From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: February 10, 2006 2:15:25 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Intel based Mac question


Hi Kurt;


We are hard at work on Astro IIDC 3.0 (6+ months now in Alpha and hope to begin Beta testing in four to six weeks). Apples' Intel announcement didn't fit with our development schedule nor are their sales going to make much impact in the existing Mac user base - (roughly 15 million are running OSX 10.3 or higher). So were not concerned about WacIntel at this point. Also there is no reason that you can't use Astro IIDC within Rosetta - although I'm pretty sure you can not use KeySpan or any serial devices for scope control because they have KEXT dependencies for their POSIX driver.


I've scoped it out and we have roughly 600,000+ lines of scalar code to sort through and re-write to "switch" to Intel, which will take 3 to 6 months to write and likely another 3+ months to debug - both our code and Apples (lots of issues with FireWire). We optimized our code to run very fast on G3, G4 and G5  processors and all of the critical performance stuff has to be completely re-thought out. (For example some of our code never touches the main cache Ram except for data input / output, we utilize all 32 CPU register and write the code so we don't overflow them - intel has at most 7 CPU registers and you can't make that work). Your going to loose all our SIMD optimizations, as SSE3 is missing several crucial instructions that have no equivalent to Altivec. So you'll have to suffer a significant performance hit and Apple's VecLib / VecDSP libraries are of no use to us for what we do.


Also the switch from MetroWorks CodeWarrior 9.x to  Apple's XCode 2.2.x has had massive performance hit to our our PPC code base - so we will not be doing Universal Binaries. When I say massive, I'm talking about compiling the same code base with all stable optimizations on in both CodeWarrior and XCode and the XCode build is a minimum half as fast so that it wastes 100% more CPU cycles to do the same tasks. Although XCode is better than it was before (PB was a complete joke), Apple has really done an exceedingly poor job with it's compiler optimizations for PowerPC with XCode. They could have bought or Licensed Code Warrior G4 and IBM's G5 compilers for a song and delivered really great performance, but they didn't and everyone pays for it. And this isn't just "me", a lot of developers are saying the same thing on the SIMD lists too and have comparable numbers.


Lastly, were having a really tough time justifying the expense for a MacIntel port, especially since Astro IIDC is a niche product for science and Apple doesn't care about niche products or niche developers. Apple's market share is 2.1% world wide and 2.5% in the USA (based on Apples' SEC Mac sales numbers as compared to Gartner and IDC numbers of PC sold at http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01/19/pcmarket/index.php) and frankly, their are more XBox systems out their right now than their are Macs running OS X. Also their is considerable doubt whether Apple will continue to support FireWire on new Macs or not, as iPod's don't do FireWire, the built in camera on all new Macs are USB 2, Apple has dumped FW 800 support on their Laptops and their Intel partner is big on USB 2 support - not FireWire. Since iBooks, MacMini's and iMacs' don't have expansion slots and the bulk of our users use them, the loss of FireWire would kill off all FireWire products on the Mac. Their are a lot of very unhappy FireWire hardware and software developers out their right now and Apple is saying nothing about what their intentions are.


So we have not made a decision on whether we will port MacinTel. We may very well rewrite everything for x86 including the GUI part (which is maybe another 100,000 to 200,000 lines of code)  and do a Windows XP/Vista port instead. What I do know is that if we do offer the MacIntel port, it  will be a new product and you will be buying new - we won't offer an upgrade.


Hope that Helps..


Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com

www.outcastsoft.com




On 10-Feb-06, at 1:02 PM, mihalco wrote:


Hi Milton,

What are your plans for your Firewire camera stack and Astro_IIDC for

the Intel based Mac's?  Is there going to be a port that will run on an

Intel based Mac laptop in the not too distant future?

Thanks,

Kurt Mihalco