iMac Core Duo, the First Afternoon
My iMac arrived today, and I’ve done preliminary testing of the universal binaries of my applications (which I’d built last week). So far so good, and I plan to ship them next week. Here are some random notes from the first few hours:
- The iMac case design is great, probably one of Apple’s best. I like the way the air vent is hidden behind the stand. It’s much quieter than my G5. It seems unfortunate that the iSight angle can’t be adjusted separately from the display angle. The vertical slot-loading optical drive feels weird, but maybe I’ll get used to it. There are at least four dead pixels, which is more than on any of my previous LCDs.
- In general, the user interface is much more responsive than on the G5. Live window resizing is very smooth, for instance. I wonder if this is due to the video cards. Is a 128 MB Radeon 9600 XT that much slower than a 256 MB Radeon X1600? Or maybe it’s because the iMac only has one display at present?
- Rosetta is transparent, and the performance is acceptable. Launching a PowerPC application for the first time is what feels the slowest—actually using it isn’t too bad. It does take extra RAM to run applications in Rosetta—about 13 MB in SpamSieve’s case.
- Running natively, my applications are much faster on the iMac than on the G5, and they launch almost instantaneously. (Both machines are dual 2 GHz.) I have not yet tested any applications that use AltiVec. Compiling is much faster on the iMac.
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I developed the universal binaries on the G5, and so far there’s been only one surprise—due to a stupid mistake on my part—running them on Intel, and it was caught with the unit tests. Here’s an excerpt from the code that writes SpamSieve’s corpus to disk:
uint16_t keyLength = NSSwapHostShortToBig(usedBufferLength); uint16_t valueLength = NSSwapHostShortToBig([valueData length]); [data appendBytes:&keyLength length:sizeof(keyLength)]; [data appendBytes:&valueLength length:sizeof(valueLength)]; [data appendBytes:keyBytes length:keyLength]; [data appendData:valueData];
The bug is that in line 5 the length parameter should not be swapped.
- I get a CoreEndianFlipData error -4942 on the Console when SpamSieve uses the resource manager to read an Entourage sound set file. It seems to work fine, though.
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Michael,
Try fixing your "dead" pixels first... they may just be temporarily stuck. I bought a 24" Dell widescreen LCD, and it arrived with 2 stuck pixels. I was depressed about possibly needing to send it back (or having to live with spots on a brand new screen) and went looking for answers... I found a little video (http://www.psp-vault.com/Article168.psp) that un-stuck the pixels, and I haven't had another one stick.
I ran the video (in the region of the dead pixel) on loop for half an hour, and it didn't fix it... the trick is to run it full-screen... fixed it in a few seconds!
Cheers,
Rob
Can you send me the sound set file that triggered the error or tell me which file it is in an Entourage install? Thanks!
Not to be pedantic, but isn't the error really on line 1? Line 5 is just calling a function with the value calculated in line 1.
Stephen: No, because the value is correct for when it's used in line 3.
Congradulations on your purchase Michael. I am about to order one myself, especially now that I tried one out at my local Apple Store.
Is a 128 MB Radeon 9600 XT that much slower than a 256 MB Radeon X1600?
Yes. Significantly so. This is one of the things a lot of people seem to have forgotten when looking at the new-found speed of World of Warcraft (for instance) on the Intel Macs; the X1600 is two generations later than the 9600XT and significantly faster in 2D and mid-end 3D operations (being a cut-down version of the X1800 GPU). It's one of the more quietly impressive aspects of the new iMac and MacBook Pro (to me) that they thought to use this graphics chip as opposed to one of the many previously lacklustre GPUs they've used (GeForce FX 5200? Er, wow.)
Thanks for the info, kapowaz. I don't really follow graphics cards, so my expectation based on past experience was that the iMac video card might actually be slower than the one in an older tower. I bet Apple is happy to let us think it's the Intel chip causing that speedup.
Many thanks to Eric Albert for tracking down the OS bug that causes the -4942 error--over the weekend.
Rob: I tried running that video full-screen, and it didn't seem to have any effect.
With four dead pixels I'd be sending it back.