Police to Apple: The Gig is Up, The benchmarks are out

[LordShaithis]

A while back I got one of my emails printed in Time Magazine, where I went off about how the new iMac was an irrelevant piece of crap. I rest my case.

[Durandal]

The L3 cache is a problem becasue on large memory operations the L3 chache is queried every time it needs a memory block, and after not finiding it thier goes to the main memory. On a PC the request just heads stright to the memory.

I personally think they should have used the l3 cahce to coordinate vitrual cmemory blocks and regular ram blocks, to speed up retrivial on big blocks of data.

OK, I don't know shit about that, so I'll take your word on it.

Why am I ticked off at them. They stick a big sign on the dual G4 $3500 (which i was going to buy) that said "300x faster on digital editing" and it turns out that its on par with a year/year and a half old PC. I can forigve operating systems claims, but such utter disrespect for the truth is lame. I can;t ever remember such a gross distortion from intel, and the fact that Apple is always crowing about the higher moral ground and caring about its customers.

After Effects isn't digital video editing. It's compositing. Final Cut Pro is video editing, and it blows away the x86 world's offerings because it doesn't require additional hardware for real-time rendering and works flawlessly with the machine. There's no Final Cut Pro available for PC, but it can't be horrible if you've got professionals who have been in the business upwards of 20 years using it. Hell, ILM used Final Cut Pro to do rough screen renders and storyboard stuff.

As for Clock speed differences between AMD and P4, might I add, that AMD is hitting the Hz wall on thier design, and can't keep up the proccssing parraell they have in the past. They need a new core like the P4 has that can better handle the higher ghz. IN the next month, intel is going to release a 2.8ghz chipand a month after that a 3 ghz chip. AMD can't match that anytime soon. And I will conceed that thier chips are about 20% faster per hz.

That issue will be easily addressed when the Hammer comes out. Hell, the Thoroughbreds alone should do it. Intel designed the Pentium 4 around a marketing standpoint. They put a huge pipeline in there so that they could ramp up the clock whenever they wanted to, and if they hit a ceiling, just add more pipeline stages. The Pentium 4 is a disastrously inefficient processor compared to the Athlon XP. Frankly, I don't know why AMD isn't doing commercials showing the AMD Death Star blowing up the Intel Alien Ship. They've got the benchmarks and the price to back themselves up. The point is that all companies tell little legal lies, especially when it comes to performance comparisons.

Besides, Apple seems to be getting away from comparing themselves to the x86 world (there hasn't been a Photoshop showdown at the last 3 MacWorlds, thank fucking Christ). They can just sell the machine on looks and functionality, which is all that really matters. If the OS runs well (and, believe me, Jaguar runs very well) and they can do what they want without having to dick around with the standard Windows bullshit, it's a marketable machine, regardless of clockspeed.

BTW Do you know if Apple has introduced Winbind for the Unified Widnows Login?

I don't believe so, however Microsoft has released a secure login component for OS X which allows OS X to log into Windows 2000 networks with 128-bit encryption.

Not to change topics or anything, but inexpensive x86-based renderfarms running on Linux are becoming very popular. Most of the big rendering software packages are being ported to Linux, and big operations such as ILM are using it very heavily. The combination of power, freedom from vendor lock-in, standards support, cheap hardware, no OS licensing costs, and total customizability is driving the change from the older prioprietary vendors such as SGI (or Apple). Of course, Microsoft probably isn't too happy about this, but then again, I'm no fan of Microsoft.

Of course. Linux and Unix do render farming better than anything else, and they both just happen to be either cheap or free. Editors and folks like that are very budget conscious, especially ILM. They have to be able to do stuff in Star Wars cheaply enough so that they can do it for anyone else.

For the actual editing process, though, editors want everything in one box. Avid gives that to them, but Avid is extremely expensive, even when compared with Apple.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

When some think Apple, they think of those old computers with green displays. Anyway, the Winblows OS is probably intentionally glitchy, and I'd love to get a different OS, but I use Winblows out of choice (or lack thereof). I'm not getting an Apple, because dude, I have Dell! Does anyone here that kid?