The Underscore Archives

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 07:28:34PM +0100, Rick Hurst wrote:
> On 6/5/07, Steve Roome <steve at pepcross.com> wrote:
> 
> > So, go with which ever you like the look of best, try them out a bit
> > at PCWorld [*]
> 
> 
> PC World have OSX running on PCs? excellent! i'm off to buy one now! hooray!
> ;-)

Well, yeah, they're all just pc's now. :) No more branded than the sun
one I have here that claims it's a sunfire. Now I thought that moniker
was reserved for ultrasparcs, but no, it's a pc.

As to performance, neither are perfect on perfect hardware, be that a
virtual machine or a real machine. The overhead of the virtual machine
is application specific so if you want to run it on a given machine
virtual or otherwise again the performance is down to the applications
not the gui itself.

OSX and Windows don't compare well on something vague like
"Performance."  even if the hardware is a virtual cluster, a "mac", or
a "pc", the distinction between all three is down to little more than
a few lines of initialization firmware. Processes still run on virtual
386s at the clockspeed of the CPU. The overhead of the other apps
while still reasonable is mostly irrelevant, we all should know by now
that parallels does the job nicely, as does vmware but I wasn't about
to explain that to someone who wants to know which goes faster,
neither is imnsho still the correct answer.

Any given application of interest running on either is a different
matter though, emulated/remapped or otherwise.

Parallels, vmware and a whole host of other things are no longer
emulating hardware so the question is moot, because we're again
talking about the "Performance." of an application run on hardware
which we only know is a "PC" (it only gets virtual address space and a
386 and some "system" calls of some sort.)

Maybe I did miss the point though, still, I'm going to back up my
beleif there as best I can 'cause I can't possibly admit to being
wrong or stupid. Perhaps today I am the best tool.

        Steve