News for Sunday, 4 September 2005

We broke the 40,000 mark of registered users on the macbidouille forums!
We take this opportunity to thank all of you who participate in the life of our forums. Many thanks also to all the tech support huys who point people to our site when they don't know how to solve their problems ;-)

Gabriel pointed us to part 2 of an interesting review by Anandtech:

I spotted an interesting article comparing the performances of OSX Tiger and Yellow Dog Linux on the G5 and YDL on an Opteron.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520
It's easy to understand that GCC 4.0 is THE compiler to use for the G5 (and maybe it even isn't using all the potential of this CPU) and that the G5 compares well to an Opteron, the current high-end x86 CPU. The article underlines a number of architectural weaknesses in OSX.

That's a short summary, and the article actually points out MAJOR weaknesses of OSX when running MySQL server, mainly when multiple threads have to be started concurrently (we are talking about 5-10 times slower using OSX on the G5 than using YDL on the same CPU). And since MySQL is used by gazillions of web sites around the world, Apple will have to do some serious OSX optimisation when they do the Intel switch, since it will then be extremely easy to compare the operating systems on pure performance.