Saju says: go to a university and tell me how many simulators are working of macs.
I AM. Sorry to the thread for the off-topic, but I just can't resist that one. My whole lab does compute intensive simulations on Macs. We shopped around, and believe me, we're completely open-minded about this, although we've always been mostly unix in my lab and department. We originally expected to buy cheap alpha boxes because expanding our sgi network was too expensive. We then considered pentiums running linux because we thought we'd get the best bang for the buck. We tested out a bunch of different boxes. We bought G3 macs for one simple reason: they ran our software faster than anything else we could buy for the price. Our software solves large systems of nonlinear differential equations, 1000s of simultaneous equations in one application, 10E5+ in another. So it ain't exactly "real-world" performance we're talking about here (like Word or Photoshop).
Just a fluke? Well, I can tell you about a lot of people around my campus that see things about the same way. We'll also be buying about twenty G3s to put in a stack in a closet running a custom distributed 3D renderer my advisor wrote. We bought another G3's recently solely for the purpose of encoding frames that come off this renderer (which currently runs on a network of SGIs) into quicktime movies. Great software, that Quicktime. Again, I apologize for the off-topic diatribe, but it is simply not true that Macs are unsuited for serious computing, and it IS vaguely relevant to investors to be aware of that fact. Macs are also the best thing going for people who use Mathematica and Maple. I feel like I need a little disclaimer here: I honestly am not a Mac bigot, though that's what I've always bought myself (other than a couple of alphas and one sparcstation).
I might mention, since a few people have been talking about it here, that most of this is done in Java... for all the comments you hear about it being slow, if you avoid certain of the library stuff (like the vector class and some of the math library functions), it's as fast as compiled C, at least for numerical computation. Note that this does not apply to user interface and graphics code, which IS substantially slower in Java. All of this is true in my experience on a mac, either under Mac OS or MkLinux, and also applies to DEC Alphas running RedHat and to SGI Indigo II's running Irix. Java is a great language for people like me who aren't programmers by education; I can't begin to tell you how much hair I lost chasing wild pointers in C++.
- George
(someone with a free trial membership, if that doesn't completely discredit me in everyone's eyes ;) |
