[Ham-Mac] iMac and MacBook - Intel Dual Core

[Steve Hellyer]

Hi Richard and all,

I will pile on to the growing list! :-)

Now have iMac 20" Core Duo 2 Ghz.  It replaced my single G5 iMac 1.8  
Ghz (Father has that now) and everything is 2 to 4 x faster on  
average. Non-native programs seem to run at same iMac G5 speed so no  
loss.  It does take a bit longer to launch a non-native application  
as the Rosetta translator program gets called. Once running however  
they run quite fast. Rosetta's job is to translate PPC code into X86  
instruction at a processor assembly language level. It does this in  
the background and quite honestly you don't really realize it taking  
care of running the PPC code. It just works.

More indepth info about Rosetta here:
http://tuvix.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/ 
universal_binary/universal_binary_exec_a/chapter_7_section_1.html

Like others have noted you do need native drivers like Keyspan serial  
drivers and web browsers like Safari that are Universal Binary will  
also need Universal Binary plug-ins to work within Safari. All the  
plug-ins I use are.  If one of your important plug-ins aren't it is  
possible to tell Mac to run Safari within Rosetta. It won't be as  
fast, but your plug-ins that are PPC only will then work.

If you are on a new Intel Mac you can tell which programs are native  
and which are using Rosetta by bring up Activity Monitor in your  
Utilities folder and under "View" menu  select "Columns" and check  
the "Kind" column to be added.  It will now tell you Intel or PPC in  
the row for that the program or process name.

Mac OS 9 application won't run.  There is no Classic in like there is  
on PPC so if you have an old Mac OS 9 application best to stick with  
PPC based Mac til and Mac OS X version is available or find a  
hopefully better an alternative.
There is an a Classic emulator for the Intel by open source community  
called SheepShaver (http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/) but I have not  
tried it, so not sure how good it is.  It will only emulate MacOS  
7.5.2 thru 9.0.4.

One last tip... RAM. Get as much as you can afford.  512 MB is really  
a minimum with 1 GB really speeding things up and 2 GB being heaven.  
Rosetta will consume some memory to do it job (How much depend on how  
many non-native applications it has to deal with).  The UNIX  
underpinnings will take full advantage of the RAM and cache regularly  
used code/data for quick retrieval.  You can see this your self but  
trying a quick test...

1) Reboot computer to clear all the caches.

2) Run Chess game (in Applications) and note how long it takes to get  
the chess board on screen.

3) Now quit Chess and then run it a second time.  See how much faster  
it launches!

The more RAM you have the more caching the Mac can perform speeding  
up your computer. It also one the reason defragmenting a drive it not  
such a big issue these days.

Hope this helps,

Steve
VA3SPH

On 25-May-06, at 6:41 PM, David Kelly wrote:

>
> On May 25, 2006, at 4:38 PM, Richard Hemingway wrote:
>
>> I'm wondering if anyone has tried any of the new Intel Dual Core  
>> computers??  How does the old software run on them?
>
> I have a MacBook Pro 1.83 GHz. Every application I've tried other  
> than NeoOffice runs better on the MacBook than my Titanium G4-400.  
> Most notably the PPC version of VLC.
>
> --
> David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
> ====================================================================== 
> ==
> Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ham-Mac mailing list
> Ham-Mac at mailman.qth.net
> http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/ham-mac