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Maybe just because it its a "Becnhmark"? ;-P

The guy seems to have replaced is "old mac pro" dual core processors by quad core processors, and compares with the new "early 2008" retail eight core mac pro.

new one stil got two quadcore's

It really doesn't matter since the machines aren't so close to the same configuration.

The least they could have done is provide the same clock speed, same amount of RAM, etc. and then tested the two.

It seems it's as useful as sitting there counting the bounces in the Dock saying "well, it takes 4 bounces instead of 3 for X application." This is just a pseudo-scientific test with a lot of variables. You might as well call a telephone psychic.

OMG 30 whole seconds?

What cell phone are you using? A full cell phone bootup takes at least 10 seconds on anything I've ever owned.

Stop shutting-down your computer and you won't have to wait for it to boot. After all, how often do you shut down your cell phone? I mean seriously, even my laptop (MacBook) has two weeks uptime...

Yeah and if you're worried about the OS becoming slower over time for lack of reboot you can just schedule it to automatically reboot every night, week, whatever in the OSX energy saver preferences pane then let it fall asleep so it's fresh when you get to it. This is such a non issue on mac.

Impressive, that is really an energy efficient way to deal with the long boot-up times.

This is not serious, especially these days that you have to save energy. An idle laptop uses at least 10 watts. Over several years, it does make a difference in a budget and it does not help the Earth.

And as some one else mentioned, if you don't reset your memory, after a week or more of uptime, your system will be slower because some applications are not optimized as they should be.

Mac laptops hibernate by default. Pull the power cord and battery if you want. In any case, Macs tend to sleep particularly efficiently: put it to sleep at 5pm, unplug the power cord; wake it up at 9am and plug it back in. It'll charge for a relatively short while, but you'll still have plenty of juice if you need to go wandering.



Restart your apps. My Macs only get rebooted when there's a significant software update, with no ill effects. A modern operating system shouldn't need rebooting just for the sake of ongoing housekeeping, and last I looked, none of the UNIX-based ones (including Mac OS X) do.

No, they don't. They go into sleep and will go further into hibernate mode if the battery charge falls under a certain level (you need an App like DeepSleep to make a Mac go into hibernate mode at once).
Nevertheless, this is waisted energy which is ridiculous just to "save" a few seconds boot time.


You mean you waste energy particularly efficiently?
Your method of pulling the power cord is even more wasteful, since using the battery and recharging it is even less energy efficient and leads to battery degradation (use e.g. CoconutBattery and have a look at loading cycles and battery capacity degradation).


The important word here is "shouldn't need". However, in reality, there is no such thing as a bug free OS. Unix based OS are normally used in server environments, where the amount of apps and services is mostly within a narrow range, the hardware is certified for a certain OS, is well tested under 7x24h conditions and the behaviour of the OS over time is known by the administrators (e. g. our industry grad OpenServer was rebooted every few weeks in order to prevent performance downgrading or unexpected reboots).

I guess the situation looks quite different when it comes to a "desktop" Unix. Sloppy programming, not very thouroughly tested drivers, hardware that was not meant for 7x24h usage, a whole bunch of services and apps, etc.

Do the environment and yourself a favour. Just shutdown your PC/Mac if you don't use it. No matter how capable or good your system is: waste stays waste.

Simple war to avoid boot times: do not shut down the system.
Since some years, I do not shut down my systems anymore. I just send them to sleep mode.
So my systems are instant on to use.

Multiply 10 watts an hour x billions of users on Earth x years and years of sleep mode and you'll see how much we could have saved of money, fossil energy, and CO2.

Sleep mode is nowhere near 10W. Your average laptop battery is only about 55W-HR, and a laptop will easily last a day or two in sleep-mode with a full-charge. That puts the sleep-mode power draw at 1-2W.

To put that into perspective, a single gallon of gasoline has about 36,600W-HR of energy, enough to power a laptop in sleep mode for two to four years.

To put it still further into perspective, powering all the laptops sold worldwide in a year in sleep mode for a year will use about 25 million gallons of gasoline. This sounds like a lot, but the US alone uses that much gasoline in only 90 minutes...

The power savings from shutting down computers is so phenomenally miniscule it's barely worth even posting about.

Edited 2008-01-11 19:44 UTC

That is an interesting perspective you put this into, but I'd say it still is bigger than zero, which is what you get when you shut off your computer.

This is also true for all the other millions of electric devices people keep running on stand-by for no other reason as to be able to switch it on without getting out of the armchair. Which might add another perspective to your's.

Nah, you just need a proper IDE that compiles on multiple CPUs at the same time. Then you can easily keep 16 cores busy.

Which IDE are you refering to?

Presumably any which you can configure to do �make -j16� in a subshell.

(I've also got a feeling that Xcode supports parallel compilation using whatever resources you have availableâ€"it would make sense, given that it has a load of support for distributed compilation too)

Quad Core 64-bit capable processors will benefit software used by digital artists such as game designers, compositors, editors, etc. Example Mental Ray used for rendering large amounts of data for film, etc is capable of using multiple processors across a LAN. I currently use Maya with Mental Ray on a MacBook Pro using a Core 2 Duo processor and can clearly see the time saved than using a single core processor. As for the laptop versus desktop question it really depends on the user requirements. I like having the mobility to bring the laptop with me whether for working on a project in my spare time at the cottage or on location (ie: film set). Anyone who multi-tasks several applications at once will benefit from multiple core processors.

Me? Whilst it is loading I can put a pot of coffee on, have breakfast, read the newspaper - there are lots of things that can be done - unless of course you're unable to multitask.