From: "mihalco" <mihalco@pacbell.net>

Date: February 10, 2006 4:40:43 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Intel based Mac question


Hi Milton,

Thanks for the update.  I know it would be a huge undertaking, and 

you definitely clarified where you are headed.

Regards,

Kur


--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@...> wrote:


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@...

www.outcastsoft.com