Apple Computer on Tuesday unveiled souped-up Power Macs, in the first major upgrade to the professional system in about a year and half. The low-end model retains the 133Mhz bus, while on the mid- and high-end models it's cranked up to 167Mhz; the high-end model boasts 2MB of L3 cache. The creaking ATA-66 IDE controller is retained, but all models also have an additional ATA-100 bus. The Apple store lists the 2x867Mhz model (256MB RAM/60GB HD/DVD-CDRW) at $1,699; the 2x1Ghz model 256/80/Superdrive) at $2,499 - and both available for delivery right away. The speed bump is not significant to compete with the high end x86 models, however, it is welcome, and the prices seem a bit more reasonable this time. What concerns me is the fact that OSX is not exactly a multi-thread beast (compared to let's say, BeOS) however Jaguar 10.2 and especially Finder have taken steps towards resolving this.
Problem is, that 99% of the applications for OSX are not multithreaded at all, so a dual machine won't do you much good if you want all this power to run a specific app as fast as it could go. Apple should educate their third party developers on how to write proper multithreaded applications, because this is not something that most developers usually know or do. Especially now that Apple is going full speed for dual configurations in order to compensate for Motorola's complete lack of interest for G4/G5. Educating developers properly is something that Be never did, and, well... read the rest in that discussion here. Be went the way of the dodo, and it would be a real shame to see Apple get in trouble too. Please Apple, educate your devs about multithreading. I won't argue about slow/expensive machines this time. Just let your third party developers know what they need to know to make full use of these SMP systems!
Threaded Mode
