Dang. I just pulled off something tonight that makes me wonder if Apple wasn't in fact smoking crack when they decided to drop the PowerPC processor in favor of moving to Pentiums. My little Mac mini -- 512MB of RAM, 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 CPU, was able to effortlessly (and I mean without a single slip, skip, hesitation, or bobble) do all of the following simultaneously:
- Burn a DVD from an ISO image using an external DVD burner
- Rip music into iTunes from a CD in the internal drive
- Play music from a separate playlist in iTunes
- Synchronize my iPod (iTunes again)
- Browse the Web with Firefox
- Read email with Microsoft Entourage 2004
Now, I've used a variety of systems in my day, and I've never seen the machine that could handle that set of tasks without at least the occasional glitch or shimmy in the works. At the very least, all of the I/O would cause the occasional pause as the machine optimized for the DVD burning operation to avoid making a toaster (if I was lucky). And my experience isn't just in Windows -- I've tried this on Linux and FreeBSD systems too. The unifying factor? They were all based on the Intel architecture, with its half-assed memory management and I/O capabilities.
I really want to know what kind of chipset Apple is using to do memory management and I/O, because this mini just smoked my brain. I've known for a while that raw clock cycles can't be used to compare RISC processors like the PowerPC (or SPARC or Alpha) with the CISC CPUs such as, oh, pretty much anything out of Intel for modern PC use -- but having a low-end system like this deal with all these high-I/O tasks without breaking a sweat is pretty damn awesome. I really hope they're not using what is essentially typical PC chipsets, because if so, I doubt their new offerings will be able to do this, no matter what benchmarks they can cook up.
Mixing custom playlists is fun. I just created a "Sweat" playlist, intended for use when exercising. Maybe having a decent soundtrack will give me some motivation to hit the physical fitness regime with something approaching dedication again. As such, the songs don't have to be good music, they just have to have a good beat or rhythm:
- Deep Dish, No Stopping for Nicotine
- Queen, One Vision
- Astaire, L-L-Love
- Billy Idol, Wasteland
- Many Moore, Candy
- Oingo Boingo, When the Lights Go Out
- Britney Spears, (You Drive Me) Crazy
- Falco, Vienna Calling
- Erasure, Oh l'Amour
- Bonnie McKee, Trouble
- Kenny Loggins, I'm Free (Heaven Helps the Man)
- Roxette, Dangerous
- Kelly Clarkson, Since U Been Gone
- Phil Collins, Sussudio
- Lindsay Lohan, Rumors
- ABBA, Does Your Mother Know
Yeah, I know. I should be ashamed of myself. But y'know, if I can actually stick with my exercises and drop some lard off this tubby frame of mine, my taste in music might be slightly vindicated.