Re: IDL i/o on G4

[dima(at)localhost.localdomain (Dmitri A. Sergatskov)]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001 12:47:53 -0500, 
JD Smith <jdsmith@astro.cornell.edu> wrote:

....<deleted>....
>
>If I were you, I'd drop RSI a line and ask two things:
>
>1.  What are your plans with respect to MacOSX?
>
>2.  If you have internal builds of IDL for MOSX, can you comment on I/O
>performance?  Altivec usage?  Command line support?
>

Thanks, I will do.

>I should think a G4 titanium with OSX would be just about the fastest
>laptop for running IDL available, but only if RSI is on the ball and has
>a version ready when it hits prime time (sometime this summer, though
>the release is next week).
>

Sometimes I with Apple would get a clue and _pay RSI (and Mathworks
for that matters) money_ to do that. They advertise the G4 as 
a "supercomputer", but so far it looks more like a glorified
$5k DVD player. I am pretty sure it was one of the reasons 
the Cube fail. 


>You might also consider bothering RSI about LinuxPPC support, which
>should be pretty trivial for them.  Then your I/O issues largely
>dissappear. 

One would think they can do it. After all RSI were probably the first to
port serious application on x86/Linux. They also have TerraSoft next door.
From the other end I was always dissapointed with x86/Linux port of IDL 
(I have not tried the latest releas though). It was not very stable,
required multiple visuals (that x86 hardware would not provide)...

>
>Keep in mind however that all laptops' I/O will underperform: disk size
>and weight are optimized over speed.  
>

I understand that. My major concern is a sustain memory throughput.
It is not going to be a major number cruncher.

>Good luck,
>
>JD

Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Dmitri.