Peter's Random Thoughts

I was listening to Leo Laporte's MacBreak Weekly podcast a couple of weeks ago when the subject of Leo's brand new Nehalem based Mac Pro came up. His concern seemed to center on Nehalem's slightly slower clock speed versus the Xeon processors used in the prior generation Mac Pro. What struck me about this conversation was that I remember listening to similiar conversations thirty plus years ago only the discussion then centered on IBM mainframes versus Amdahl mainframes.

Thirty some odd years ago IBM was transitioning from uni-processor (today's parlence single core) mainframes to dual-processor (dual core if you will). Amdahl was focused on building larger uni-processor mainframes. [It should be noted here that legend has it Gene Amdahl, who was the hardware "father" of System/360, left IBM to form his own company because of his strong beliefs in this area.] Truth be said, all I remember back then was running countless application benchmarks for my employer at the time to determine which machine design, IBM or Amdahl, did better running a given application. The answer then was "It depends". It depended upon whether the application could exploit more than one processor or not. If it couldn't than the the large uni-processor design was needed. If the application could exploit multiple processors then the dual-processor was the path.

Which brings me back to the Leo's concern. Frankly at the end of the day it will be whether or not the application he is going to run understands and exploits mulitple cores.