Jeremiah Thomas Isaacs wrote:

> power.  what level of realtime performance has been accomplished on the
> newer g3 macs?  and is there a big difference in performance from the
> 604e-s to the g3 processors?

I'd like to know this too-- for my csound benchmark page at:
http://members.tripod.com/~slinkP/pw_linux/csbench.html

> also, anyone using linuxppc and macos for csound?  ive heard rumors of
> linuxppc being much faster at some things (than MacOS) on the same
> hardware.

Michael Seta contributed two benchmarks to my page. The hardware was a
PowerPC 7200/120. He tested csound under both Mac OS 8 and MkLinux. The
MkLinux version was dramatically faster. However, there are a couple of
things to consider:

--Csound is CPU and FPU intensive, and different OSes are likely to have
fairly marginal effects in those areas. The big difference is likely to
be in memory usage, which is not usually that critical for Csound.

--Also, the difference reported was about 25%, which could quite
possibly be accounted for by the different compilers used for the two
Csound versions. This is pure speculation on my part.

So I'm skeptical of the idea that Csound is inherently faster under
MkLinux than under Mac OS. But unless you have access to a
well-optimized Mac C compiler, in practice, maybe MkLinux Csound _is_
faster???

Realtime *control*, on the other hand, is apparently a thorny problem...
I seem to recall various threads on this list in which people said that
Mac versions of Csound have a big latency problem, big enough that
realtime MIDI control could be very frustrating. Maybe Csound on MkLinux
wouldn't have this problem? Has anybody tried it? Certainly Linux Csound
on my Pentium 133 doesn't have big latency problems.

Regards,

PW