In article <398fd4a9@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

> : If you're planning on sticking with MacOS, a
> : second CPU isn't going to do much good
>
>   Well, it's not exactly true.
>   Povray runs in one processor, but you still have to other one free for
> whatever else you want. This means that povray will really run in the
> background without interfering whatever else you are doing because you are
> using the other free processor.

No, this is not the case when running Mac OS (it will be the case once Mac
OS X is out early next year).  Mac OS still uses co-operate multitasking and
some parts of the OS are not even reentrant - especially most of the GUI.
The benefit is that even applications written in 1984 which ran on the
original Macintosh will run today (and as there is no Y2K problem on Mac OS,
they still run as expected!).  If this kind of backward compatibility is
really necessary is another issue, but it is up to Apple...

Only applications requesting to run on a second processor will actually gain
any benefit on Mac OS.  Making exceptionally good use of this are Adobe
products (Photoshop, Premiere and AfterEffects, as far as I know) and a few
other applications.  A list is surely available somewhere on the Apple
website.

Of course, it is always possible to install Linux PPC on a dual-G4 Mac, and
the multiprocessing world is 'normal' again :-)


     Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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