Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 18:02:47 11/21/03
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On November 21, 2003 at 19:51:10, Dann Corbit wrote: >On November 21, 2003 at 19:33:33, Andreas Guettinger wrote: >As is well known, if you are doing video processing, the Power Mac is a >top-flite, somewhat overpriced machine. And darn good looking too. The PPC with Altivec (G4s and G5s) is rather good with audio processing as well and that's what I use to rip my CD collection. As of a few weeks ago, Apple no longer sells the G3 CPU that lacks Altivec. It may be that the 128 thirty-two bit registers of an Altivec unit could be quite useful as a register cache in a chess program. It's exactly the amout of space neede to store either an AttackFrom[64] or an AttackTo[64] bitboard array. Are Macs expensive? Yes. Are Macs overpriced? The short answer is: probably, but not by much for equivalently equipped competing machines. The long answer (for programmers) has a lot to do with ease of use (hands down winner), freely avaliable development tools (Xcode from Apple, the entire GNU toolset, the X Window toolset, etc.), and longevity. I have used Microsoft's various development toolchains starting back from the late 1970s and continuing to the current Visual Studio suite. But now only when people pay me to do it; I haven't used any MS tools for my own projects since 1987. Apple's Xcode IDE with its new zerolink feature and automated distributed builds is the way to go, at least for now. For the area of longevity, I'm typing this on my oldest G4 Mac, a 400 MHz dektop model that came out four years ago. It runs 24*7 doing chess and Seti work while remaining nearly problem-free. In fact, the only difficulty I have is rebooting after the occasional brief power failure; I need to let the machine stay turned off for 30 seconds or so before restarting -- perhaps the original power supply with over 30,000 in-use hours is getting ready for a permanent vacation.
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