<< Also, yes you COULD build a Mac from scratch, but they only sell the cases/motherboards as complete systems, so there's really no need to. Other than that, they go together exactly like a PC, sure, they've got integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet, but the video card is AGP, the hard drives are IDE, and the processor plugs into a slot jsut like on PC's. The only big difference is the way they're sold. >>
First off, I'm not saying that the actual building of the mac is gonna be any different, I'm sayin he'd prolly have to scrounge up a good number, if not all, the parts from macs that were RMA's or chucked. It's like building a notebook comp, you could do it if you played on ebay a few weeks and picked up the parts, but it's unlikely asus is gonna come down the line with a series of laptop mobos for the end user.
<< you have no idea what you're talking about. Photoshop doesn't do 3d graphics at all. Photoshop is 100% dependent on CPU and memory, graphics card has nothing to do with it. >>
following the data path here, RAM to CPU cache, cache to core core runs/processes, paged out to cache and over to the vid card which puts the data on the screen. Take an integrated chipset and your OS concepts. If an errant thread like putting pages in/out of RAM/cache is being performed a semaphore or a lock is initiated in the system,halting the rendering process. Your data buffer is one and the same as the RAM, so page out to RAM, resume rendering, page from cache into core, now page your image data out of RAM back into the cache to the processor, and routed back to the card. Now if your card has it's own buffer, the data doesn't need to get spit out into the RAM again, it gets transferred out into the monitor, even better if the GPU has it's own instructions to carry our independent of the CPU.
You're right, the rendering of an image in photoshop is pretty much on the cpu and memory and cache and all the crap in between...but if the chips that carry that data between the 3 have to keep pagin in and out and waiting, you get slower times, get a fast GPU on there with the basic 2d instruction set, and you won't need to interrupt the chipset for a page into RAM. Macs advantage here is that they have two CPU cores to do the rendering, so that when they hit a broken thread, the rendering doesn't need to halt and the image data can be sent straight away to another core. if you eliminate most or all these halts tho and drop in a fast GPU on a fast bus, then Mac loses this most or all this advantage and it degrades to a contest between two 800mhz processors workin in tandem vs a 1700mhz processor running singly. Assuming clock for clock they are the same(I'm an AMD person, not too quick on the p4), the p4 has a faster clock.
Mind you, my knowledge of photoshop code is practically nil, but data paths, I know pretty well from my CS Org classes. I admit I could be wrong on the point and if I am, plz point it out to me, but this is my info, but I also realize that maybe Pshop handles its data paths differently. I know that the Mac does it slightly differently as I had read an article a few years back that said that porting Mac software to PCs would never yield the same results as the software is originally constructed assuming a fixed system core etc and is optimized for the Mac...and if memory serves, Photoshop is native Mac software.
Finally, this is not meant to be hostile and I hope it is not taken as such...this is my understanding and if it is flawed, I'll gladly acquiesce**SAT word!!**
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