Originally posted by gopher
Apple is not behind as some people think. With these applications able to take advantage of Altivec:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html
Absoft Pro Fortran
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe GoLive
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Premier
Alias|Wavefront Maya
Apple DVD Studio Pro
Apple Final Cut Pro
Apple iDVD, iMovie, iTunes
Apple Mac OS X
Apple QuickTime
Apple WebObjects
Avid Media Composer
Connectix Virtual PC
Deneba Canvas
Digital Origins EditDV
Discreet Logic Combustion
Discreet Logic Cleaner
Emagic Logic Audio
FileMaker Pro
Heuris MPEG Power Probe
Id Software Quake
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Macromedia FreeHand
Macromedia Fireworks
Macromedia Flash
Maxon Cinema 4D
Media 100 CineStream
Metrowerks CodeWarrior
MOTU Digital Performer
Netscape Navigator
NewTek LightWave 3D
Propellerhead Reason
Sorenson Video Codec
Toon Boom Studio
Wolfram Mathematica
And it's important to note that, even with various parts of these programs hand-optimized for AltiVec, they still in many cases do worse in task-based benchmarks than their equivalent PC versions. GCC 3.1 in Jaguar has been improved to do some automatic optimization for AltiVec, but the degree to which it does this is nowhere near enough to boost performance to a great degree even in applications that lend themselves to matrix and vector operations. Meaning AltiVec optimization still requires much developer effort.
Not to mention the PCs that do beat the Macs in these benchmarks often cost much less than the Macs they beat. If a dual 1.25GHz G4 can beat a dual 2.2GHz Athlon at whatever task, that's great, but when you consider the Athlon costs half as much, well, that's not so great.
And speeds up to 90% faster than Pentium IV:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html
Depending on Apple for a source of objective benchmark information, I'm surprised that percentage isn't higher, like 300 or 400%.
thanks to Altivec, it really all depends how well designed the program you are using is at using Altivec. If for some reason your program isn't fast enough for you, complain to the developer, not Apple. Just because your program isn't fast, doesn't mean it all should be assigned blame to hardware or the OS.
Why not complain to Apple? They're the ones who are selling these CPUs that use non-industry-standard math units that require tons of effort to exploit fully.
Before we grouch about whether or not the next Power4 makes it into Macs, let's try to at least get 3rd party software to catch up with hardware. If programs like Genentech's Blast can run 5 times faster on a Mac than a Pentium, it goes to prove software developers for the most part don't understand or don't care how to code their software to take the fullest advantage of the G4.
It also goes to show that the particular algorithm that Blast employs suits itself well to the AltiVec unit, and that because few other programs are so lucky, they will never achieve anywhere near the performance of Blast, hand-optimized or not.
Remarkably, Altivec is optimizing Adobe Premier to some extent, but not enough to make it worth it on a Mac as some people have posted benchmarks showing it isn't well coded enough for the Mac. Funny that Photoshop on the other hand is. I think Premier users need to contact Adobe and ask them why they aren't taking the fullest advantage of the G4 and optimizing their software for the G4.
The reason is obvious: Optimizing for AltiVec costs time and money. Let's assume that Product X contains two million lines of code. And let's assume that a competent programmer who earns $50,000/year is faced with the task of optimizing 50% (a million lines) of this program for AltiVec. Working at 1,000 lines per 8-hour day (a liberal estimate), it will take him over three years. That's obviously not acceptable, so Company X is forced to hire a few more programmers to make this job possible in a reasonable timeframe - let's say two more programmers, who earn the same amount and together can get the job finished in under a year. The total cost is $150,000 in labor for that year of development. This isn't even taking into account expenses for hardware/software, testing, marketing, etc.
This is $150,000 that Company X never would have had to spend (and doesn't have to spend on anyone ELSE's processor) if Apple's CPU was not so esoteric. It sounds to me like this is much more Apple's problem than third-party developers' problem. "Hey, port your software on over to the Mac. Nevermind that to achieve top performance, you'll need to employ labor-intensive programming tricks which will only run on our processors, and nevermind that the future of our processors isn't looking that great anyway, and who knows, we might jump platforms entirely in the next year without any advance notice, so when and if that happens, tough beans! But port to the Mac anyway! As we said, our CPU roadmap is a trade secret, but if you port to our platform, we'd be happy to provide you with a
AltiVec Technical Summary PDF for free download, as thanks for being a valued Macintosh developer."
I just don't understand how the blaming of developers can be justified. If Macs actually had strong general-purpose FPUs, or if Apple would put more effort into its compiler, we wouldn't b ehaving this problem.
Alex
