More than 2 Processor Support in Mac OS X?

[Bear]

But still..... what speed WOULD it take to render a iMovie to a file form (leave out the burning bottle neck) - nearley instantaneously? 10ghtz? 20? What speed will make a truely GREAT animated show like Toy Story or Nemo a weekly event like south park or spongbob?

Well, there are human factors involved that may take more than a week for each movie. And of course you would need decent scripts to go along with the animations. [I think Hollywood is running low on good scripts again. Eitehr that or whomever is picking the scripts is an idiot.]

The limitation isn't hardware, otherwise they'd just throw more hardware at the animation. It's the creativity and making sure the scenes follow the script and such.

As for your iMovie/iDVD question, it's a combination of proc speed, disk I/O speed and amount of memory in the system. I actually don't have your answer, but one day some year, you'll know the answer.

 

[Lacero]

I think I'll wait for quantum computers to be able to render out a movie like Shrek 2 in a matter of seconds. Or render a movie in iMovie in 1 or 2 quanta cycles.

 

[MacRonin]

Along with the change of wording from Clock Speed to Core Freq, I also noticed that the icon of the CPU has a x2 graphic (like the one that tells you how much unread email is in your Inbox on the Mail app icon in the Dock) on it, but only one CPU is selected in the bottom list...

Maybe the x2 is indictive of the selected CPU having 2 cores...

Meaning there could be quad-core CPUs down the road...

Discuss...

 

[~loserman~]

It isn't a matter of whether or not there will be dual core G5's but a matter of when!!!
My prediction is we will see them at the earliest 4th Quarter 2005 very latest by the end of 2nd Quarter 2006.

We could see dual core G4 processors in Powerbooks no later than 3rd Quarter 2005. IF Apple decides to use them.

 

[RealDeal]

so cool a 4x G5...

ok- new to north america- i have a big toyota 4x4 that have used aggressively on 40 deg slopes in rain/rocks (as well as a few parking lots!)..

Had a Sun 4by processor worth about a mill canadian for research (AI PhD stuff) as well as emails.

Would "flip" to have an OSX 4x G5 config for simulations (operations workflow bottleneck stuff) at a decent price (say C$6k).

Here's hoping...

 

[spankalee]

Along with the change of wording from Clock Speed to Core Freq, I also noticed that the icon of the CPU has a x2 graphic (like the one that tells you how much unread email is in your Inbox on the Mail app icon in the Dock) on it, but only one CPU is selected in the bottom list...

Maybe the x2 is indictive of the selected CPU having 2 cores...

Meaning there could be quad-core CPUs down the road...

Discuss...

That's just so that they can display x3, x4, x8, etc. depending on the number of available processors. With images of multiple processors they are limited to what they setup before hand. If they ship a box with 5 processors and they didn't put a 5 processor graphic in, they're screwed. Plus, it gets a little messy after 2 CPUs.

I don't think it has anything to do with dual core processors.

 

[feakbeak]

Have there been any 3-proc machines? Usually all the multi-proc machines I have worked with or heard of have been in multiples of two. Based on this precedent and that fact that most things with computers are base-2 I hadn't thought any computers existed that ran on three processors.

I'm sure it's is possible, but has it been done before? I would have to imagine even if such machines do exist, there are not many because that seems like a screwy setup.

 

[Nermal]

I also noticed that the icon of the CPU has a x2 graphic (like the one that tells you how much unread email is in your Inbox on the Mail app icon in the Dock) on it

I took a look at the picture files inside the bundle, and there are several of those red graphics. None of them have any text, but they're all different sizes. Here's the biggest one, there's room for a big number in there!

 

[theory4themusic]

The human brain as a processor

I know... yadda yadda yadda - drivers drivers drivers... but still what would it take to satisfy everyone? How many gigahertz is the human brain? I'm pretty sure my Mac is faster than me!

This is a really really interesting topic for me and I'm glad you brought it up. I'm by noooooo means an expert on any of this, nor do I claim to be, but your post evoked my curiosity so I did a little bit of research on the topic. Never underestimate the power of the human brain! Some of the statistics I came up with blew me away.

Speed
I'd suggest reading this article on the relative "speed" of the human brain.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.html

If you don't want to read through all of that some of the interesting estimates were that the human brain is capable of at least a theoretical 20 million-billion raw computational calculations per second. Depending on what kind of "Calculation" you're talking about that number can be considered either conservative or way too high.

