>Hi FB^3-ers:
>    Has there been any work on how to take advantage of the new dual 
>processor Apples and/or the Altivec technology of the G4 chips?  I 
>have heard that OS 10.1.2 is supposed to do 'symmetric' 
>multiprocessing (whatever that may be in the context of an FB^3 
>program) but the dual processors and their Altivec sections also 
>have access to the "Classic" OS 9.2 environment in which our FB^3 
>currently resides.
>    Are there some rules of thumb that could help in taking advantage 
>of these technologies?  For example, could we specify or encourage 
>successive calls to a FN to be done in parallel?  (Perhaps a 
>programmer's marking of possible parallel sections of code could be 
>indicated without having to ask today's compilers to figure it 
>out... )  Could Graphics operations called from the toolbox or by 
>FB^3  commands be made that could benefit from Altivec?  An 
>Altivec-ed (faster?) version of  COPYBITS for example might be 
>nice...
>    I'm asking for comments or guidance on these issues because I 
>have not noticed these topics addressed anywhere on the web even 
>though the technologies have been out there for more than a year now.
>    Thanks in advance for any thoughts,  Hayden Coon

Hayden:

I'm no authority on dual processors or parallel processing, but I 
hope that it's transparent to us programmers. I hope that when we 
program something to draw something to the screen, that the commands 
are sent to a graphic processor that's totally transparent to us. I 
don't want to be required to divide my programming into functions to 
be sent to different processors.

Likewise, with parallel processing, I don't want to think about what 
process is going to finish first so that I can arrange my programming 
to take full advantage of the speed parallel provides. I want it to 
be done automatically for me -- I'm lazy that way.

tedd
-- 
http://sperling.com