Author: Hristo
Date: 00:43:06 11/22/03
Go up one level in this thread
On November 21, 2003 at 21:02:47, Steven Edwards wrote: >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 Perhaps you wanted to say 32 128 bit registers. VR0-VR31 are all 128 bit wide. GPR0-GPR31 are 32 bit general purpose registers (32 of them) FPR0-FPR31 are 64 bit floating point registers (32 of them) + a few other registers for status, conditions, etc. + entire set Memory management, Exception handling, Misc registers. The PPC is quite nice to program to at the assembler level. >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. No. > Are Macs overpriced? No. >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 prefer Mac because it is more fun for me, not because it is undeniably a better system compared to any wintel. > >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. XCode is nice, but Visual Studio is no slouch. For serious development XCode wouldn't be my choice just yet. It seems to have a mind of its own sometimes ... ;-) However, vi + make + automake can often fill the gaps ... > >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. A linux (intel) box has been running cvs server at work, non stop, for over 18 months. Plus a few other intel boxes running linux have been up for more than a year. I had forgotten the passwords to those machines ... thank god, the passwords rime ... Anyway, the Intel boxes when maintained properly can be useful just as long as a Mac. Problem is that often the Intel boxes are treated like dirt since they are so cheap. Regards, Hristo
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