In you face DirectX! :)
Got hardware instancing working in the end (after discovering lots of undocumented caveats). Before, on the nVidia GPU, we were spending 65% rendering/35% useful calculation, now we’re 30% rendering/70% calculation. The ATI GPU doesn’t support HW instancing but that machine is a little less CPU bound.
Now we have two more machines to lust after, a desktop and a laptop. Personally I’m fighting the usual irrational mac-lust that people get after a Steve Jobs keynote and just waiting for the reality distortion field to reduce in magnitude.
So am I excited about this new Apple-y goodness? Yes, but not for the reasons one might think. Obviously the raw bang-per-buck of PowerPC has been reducing as Intel has become more and more commoditised which has been mitigated by the high-speed busses and high-end memory in macs for a while now. Unfortunately (for Apple) PC architecture has been catching up wrt bus speeds so much that the claim that the PowerMac G5 is the fastest personal computer has been becoming less and less believable. Hence the switch to Intel is a fairly boring event from a purely speed point of view. Yes the machines are faster but then, hey, computers get faster don’t they[1]?
What I’m more excited about is a convergence of technologies. Speaking as someone who (now) has non-trivial development experience on Windows, Linux and OS X, I can easily say OS X is the most pleasing to code for, modulo some oddness in object format. OS X is also a fantastic OS to play with and so forth but sometimes you just need to get back into Linux for various reasons. I imagine some people might even find a need to boot into Windows. Hence I’m so excited; all of these OSs can now run natively on an Intel-based architecture.
The Core Duo chips in the new macs have one killer feature for me; they include Intel’s virtualisation technology. The PowerPC was always virtualisation friendly (witness Mac on Linux) but now Intel has caught up. The concept of running a Xen-ified mac with OS X and Linux just a mouse-click away is quite compelling.
So will I be shelling out for an Intel-based mac? Probably not yet. For a start I need months to justify it to myself and, at the moment, I don’t think I’ll get beyond the ‘cool toy’ reason. OTOH I promised myself a new machine when I finished the PhD…
[1] God bless Moore’s regression…