3 ms·
It's completely wrong that the hardware was underpowered. The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.
by threeseed 3y ago
It's completely wrong that the hardware was underpowered.
The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.
- astrange 3y agoIt didn't have a SIMD unit. Although x86 only had MMX at the time, which wasn't much better.
- acdha 3y agoAlso MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only limited compiler support but also no libraries and little programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in the nascent internet era where people couldn’t just look things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help on GitHub.
- astrange 3y agoI'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX. Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes the floating point registers until the next `emms`) compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no autovectorization.
- indymike 3y agoA lot of the performance complaints came from software that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As software built for PPC came out, that complaint went away.
- detourdog 3y agoWhat is funny is that macOS 9 was so snappy on the GUI side but you had to start employing RAM disks and given different names to the same application to run them simultaneously. It could really scoot but occasionally a dialog box might bring everything to a halt until hitting OK or Cancel.
- NikkiA 3y agoThe CMD640 IDE chipset used was utter trash and most of the bottleneck. It wasn't until the G4 series that apple stopped slapping it in everything. A system with the CMD640 only used for cdrom, and a bootable SCSI PCI card performed a lot better.