{"id":1188,"date":"2006-01-19T17:34:46","date_gmt":"2006-01-19T21:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2006-01-19T17:35:40","modified_gmt":"2006-01-19T21:35:40","slug":"imac-core-duo-the-first-afternoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/19\/imac-core-duo-the-first-afternoon\/","title":{"rendered":"iMac Core Duo, the First Afternoon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\r\nMy iMac arrived today, and I&rsquo;ve done preliminary testing of the universal binaries of my applications (which I&rsquo;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:\r\n<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>\r\nThe iMac case design is great, probably one of Apple&rsquo;s best. I like the way the air vent is hidden behind the stand. It&rsquo;s much quieter than my G5. It seems unfortunate that the iSight angle can&rsquo;t be adjusted separately from the display angle. The vertical slot-loading optical drive feels weird, but maybe I&rsquo;ll get used to it. There are at least four dead pixels, which is more than on any of my previous LCDs.\r\n<\/li>\r\n<li>\r\nIn 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&rsquo;s because the iMac only has one display at present?\r\n<\/li>\r\n<li>\r\nRosetta is transparent, and the performance is acceptable. Launching a PowerPC application for the first time is what feels the slowest&mdash;actually using it isn&rsquo;t too bad. It does take extra RAM to run applications in Rosetta&mdash;about 13 MB in SpamSieve&rsquo;s case.\r\n<\/li>\r\n<li>\r\nRunning 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.\r\n<\/li>\r\n<li>\r\n<p>\r\nI developed the universal binaries on the G5, and so far there&rsquo;s been only one surprise&mdash;due to a stupid mistake on my part&mdash;running them on Intel, and it was caught with the unit tests. Here&rsquo;s an excerpt from the code that writes SpamSieve&rsquo;s corpus to disk:\r\n<\/p>\r\n<pre>\r\nuint16_t keyLength = NSSwapHostShortToBig(usedBufferLength);\r\nuint16_t valueLength = NSSwapHostShortToBig([valueData length]);\r\n[data appendBytes:&amp;keyLength length:sizeof(keyLength)];\r\n[data appendBytes:&amp;valueLength length:sizeof(valueLength)];\r\n[data appendBytes:keyBytes length:keyLength];\r\n[data appendData:valueData];\r\n<\/pre>\r\n<p>\r\nThe bug is that in line 5 the length parameter should not be swapped.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/li>\r\n<li>\r\nI 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.\r\n<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My iMac arrived today, and I&rsquo;ve done preliminary testing of the universal binaries of my applications (which I&rsquo;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&rsquo;s best. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}