How many CPU's on a Mac

[Rick Thompson]

I have a dual G5 2.0 with 3.5g memory. Publishing dxf files as never been overwhelming quick, but AC11 seems to have managed to expanded this many fold. I'd guess 4x longer, but I haven't timed it. I recently got more memory, but that didn't help. I would get a quad Mac, or whatever, if it would actually help with speed, but my understanding it is want. Is that correct, and this is just the way it is? I am not fond of going with the Intel chip for other reasons, but???

[Brad Elliott]

ArchiCAD is still a one chip pony. Newer faster chips will get you improvements but extra processors won't at this time.

[Rick Thompson]

Thanks for the reply.. what still confuses me is watching the cpu meter for both processors jump when I export dxf.. not just one, but both start going at 75% or more. I realize I have other things going one, so maybe they all shift to one which makes both go up. I believe 3D will use both processors, so I was wondering if exporting might benefit. AC11 is just slow, as reported elsewhere:(

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Rick,

Also reported elsewhere is a reference to CPU management customization in Tiger. Perhaps that might be useful.

Reports on Leopard features this week also speak about improved CPU-Management abilities in Leopard.

cf. http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/11/wwdc-announcements-a-closer-look/

Would anyone care to comment please on what this would mean for ArchiCAD users right out of the box versus software development at GS that would be required to further optimize ArchiCAD for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs.

[Karl Ottenstein]

ArchiCAD and other single threaded apps will not lock themselves onto a single processor (processor affinity). Thus, if you have such an app running at 100% on a single CPU system, it will be about 50% on each of two CPU's and 25% on each of 4 CPU's, typically - and not counting all of the other things running your system - simply because of the way the OS schedules things (time slicing).

If you're seeing 75%, Rick, it means that ArchiCAD is using part of each processor, and other things are using the rest...ArchiCAD isn't using more than the equivalent of 100% of a CPU, unless it is doing a LW rendering in which case it can use all CPUs.

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Multiprocessing

Karl