he just likes having the best stuff. and he has his own networking buisness, so hes a geek at heart. combine geekness and money and you get large expenditures on computers. im not complaining. ive been around computers for while because of him and i love it. i just cant wait to see what he buys next; probably dual 3000+ when they eventually come out or something. maybe i can score some hand-me-downs

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There has been alot of rumours and incorrect information being spread re PC's and Macs on this board. I would like to clear up what the ACTUAL differences are between the 2 platforms and why for a long time Macs and Sillicon Graphics workstations have been the choice for audio and graphical application.


First of all lets clear up some rubish:

"Hypertransport does support 2P, 4P and 8P". Not true. The technology that supports this is SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing). Hypertransport really relates to bus speed and bandwidth.

"Macs have better quality parts than PC's". In the old days (5 years ago) the parts in Apple Mac computers were far superior to PC's. Macs came standard with SCSI hard drives. These hard drives are much faster than PC's (ATA) IDE or EIDE as they are called now hard drives. Not only are SCSI faster they also are better for handling audio applications, this is because they are more efficient at handling mutliple write and read requests to the hard drive. Macs also came with better quality graphics and audio cards as standard than PCs did. THIS IS NO LONDER THE CASE in todays Macintosh's the graphics, audio, hard drives e.t.c. e.t.c. are basically the exact same equipment as you would find in top branded home PC's.


So what is the difference then between PC's and Mac's. There are 2 main differences: Processor and Operating System.

Someone said that the G4 at about 866mhz can out perform an athlon at 1800mhz. This is not true. It totally depends on the applications. Different CPU's are designed for different tasks. You will need an expert in the CPU's to tell you the actual differences and why one is faster in some applications and others in other applications. <- I don't really know this so I won't try to explain


What I will tell you is why the MAC OS (used on the mac and silicon graphics workstations) is better for audio and graphics than the PC's OS. The Mac OS is a 'Real-time' OS. What this means is the processing time of the processor is broken into chunks at regular intervals according to the CPU's clock. The processing is done at these regular intervals. What this means is that if you are recording a DJ-Mix at 44hz sampling rate. The processor will always sample the incoming audio at the correct time.

This is not the case in a Windows based OS. In a windows OS the processing is layered into a stack of processing. This means that if we are recording a song at 44hz and there was too much processing on the stack. The sample could wait and be sampled at the wrong time. As in it might be slightly (a couple of micro seconds) delayed. The amount it is delayed depends on how many other tasks you are running on the computer.

This is also the case with video or audio playback on the PC's or macs. On the PC if you play a video (software accelerated not hardware) and start another intensive task the video will jolt. On the mac this should not happen because no one task can dominate the CPU's processing

There are different advantages and disadvantages between 'real time' and 'non real time' OS's. I am not saying real time is always the best it is not BUT one of the advantages of real time is that it is much better at handling audio and video.

The above is the basic reasons why audio and video enthusiast use the MAC. I would also like to state that this was the case for MAC OS's up until 9. I am not sure about OS X as that is based on the unix operating system (I believe it is still real-time).


By the way I am not an expert in Operating Systems I am a programmer but I do have a bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science in which I spent quite a bit of time looking at Operating Systems


Hope that clears things up a little bit


Cheers, Josh

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Also do not be Awwed by dual CPU systems. In most applications they are actually slower than a single CPU system a dual Athlon 1800 can be slower than a single Athlon 1800. This is because there is significant processing overhead to do SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing). The only time that dual CPU's will be faster than a single is if the application is written to support multi processors. Smaple applications that support multiple CPU's are:


Adobe Photoshop
Quake 3
Microsoft SQL Server
IBM DB2 database
Oracale database

Basically server software such as relational database software.

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quote:

Originally posted by Dzokayi So with that in mind...all you AMD fanboys out there...keep in mind that while the Athlon has superior floating point performance compared to a P4 of similar clock speed, the fact remains that Intel still wins in outright performance because the efficiency of the Athlon cannot overcome the sheer brute force of the clock speed advantage enjoyed by the P4s or Xeons. It's a simple fact right now.

^^^^^
Not true. Check the benchmarks bellow. AMD is still on top of alot of bench marks. Also the reason the XEON is faster is due to it's large amount of Cache rather than it's processing clock speed


http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02...xp_2800-16.html

^^^
Check the benchmarks AMD is on top



Also I saw someone refer to benchmarks on the AMD web site. Never refer to benchmarks on a manufactures web site they are often biased. Always use benchmarks of independant organisations e.g. www.TomsHardware.com <--- Basically the industry benchmarking source

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I'd go for the Mac. At work the PowerMac certainly defeats the windows machines. Even if it's only because of the gui...

quote:

Originally posted by Joshva Also do not be Awwed by dual CPU systems. In most applications they are actually slower than a single CPU system a dual Athlon 1800 can be slower than a single Athlon 1800. This is because there is significant processing overhead to do SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing). The only time that dual CPU's will be faster than a single is if the application is written to support multi processors. Smaple applications that support multiple CPU's are: Adobe Photoshop Quake 3 Microsoft SQL Server IBM DB2 database Oracale database Basically server software such as relational database software.

This is true in windows but with the Mac OS X, the kernal has native SMP support so EVERTHING is using both procs. This is the reason why SMP is so popular in macs as opposed to windows.

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I record onto my laptop i have a apple tibook 800mhz running logic 5 and normaly i record directly into it....using a midiman quatro 4x4.

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