Storage
(this information is still from http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.htm)
I found the author's description of the human brain's storage particularly amazing. One theory is that theoretically the amount of information the human brain can effectively store is infinite. That is to say, if you have the will to learn it, your brain can always find the space to allow you to do so. Examples of this are in a musician's ability to memorize music, and keep it in their memory as long as the brain deems it is useful to do so. Compare that to a non-musicians ability to do the same, and it is apparent that you can train (optimize) your brain to deal with a task... as long as that is what you truly want.

The author then goes into another theory, where he does some interesting calculations for an estimation. Not going into the calculations, because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around them, I'll just pull a number. Approximately 100 million megabytes. Again go to the article for a much better understanding of the different considerations.

Other factors to consider
Now all of that is fine and dandy, but to gain a real insight of the computational power of the human brain, one must consider what types of data it is interpreting.

One of the big ones that came to my mind was sight. Your eyes. What kind of data is coming in from those babies? Let's compare your eyes to a camera. No, make that a video camera. First of all how many frames per second do your eyes refresh at? That, it seems, is a much more complex question than one would think. Look at
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
for more details on how it varies on condition. One striking thing is that in an air force test, a pilot could identify a plain on the horizon that was only flashed for 1/220th of a second. Let's assume that the eye consciously divvies out 200 frames per second. The next question becomes; what resolution is it taking in at that speed? Well, check out
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
There they estimate (yes it changes dynamically depending on situation) in a 120 degree viewing radius (theoretically the eye perceives 180, but he was being safe) 576 megapixels. Then you have to factor in it's processing 3D depth of field (even the best HD video camera only gives you 2 dimensions), "ISO" if you will (adjusting your eyes light sensitivity), dilating them and the like.

Now bring that back to the brain...
It's taking in approximately 576 megapixels at about 200 frames per second Real Time (to bring it back to computer speak). Now take into consideration that vision is something that your brain is processing in the background. Along with operating all the other involuntary muscles in your body, and giving you conscious motor control. Then there's the other 4 senses which are constantly on the go. What about speech? The ability to be multi-linguistic and apply various grammar rules depending on the language. I'm not aware of a computer that can interoperate taste... yet. I could go into the perception range of an ear vs a microphone... or a touch-pad's "feeling" resolution vs the touch nerve receptors in a finger multiplied by the area of skin on the body (depending on nerve concentration)... but it's getting late.

One more thing... computer games. Computers have become amazing lately with their 3D rendering abilities. The human brains 3d rendering ability? What about dreams? Can't they be spot on realistic? Think Night-terrors, where not only can the person see things, but along with that they can feel presence of other things in the room with them.

Of course there is the one thing that currently sets humans apart from machines. How the brain interprets allows creativity, emotions,
allows an artist to manipulate a canvas, allows a photographer to capture beauty in everyday objects, Beethoven to compose a symphony, create harmony, or bring destruction.

Fascinating stuff, to me at least...
sorry everyone for the huge post... I got a little excited... but hey I don't post often... once in a blue moon... sooooo... making up for it?

edit:
One last one more thing! The human brain can process 8 different independent thoughts consciously (as in you're making it think of them) at once. I sure as heck can't, but theoretically that is the limit of simultaneous thinking... before you go insane.

 

[WannabeSQ]

I work in Post Production, mostly in the audio department, where we have dedicated DSP, but Pro Tools still takes advantage of dual processors. Our Video department would benefit greatly from more cores, a lot of what we do is rendering crap, a quad 3GHz G5 would greatly increase our productivity. Our Dual 2GHz G5s can compress a 90 minute DV video file to MPEG2 in about an hour, quad 3 would be like 20 minutes. If it is possible to put it in the standard G5 case, without causing too many heat/power issues, and as long as it doesn't increase the cost by leaps and bounds, I think we will see quads in 1-2 years at least, hopefully by the end of the year.

 

[Chaszmyr]

I took a look at the picture files inside the bundle, and there are several of those red graphics. None of them have any text, but they're all different sizes. Here's the biggest one, there's room for a big number in there!

With room for that many processors, I start to wonder if maybe it just finds all the processors in a cluster now or something.

 

[feakbeak]

Fascinating stuff, to me at least...
sorry everyone for the huge post... I got a little excited... but hey I don't post often... once in a blue moon... sooooo... making up for it?

Great post. This type of stuff fascinates me as well. I read through some of the links you listed, but not all.

