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The release of the latest iMac line has also spawned a lot of discussions about the necessity of multi-core processors namely quad-core systems. Synthetic benchmarks show the improvements in processor technology but more often than not this does not translate into real world advantages. At least that is what most comments sum it up to. But multi-core especially quad-core systems make sense not just for video and 3D-applications. There is good reason to opt for quad-core instead of dual-core systems.

Many applications are not designed to thread their tasks enough to really saturate the resources that modern multi-core systems offer. So software developers are encouraged to make use of technologies like Grand Central which takes a lot of work out of the multi-core software design process.

There are two arguments that justify buying multi-core especially quad-core systems today. Why you ask? Because benchmarking never shows reality, even real world application benchmarks only measure the performance of a single application on a multi-core system. But this is not how most peoples systems get used. We are not only running a word processor and do nothing else. We use a lot of applications at the same time, be it iTunes running with some encoding or playback in the background, be it your favorite browser with a dozen of tabs each with quite some Flash content and Javascript applications each taking CPU cycles in the background. Then there is Skype, a development LAMP-stack running in the background, Time Machine doing a backup and so on. So there are quite a few applications which hopefully do not take up all of your system resources but all of these running concurrently will make use of a multi-core system.

The second argument, we are at a point in time where multi-core systems have become a standard. So it makes much more sense for developers to take their time to re-engineer their software to make use of this extra power. The advantage is not always that things go faster but also that applications become more responsive while working on tasks in the background. This change will accelerate rapidly now that multi-core support in development tools and operating systems is broadly available.

That took a long time. Quicksilver 1.0b57 is out. Though the version number change is minor it brings some interesting updates.

According to the release notes there is a 20% – 40% speed increase, this is all while managing a library of 13k items. The software feels snappier too, which is also an improvement over previous versions which sometimes felt like Quicksilver was processing something in the background without reacting. The speed improvements are due to Clang. Clang is an Apple sponsored compiler front end project for C, C++, and Objective-C.

At the moment you only can get the latest version via Macupdate – Quicksilver 1.0b57 Download.

According to the Core i5-750 and Core i7-860 specifications it should be possible to run Apple’s latest 27″ iMac with DDR3-1333 RAM instead of the stock DDR3-1066 RAM it gets delivered with.

It is not the first time Apple has used customized CPUs, so there’s always a chance that the default specs do not match Apple’s implementation. Brave folks went out on a limb and tried if the iMac is able to use more than the standard spec ram.

The answer is, yes, it is possible though you have to be careful. The DDR3-1066 RAM Apple is delivering has a CAS Latency (CL) of 7. CAS Latency is the time it takes from the moment the memory controller accesses the memory to the time the requested data in the memory gets delivered at the output pins. But if you want to use DDR3-1333 RAM you have to keep an eye on the CAS Latency of the RAM. The higher the memory can be clocked the bigger CAS Latency gets. Usually DDR3-1333 RAM has a CL of 9. DDR3-1333 with CL9 does NOT work with the iMac Core i5-750 and Core i7-860!

Testing shows that you can use DDR3-1333 RAM with CL7 (SODIMM, 204pin). This is highspeed RAM which will cost a bit more than the average DDR-1333 CL9 RAM. Kingston for example offers CL7 RAM with their HyperX DDR3 RAM.

Now let us put this into perspective. First you have to swap out all of the stock ram for the DDR3-1333 to get any perfomance gains, second DDR3-1333 CL7 RAM costs quite a bit more than the DDR3-1066 CL7 RAM. How much performance gain will you get for all this?

As you can see there is is little to gain from this investment, especially when you keep in mind that the iMac stock configuration is able to keep up with the current Mac Pro Quad-Core. So while it is possible your money is probably spent better on more RAM instead of faster RAM. Also keep in mind that DDR3-1333 RAM is out of the specs that Apple has outlined for their system.

Results are taken from Macrumors forums user i7QuadCoreMania. Benchmark values are averaged over 5 benchmark runs.

Just a quick update for the Apple 27″ iMacs (late 2009). The first benchmark results have arrived for the 27″ iMac Core i5 and 27″ iMac Core i7. Geekbench 2 shows even faster results in 64-Bit mode.

I’ve updated the chart to correct a small error because the Core i5 result wasn’t taken with the same Geekbench version as the others. Now all results are taken with Geekbench 2 version 2.1.4 and with OS X 10.6.2. I’ve also added the latest Mac Pro models (early 2009) so that you can better compare the results.

Update: Bare Feats now also has benchmark results for the Core i7, Core i5 compared to the early 2009 Mac Pro’s.

Here are the results:

results taken from Geekbench website: iMac Core i5 2.66Ghz, iMac Core i7 2.8Ghz, iMac Core 2 Duo 3.33Ghz, iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06Ghz, Mac Pro 2.93Ghz (1 CPU), Mac Pro 2.93Ghz (2 CPUs)

This week I had to conduct a two day Photoshop training. While Photoshop is definitely the de facto standard for professional image editing it is nowhere near affordable for home users.

One of the attendees asked if there were any alternatives if they wanted to use a tool like Photoshop at home. Which is more than understandable since Photoshop is much too powerful and pricey to buy it for yourself at home. There are cheaper alternatives like Paintshop Pro or Pixel Image Editor but these solutions still cost money. Also since I was teaching Photoshop, the question really is, is there something that mimicks Photoshop. Read the rest of this entry »

Would it not it be great if you could read a PDF manual like a book and make annotations? Would it not be great if such a software would not cost you a dime? Well Skim is exactly that. A helpful PDF annotation tool which lets you highlight important things and lets you add and edit notes.

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Thanks to the ease of use of Wordpress I had my basic design implemented after the day I had set up my new blog. I just tweaked some parts over the weekend to style some subpages.

Wordpress is really easy to use, in just 2 days from knowing nothing about Wordpress I went to a fully set up blog with my own theme. The documentation on wordpress.org is really excellent and helps a lot.
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The Motley Fool has an interesting article on how to retire sooner. If you can cut corners on things that you do not really need at the moment, you are able to save this money to retire earlier. The article shows some nice examples how to this saved money to work.

Sometimes the little things make the difference. This one is no exception. Since the introduction of HTML mails nothing has been so badly used. I for myself still prefer plain text mails, not only because of their lower size but also because there is no good about color coded emails with all kind of whacky fonts.

humanized.com has a nice article where they show how to make notations with a simple bracket system. This system is so plain simple and amazing. But take a look for yourself.

Humanized > Weblog: Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation

I am still looking around for lists of software people are using on a daily basis. Especially when they are coders. I was looking for some information on how to code in HTML with TextMate. This software is pretty cool for coding but it seems they don’t have the right guys for marketing their software. Garret Dimon gives some insight on how to use TextMate.

Other than that he also has a nice list of his favorite software he uses on his Mac.