Re: [ccp4bb]: Comments on G4 Ti

[<wgscott@chemistry.ucsc.edu>]

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>  P4 2.8 GHz Xeon, Intel Compilers:		1.00 (1 month)
>  P4 2.8 GHz Xeon, CCP4 distribution 	1.43	(1 month)
>  OSX PPC 1GHz, CCP4 distr.			5.11 (3 months)

I'm not quite sure how to read this.  What is the difference between 
the first and second line above?

If the second line refers to native compilers, this might mean, 
normalized for clockspeed (which isn't really valid due to the risc 
processor in Mac), that the pentium is doing 1.3 times better.  But the 
CNS web page notes that CNS runs about 2 times faster on native 
compilers than gcc (which is what OS X uses by default), so I wonder 
how it would do normalized for clockspeed using the gcc 3.1 compiler?  
I've noticed that things have really improved even with the older dual 
processor machines since upgrading to gcc/g77 3.1.

Does anyone know how much better the Absoft and other proprietary 
compilers do?  We've had lots of trouble getting vectorization and 
altivec to work with the Absoft compiler and gave up.


Regarding whether to get the G4 laptop:  My personal preference is to 
get the best desktop machine and the cheapest ibook.