The aspect of human memory really intrigues me. I have read that human memory is not complete. Often, the human brain will only recall certain aspects of a picture, sound or experience. When recalling that memory our brain will automatically fill in the gaps based on our prior knowledge, personality, etc. I am not doing any quick research on this right now because I'm too tired. Still, I find it interesting, it's almost as if our brain is automatically compressing the data when we store it and then uncompressing it when we need to retrieve it.

 

[sun-ice]

What about cluster ?

In my mind, the change s to enable the development of cluster application...
When you have a Xserver (2x2.3GHz) plus 15 Xserve cluster node (2x2.3Ghz)
You will be happy to test your App in :
- 1 CPU, just to test if it's running well
- 2 CPU, just to test the multi thread
- 32 CPU, just for kidding...
- n CPU, just debug large multi threaded App
Then, You need to run it full on all CPU you have...

Ok, the new MMI can manage multi core, multi CPU, multi... Ok

But with the old version... How do you develop for clusters ?

P.S. : like most of you I hope for a double double in june... (just remember 970GX)!!!!!

 

[Roberto Avanzi]

Look INSIDE the new Processor preference pane

in /System/Library/PreferencePanes you will find the new Processor.prefPane bundle. Open it (ctrl-click and select "show package contents") and go to Contents/Resources.

There are a few files, line Badge_1.tif, Badge_2.tif and Badge_3.tif

The first one is the picture that is used when two processors are on the machine, with a "2" inside. The other ones are LARGER. I suppose one could easily write "2x2" inside the third, or a small 2 with a smaller "cores" inside the second file. This is speculation, of course, but these files arouse a bit of suspicion.

 

[eSnow]

Maybe the x2 is indictive of the selected CPU having 2 cores...

Uhm nope, sorry. The screenshot was taken by some guy outside Apple owning a dual-processor-single-core machine (aka current G5 tower). So he wouldn't see the x2 if it signaled a dual-core CPU.

 

[Pringolian]

Final Cut Pro 5 and Motion 2

For starters.... my home equity credit card really supports this idea.....

BUT.... what do we have that needs this? Are their any modern games that support dual or quad processors? Any modern software???

Final Cut Pro 5 is due at NAB and I'm sure if they have been working on multi-processor hardware then they have been thinking about it on the software side too. I should think this kind of processing power could be very beneficial for FCP 5, Motion 2 and so on.

 

[juniormaj]

I've been unable to use the CHUD updater to get the latest version. Ever time I run it I end up force quitting it; it just sits there with a status message indicating it's attempt to contact the server, but it never succeeds. Has anyone else had this problem lately?

Same problem here. I have version 4.0.0b5

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Same problem here. I have version 4.0.0b5

CHUD updater tries to contact the server but never does, eventually returning an error saying that it couldn't connect. This is the first time I've ever used the CHUD updater, so I'm still at CHUD 3.5.2 (which came with XCode 1.5).

 

[Bear]

Have there been any 3-proc machines? Usually all the multi-proc machines I have worked with or heard of have been in multiples of two. Based on this precedent and that fact that most things with computers are base-2 I hadn't thought any computers existed that ran on three processors.

I'm sure it's is possible, but has it been done before? I would have to imagine even if such machines do exist, there are not many because that seems like a screwy setup.

Actually many vendors have had machines that you could have an odd number of CPUs in. Many of the large DEC Alphas & VAXen were designed like this. I know some of HP's PA-RISC systems were like this, and Sun Microsystems has had many systems that you could add processors one at a time if you want to. So while an odd number of procs seems odd it has happened.

In most modern systems, proc support circuitry is added for an even number of procs at a time (2 or 4) while in the past some system added support circutry as you added the processor.

 

[Kagetenshi]

Storage
(this information is still from http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.htm)
I found the author's description of the human brain's storage particularly amazing. One theory is that theoretically the amount of information the human brain can effectively store is infinite.

And that theory is wrong. There's a limit to how much information can be stored in the physical space occupied by the human brain, and the practical cap is going to be far, far below that.

~J

 

[spazum64]

I'm thinking they'd go straight to quadruple processors (not 3 or anything), because things work better in powers of two, I guess. And that's fine with me, because I have the perfect name for it:

The Quadra.

Catchy, isn't it?

 

[ffakr]

For the record, Rhapsody, which is just as Unix as Mac OS X, does not work with multiple processors. It was a functionality that Apple had to write into Mac OS X.

