Mac fans, check this out: <http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/desktops/0,1000000968,39284700,00.htm>
If and when Apple releases an eight-core Mac Pro, ZDNet has shown that this system will save you a tremendous amount of time when rendering PyMOL figures for your next paper or presentation. Based on my cursory analysis of their data, ZDNet is seeing about 6.5X faster PyMOL rendering on their custom eight-core Mac Pro than one would expect from a single-core system, about 3.5X faster than a dual-core system, and about 1.85X faster than what you currently see on a current quad-core system (all assuming equal Ghz). That is nearly the same scaling we saw on a 12-CPU SGI Altix, with the primary difference being that ordinary scientists can actually afford Mac Pros! The bottom line: if you're still using a single-core Pentium or G5, then a PyMOL image which currently takes 30 seconds to render will take less than 5 seconds on your Octa-core Mac Pro, if (really, when) such hardware hits the market. It is also probably worth noting how much better PyMOL performs under Mac OS X versus Windows XP. According to ZDNet's tests, Mac OS X delivers 15-20% more PyMOL multiprocessing performance than Windows XP on identical four-core and eight-core hardware. Too bad they didn't test Linux too! Cheers, Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D. DeLano Scientific LLC
