Drool - New iMacs

[Hugh Sakols]

I've been contemplating an upgrade from my 1.25 ghz g4 tower. However, at the moment I'm using a Sun 23in monitor that works beautifully. How easy are the imac monitors to calabrate using a color vision sensor?

[Henry Ambrose]

My 24" iMac (previous version) was no problem using ColorEyes and the DT91 puck.
Its a -really- nice computer.

[jetcode]

Sorry to be so sober. I used a Mac Pro Quad core with 8GB of ram while in Chicago. It was definitely fast, the fastest computer I had ever used BUT it was not amazingly faster than my 2.33 3gig Macbook pro or my high end PC desktop (which is lean and setup just to run PS). Everything ran faster but it was definitely not a HOLY COW, I"VE JUST SEEN THE FACE OF GOD moment (like going from dialup to cable).

multi-core processors have to share the front side bus and software capable of distributing the process load, the drives and memory still dominate throughput

[Ken Lee]

"multi-core processors have to share the front side bus and software capable of distributing the process load, the drives and memory still dominate throughput"

Could you please clarify?

Performance is limited by use of a multi-core processor ?

Performance is limited by sharing a front side bus ?

Performance us limited by slow throughput, which is constrained by drives and memory ?

[jetcode]

"multi-core processors have to share the front side bus and software capable of distributing the process load, the drives and memory still dominate throughput"

Could you please clarify?

Performance is limited by use of a multi-core processor ?

Performance is limited by sharing a front side bus ?

Performance us limited by slow throughput, which is constrained by drives and memory ?

The greatest throughput issue is typically disk access, if a process is CPU intensive then memory access is critical, a multi-core processor shares all system resources on one bus, the OS and application software must efficiently distribute processes amongst the different cores while maintaining some form of synchronization. The result is that more horsepower doesn't necessarily mean higher throughput. The best case for multi-core processors is when application software like CS2 can take advantage of a dual core technology. In most cases however the real benefit to a multi-core technology occurs when many applications are executing simultaneously though still limited to sharing the front side bus.

[Roger Hein]

It looks like a new add but a quick glance didn't show me any difference from what has been advertised for the past several months. What did I miss?

BTW, I just ordered a new MacPro 2.66Ghz machine and 4Gigs of additional RAM so it will start out with 5 Gigs of RAM (my big objection to the iMacs is their RAM limitation and it pained me to have to spend the $$ for the Pro). I'll get it up and running tomorrow or Thursday and will see how it performs with some some real heavy duty Photoshop work right away.

Hey Ted,

Was wondering if you got a chance to 'play' with your new toy? I was all set to buy the new iMac but am having trouble getting use to the 'glossy' glass front.

Roger...

[Jeremy Moore]

i'm not having any problems with the glossy screen on the new iMacs. if you're worried about the screens, they also have a couple of refurbished iMacs from the last generation at the Apple Store.

[Ken Lee]

The trick with glossy screens is to control what you have behind you. Since the iMac is a desktop, you'll have to sit where there is not a window or lamp behind you. Depending on your work area, this may or may not present a problem.

[paulr]

The greatest throughput issue is typically disk access, if a process is CPU intensive then memory access is critical, a multi-core processor shares all system resources on one bus, the OS and application software must efficiently distribute processes amongst the different cores while maintaining some form of synchronization. The result is that more horsepower doesn't necessarily mean higher throughput. The best case for multi-core processors is when application software like CS2 can take advantage of a dual core technology. In most cases however the real benefit to a multi-core technology occurs when many applications are executing simultaneously though still limited to sharing the front side bus.

If you open up Activity Monitor, and switch the display at the bottom to view processor usage, you can get some idea of how efficiently the system runs different photoshop operations.

I did this at work on an intel mac pro with 4 cores, while working on a big file. Some operations zoom all the processors to nearly 100% (which is what you want to see). Others don't rev them up to much more than 30 or 40% (which shows that there's a bottleneck somewhere else ... either the bus to memory or the disks).

One bit of good news is that PS seems really well multithreaded. I was expecting to see one of the cores working much harder than the others, but they seemed to share the load almost perfectly no matter what I tried.

[Roger Hein]

Jeremy, Ken - thanks for the added comments. I took another look at the iMac, ran some basic PS tests through it vs a stock 2.66ghz MacPro, and was impressed how well the iMac performed. Bit the bullet and ordered one - hopefully will get it sometime this week.