I think you're wrong. OS X Server may not have shipped on dual boxes but It should have supported SMP configs.

The generic 'OS' doesn't have a whole lot to do with SMP. Sure the OS provides applications some sort of threading model but the Kernel actually manages threads and controls which thread runs on which CPU.
Rhapsody, like the current OS X, is an SMP aware microkernel. The number of CPUs it supports is set at compile time so Apple could have limited Rhapsody to 1 CPU but that was a decision on Apple's part. Rhapsody (basically NextStep) was perfectly capable of supporting multiple CPUs.

Now as for Mach supporting an unlimited number of CPUs as was hinted at in other threads.. this isn't true. As far as I know, Mach was designed to scale up to 24 processors.. or at least thats as far as it's been run on. The Kernel isn't necessarily designed to run on a single system with 1000 cpus though.

Now on to totally hair brained rumors....
There was a rumor years ago that Apple.. in the process of working with Mach.. had cobbled together a 20+ cpu Macintosh in their research labs. There was actually one machine inside Apple's campus that was reporting RC5 encryption results at a rate that was well beyond anything possible from a Mac at the time. The results did square with the possibility of a massively SMP 604 box though. However, it's just a rumor... I've seen no real evidence that the machine ever existed. The evidence presented could have all been rooted in some bored Apple engineer figuring out how to cheat in RC5 standings.

 

[RacerX]

I think you're wrong. OS X Server may not have shipped on dual boxes but It should have supported SMP configs.

The generic 'OS' doesn't have a whole lot to do with SMP. Sure the OS provides applications some sort of threading model but the Kernel actually manages threads and controls which thread runs on which CPU.
Rhapsody, like the current OS X, is an SMP aware microkernel. The number of CPUs it supports is set at compile time so Apple could have limited Rhapsody to 1 CPU but that was a decision on Apple's part. Rhapsody (basically NextStep) was perfectly capable of supporting multiple CPUs.

Rhapsody can only see one processor.
OPENSTEP can see only one processor.
NEXTSTEP can see only one processor.
Neither Apple or NeXT released any versions that would recognize more than one processor.

I have a multiprocessor system that I've run all three on and none of them saw more than one processor.

Apple had planned on adding multiprocessor support to Rhapsody, but when they moved to the G3 they put it off. Apple was no longer doing any additional development on Rhapsody by the time the first dual processor G4s were released. Apple never made any dual processor G3s (do to the caching scheme) and on dual processor 604 systems only one processor is seen.

Besides first hand experience, I've been using Rhapsody and been active in the Rhapsody community long enough (6 years) to know that Apple didn't add multiprocessor support until they started development of Mac OS X. And I've been using NeXT systems for 15 years, which is why I know that NeXT never released a multiprocessor version of either NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP.

Saying that NEXTSTEP is perfectly capable of supporting multiple processors is like saying I'm perfectly capable of being 7' tall. Maybe I'm capable of being that tall, but I'm not.

Sorry you think I'm wrong, fortunately I know I'm right.

 

[ffakr]

I stand corrected. AppKit wasn't threadsafe apparently. So, they had an SMP aware kernel, a mult-threaded OS, and they didn't update some object libraries to play nice with SMP hardware.
Apparently NeXT had an SMP version of OpenStep running but not released according to the scuttlebutt before Apple swallowed them up.

Ffakr always admits when he's just a stupid ffakr.


BTW.. re-reading my earlier post.. it still doesn't appear that Rhapsody couldn't support SMP, just that a major framework didn't support SMP so they disabled SMP support in a kernel that was designed from day one to be SMP aware. The difference between this and your 7 foot tall analogy is that I need the proper genes to be 7' tall. Rhapsody had the proper genes to be SMP aware, but it was apparently crippled. It's more like I could be 5'11" tall (which I am) but I got lead poisoning when I was a kid so I'm only 5' tall.
JMHO.

 

[RacerX]

Apparently NeXT had an SMP version of OpenStep running but not released according to the scuttlebutt before Apple swallowed them up.

I do recall NeXT playing with a multiprocessor PowerPC system just before they shutdown their hardware division.

it still doesn't appear that Rhapsody couldn't support SMP

And Apple had originally promised that Rhapsody would support SMP... but the release of the G3 and Rhapsody getting side tracked in favor of Mac OS X meant that it was never realized.

It would have been nice, the 9500MP and 9600MP systems would have been great for Rhapsody!

...actually they still are, just without the major hardware advantage it could have had.