rather unfortunate article on Mac

Mark Hahn hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca
Fri Feb 1 18:19:46 PST 2002


> did not use that part of the chip. There are prefetch operations that
> can speed up memory access substantially that go unused. All I've seen

nah.  prefetching will get code up to 80% or so of the peak/marketing
dram bandwidth.  but alas, no Mac has shipped with better than 
1 GB/s peak dram bandwidth, which is not competitive with the PC world, 
let alone "supercomputer territory".

so if your code is "embarassingly cacheable", then rejoice.
I'd be kind of surprised to find much code that doesn't run 
at least as well on a decent AthXP/DDR box.  having GigE builtin
is sort of amusing, but GigE PCI cards are down to $36 (!).

the point is that the new Mac is no kind of breakthrough.




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