Dual Core CPU's

[TheMonkey]

Their market share is <3% for a reason - if it was not for iPOD then nobody would have remembered Apple now.

.NET was designed with a view for forward compatibility - a lot of thought was put on based on experience in the past. But if Microsoft released OS that will only execute .NET code they would go bust, same for Intel if they released processor that would not be x86 compatible - they tried a couple of times and it was a complete loss.

No no no. The market share is 3% of SALES every year. People keep macs between 2-4x as long as a PC because the users "do work" and "don't worry about all that technical tulip". I've stoped caring about the technical tulip since I got a Mac because it turns out that it's a smaller portion of "doing productive work".

Anyway remember what happened many years ago when Microsoft's niche suddenly expanded and wiped everyone off the planet (somewhere between microsoft basic and windows 3.0). There was a time when Excel worked ONLY on a Mac ... The change will happen again as it always does.

The iPod is a good cheap lead into the world of Apple. It's an affordable taster of the niche. I know 9 people (3 techies, 2 arty farties and 4 business brains) who have purchased an iPod and ended up moving to Macs as a result.

[TheMonkey]

One for AtW:

xerxes:~ themonkey$ uname -a
Darwin xerxes.local 8.7.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.7.1: Wed Jun  7 16:19:56 PDT 2006; root:xnu-792.9.72.obj~2/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386

xerxes:~ themonkey$ echo "class MainClass { public static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World.\"); }} " > test.cs && mcs test.cs && mono test.exe
Hello World.

xerxes:~ chris$

[AtW]

BSD OS that Jobs decided to use (and I think they used it or some other Unix in NeXT ages ago) was certainly a good choice and I give them that they made Unix far more user friendly than one would normally expect. Moving towards x86 CPUs was also a good move - about time too.

Once virtualisation starts working and they would allow to have Mac OS and Win XP running at the same time without major performance hit, then Mac sales would experience rennesance (sp?), it would have even tempted me, but I strongly dislike such a niche platform - don't know how about now, but previously you would not be able to use Intel graphics card or what not in Mac, a special version of gfx card was necessary, yuck, no wonder they run away from PowerPC.

As for mono - I am using it myself

[TheMonkey]

BSD OS that Jobs decided to use (and I think they used it or some other Unix in NeXT ages ago) was certainly a good choice and I give them that they made Unix far more user friendly than one would normally expect. Moving towards x86 CPUs was also a good move - about time too.

Once virtualisation starts working and they would allow to have Mac OS and Win XP running at the same time without major performance hit, then Mac sales would experience rennesance (sp?), it would have even tempted me, but I strongly dislike such a niche platform - don't know how about now, but previously you would not be able to use Intel graphics card or what not in Mac, a special version of gfx card was necessary, yuck, no wonder they run away from PowerPC.

As for mono - I am using it myself

Yes I agree with para 1 completely.

Virtualisation works well on Mac. I run Windows XP (only for Sage) in a window at native speed using Parallels.

Macs STILL require special graphics cards. Well special firmware - any card will work that has firmware. My Mac has an intel 945 graphics card! The reason for this is that they don't use BIOSes at all. They use a thing called EFI which fundamentally changes how an operating system gets started. Itanium systems and Suns use the same thing as do all PPC macs from day one. The BIOS is one of those legacy components that should have been gone years ago.

[AtW]

Yes that EFI crap that Intel managed to push there, though Jobs sure was happy about it as it was thought it will provide better protection against having Win XP installed etc, and at the end they were forced to allow this to happen anyway.

I am not convinced BIOS should go - these days OSes don't use it for key operations like say read/write from disk, it used to be calling INT 13h, but nowadays BIOS does not do that once OS takes over. They want to get rid of BIOS to make lock up of your own computer better to infest it with DRM, and that makes me prefer good old BIOS.

[Ardesco]

Hmm looks like I may have to reinvestigate Windows for my servers then. When I originally commisioned them Windows didn't support 64-bit very well and the speed difference between a Dual Opteron box running Debian Sarge (64-Bit) and a Dual Opteron box running Windows 2003 was huge.

I must admit i'll be surprised if I get a performance increase by switching the machines back to Windows, may have to build a new box and try our 2003 server again...

[AtW]

I would not say 64-bit windows is very mature now, though situation with drivers seems better. It would only make sense to use it if you have got lots of RAM (>3 GB) and/or you have actually got 64-bit tuned software.

If Linux does the job well I'd stick to it and wait for Vista based server to be released, maybe it will be good but so far Vista seems rather heavy, so I am probably not going to upgrade for a year at least even though I have good hardware.

[Ardesco]

I'm running 64-bit linux binaries on 64-bit native OS and each CPU has a minimum of 3GB.

All in all pretty nippy

It would be useful to have one or 2 Windows based servers but my previous experiance pretty much put me off that.

[TheMonkey]

Yes that EFI crap that Intel managed to push there, though Jobs sure was happy about it as it was thought it will provide better protection against having Win XP installed etc, and at the end they were forced to allow this to happen anyway.

Not really. Apple actually said that their new Macs were going to support Windows XP. They had their engineers concentrate on the immediate issue first (building a reliable piece of equipment that runs OS X). Then they'd satisfy their other objectives. EFI is brilliant. Apple's boot camp just emulates a BIOS with it! No funny stuff going on - it just works.

I am not convinced BIOS should go - these days OSes don't use it for key operations like say read/write from disk, it used to be calling INT 13h, but nowadays BIOS does not do that once OS takes over. They want to get rid of BIOS to make lock up of your own computer better to infest it with DRM, and that makes me prefer good old BIOS.

Nah EFI is the future. It's actually a mini operating system that sits between the real one and the hardware on boot. It enumerates and preloads all the drivers into the kernel based on the hardware configuration and then starts the kernel. That means the OS can survive complete hardware substitution without having to mess around with BSODs because the system disk can't be found etc etc. It just reconfigures it to the local hardware environment safely. Not only that, you can netboot with it, debug the hardware and do all sorts of stuff (including play hangman). No more NTLDR problems either.

If you've ever tried to install Windows on a Fujitsu Primergy FCAL array with DAC960FL controllers via QLogic ISP2100 cards then you will know why EFI should supplant the BIOS!

[Mailman]

Right you geeks

Ive got everything installed without much hassle. Windows detected the dual core CPU (shows two cpu's in the cpu history page) and everything seems to run fine. Even got a couple games that wouldnt run for long before falling over in a screaming heap! Oh, its pretty cool clicking on the affinity option, wonder if we will ever see consumer 32core CPU's!

BUT the biggest improvements Ive seen so far as been in image editing with PhotoshopCS when Im using RAW files! Farking Intel D805 really flies!

I did run in to one issue though, and that was the SATA drive I had purchased. The bios just refused to detect it. I changed data cables, power cables, PSU's and still no go. So on the phone to the guys at Aria and 30 seconds later had the refund arranged and product posted off without any hassles.

Otherwise everything went fine. Later this week Ill start the overclocking and see how that puppy goes! Anyone know where one could get ahold of some desktop overclocking utility or do I have to do this through the bios?

Regards

Mailman