I'm pretty active in the photographic field from club circuit to reviews in imaging hardware/software......Just about every man and his dog in this area are viciously ardent MAC fans , and presently to tell the truth for the average Joy Blogs with deep pockets, and moderate computing needs there really not that bad at all!
Photographic software (CS5/CaptureOne/HDR and Plugins) are becoming more and more demanding outstripping "Moore's Law" for Apple and PC,.......... why do you think they slashed there wrists and got into bed with Intel over the G5 fiasco! .... and it's only going to get better/worse depending how it effects you and I.
CUDA and Mercury support was/is a major step forward in combining GPU/CPU to perform a given function and was really done out of necessity as the software is now being held back by the hardware.......the performance tab in CS5 (PhotoShop) with the right hardware connected can accelerate your workflow to a considerable margin , but that a whole different story.
I would love to see some of the hardware innovation that Apple has implemented over the years across more platforms......ever seen how a iMac (Laptop) connects to it's power supply?.........no real jack per-say but a bloody magnet catch!! How cool is that!.......ever had to replace a whole laptop just because the jack socket has come away from the mainboard, ... a very frustrating repair at the least.
Going from 32nm to 22nm is really academic........there fast reaching the self imposed limit , not with die-shrink but with currently used materials, architecture and thermal dissipation of the physical die......"
Prediction".... Who ever cracks Diamond layer depositing (DLD) who knows! but this will see the biggest advancement in miniature chip manufacturer against performance we'll see in our lifetime.
Because of the electrical nature and density of diamond , layers of just a few atoms theoretically can work with less gate leakage then is present in processors we use today.....then there's the biggie!....Ability to dissipate heat..........measured in Thermal conductivity (W·m−1·K−1) we are all familiar with copper, has a rating of about 385...........Pure glass (Silica) has a rating of just"1"... which is one of the reasons why we cook our processors so easily..........synthetic diamond defies belief clocking up...........3,300K .....do you know how fast this could eject heat to the heatsink?? or because of the vastly superior electrical nature what sort of speeds where talking about
Again who really knows but a processor running at 6 times the temp, ...8x the speed and even all the memory you could possibly need is thermodynamically and theoretically possible...........Wow! that was a mouth full but gets the point across nicely
Aussie Allan
