WWDC 2003 - Mac Heaven

[Jonbo298]

Originally Posted by Shadow Fox

Ladies and Gentlemen, I do believe we have a new contender to run high-end games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

-Official Ninja of [coming soon]...

Now we need the companies to bring them out either at launch of the games or shortly after for the MAC and then we can see what the PC can't do that the MAC can just say, oh yeah, I can do that......

[Mechadragon]

I'm a bit of a newbie at computers and I was wondering: would a dual 2gig processor be equal to a single 4 gig processor?

[Stonecutter]

Originally Posted by Mechadragon

I'm a bit of a newbie at computers and I was wondering: would a dual 2gig processor be equal to a single 4 gig processor?

In a word.

No.

If you need more, ask.

[Mechadragon]

Originally Posted by Stonecutter

In a word.

No.

If you need more, ask.

Well, what exactly would it be equal too?

[gekko]

I don't think you can accurately say what it's equal to.

[Xantar]

Originally Posted by Mechadragon

Well, what exactly would it be equal too?

As I understand it (and I don't understand it very well), it depends what you're doing. The way I learned it was to think of it kind of like this:

If the program is just a linear set of instructions such as first do A, then do B, then do C and you have to complete A in order to do B (perhaps if the result of calculation A was used for calculation B), then having multiple processors doesn't help all that much. If we assume each step takes one cycle, then the entire thing will still take three cycles (keep in mind that I am simplifying grossly here).

However, if the program is multi-threaded and requires the computer to do A and B in no particular order before doing C, having multiple processors helps. One processor would do A. Another would do B at the same time. Then one of them would do C. This program would take three cycles with a single processor but only two cycles with a dual processor.

Now if the program had four steps that all could be completed in any order, a single processor would take four cycles while a dual processor would take two.

Therefore, you can't say that a dual processor is twice as fast as a single processor or is 1.8 times as fast or anything like that. You can give an average, I suppose, but that's not very predictive.

I hope I didn't mangle all that too much.

[Mechadragon]

Originally Posted by Xantar

As I understand it (and I don't understand it very well), it depends what you're doing. The way I learned it was to think of it kind of like this:

If the program is just a linear set of instructions such as first do A, then do B, then do C and you have to complete A in order to do B (perhaps if the result of calculation A was used for calculation B), then having multiple processors doesn't help all that much. If we assume each step takes one cycle, then the entire thing will still take three cycles (keep in mind that I am simplifying grossly here).

However, if the program is multi-threaded and requires the computer to do A and B in no particular order before doing C, having multiple processors helps. One processor would do A. Another would do B at the same time. Then one of them would do C. This program would take three cycles with a single processor but only two cycles with a dual processor.

Now if the program had four steps that all could be completed in any order, a single processor would take four cycles while a dual processor would take two.

Therefore, you can't say that a dual processor is twice as fast as a single processor or is 1.8 times as fast or anything like that. You can give an average, I suppose, but that's not very predictive.

I hope I didn't mangle all that too much.

Nah you didn't. You explained it very well.