OS X Mac Intel with Parallels might just run SFP...

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Mon May 01, 2006 5:12 pm

Hi all,

Ok here is another shot in the dark, I just purchased a MacBook Pro yesterday for work purposes, its a Duo Core Intel chip as you know, here is the major benefit.

As we know boot camp is in beta and people are running XP on it flawless, so there is another tool out there that has gained some major momentum.

This product is called Parallels Workstation 2.1, what this app does is similar to Virtual PC, but it has one important feature that VPC does not, this application does not try and emulate an Intel processor, instead Parallels is the 1st application in development with Intel to make use of the Intel Duo Core VM-x technology.

The upside to this new advancment is that you get a near native performance roughly 90% native speeds while inside of OSX. This tool also takes full advantage of many I/O such as Firewire, USB 1/2, BT, wireleess LAN and is able to run just about any kind of app you throw at it so far.

This program is a small miracle and sites such as Anandtech have run bench marks between Parallels and Boot camp and is shows that Parallels is beating boot camps performance by nearly 10-20% in various tests including heavy applications such as Photoshop CS2.

Now, with all good there always a bad, the negative is that currently there is no support for 3d rendering, only 2d, what this means is that all rendering is performed by the CPU. This is actually no problem since all we are talking about is GUI's and such.

I have watched videos and all sorts of real world visual demo's and test even on my MacBook Pro and I am starting to think this may work.

There is a very interesting feature that goes a step beyond what I had 1st imagined. They have full screen support with native resolutions, but this goes one step further, if you have a dual screen set up you can have a full screen of OSX in one screen and a full Windows XP on the other and you can pass the mouse between OS's perfectly.

I am thinking that once Apple comes out with their desktop Intel units that using a PCI to PCIe magma chassis might be the solution. The Parallels application allows for you to take full advtange of hardware configurations by creating access from within the VM to access your host computers peripherals.

Now clearly I have no data on this, but things are looking pretty bright. I have installed all sorts of windows based stuff like .net framework, visual basic, and some customer developed apps I use daly for my work and everything runs pretty damn nice.

The performance in Parallels is outstanding and its only in beta with rending done by the CPU.

Exciting times ahead thats for sure.

Cheers!

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Mon May 01, 2006 5:39 pm

This does sound quite cool. However, I'd say that in a studio situation, you could effectively do the same thing with a separate PC and Mac running Synergy (open-source multi-platform app that lets you use 1 mouse and keyboard with 2 networked computers, I think even copy/paste works between them). This way you get utmost reliability and can be sure that each machine is performing to maximum capability.

Of course this isn't practical when you need to use 1 machine, like when using a laptop. But I can't really see Parallels being reliable when addressing complex hardware like Scope.

valis · Post by **valis** » Tue May 02, 2006 1:33 am

Its also not useful to get audio from an OSX app (Logic) to the Creamware card. At least not without some serious latency penalties, since Scope runs under Win only.

I second the 2nd Pc sugguestion.

Post by **hubird** » Tue May 02, 2006 1:46 am

You can even run MS-DOS on the Intel mac in parallel...

It's still great news, however it should not stop Creamware thinking about OSX support.
I would really like to see a real test setup with Scope and an Intel mac!
Would latency really be a showstopper?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2006-05-02 03:03 ]</font>

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue May 02, 2006 12:28 pm

I've installed Parallel on a Mini Intel 1.6G, but haven't been able to load their 'toolset' programs which enable proper graphic setup (it's running, or rather crawling... at 800x600x16 currently).
It reminds a lot on VirtualPC, actually it LOOKS almost exactly like the CPU emulation(!) on a G4 Mac at 800 MHZ - on a twice as fast native CPU

Anyway - afaik there are no PCI equipped Intel Macs (except that developement package by Apple), so access to the slots remains a mystery for now.
Any thoughts how this could be managed between the 'hardware layers' of 2 (or more) different OSes ?

cheers, Tom

ooo000ooo · Post by **ooo000ooo** » Tue May 02, 2006 2:42 pm

I'd say that writing drivers is actually part of the emulation, for example VirtualPC emulated a S3 graphics card IIRC.

maybe it would be interesting to make an APCB (Authentic PC Box). It would consist of a mini-itx style board, a scope card, a cool enclosure and a ton of knobs. it could autorun a modular patch and from time to time you would run vnc on it and modify or swap the patch.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Wed May 03, 2006 2:42 am

Cool idea, but If it's got a monitor, keyboard & mouse hooked up to it, could you not (in theory) run the modular editing software inside a stripped & lite Scope shell?

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Wed May 03, 2006 2:53 am

The only problem with this Mini-ITX idea is that pretty much all Mini-ITX boards (that I know of at least) use VIA chipsets =P =P

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Wed May 03, 2006 3:18 am

There's a quite a few variations around now, such as the <a href="http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPat ... cts_id=717"> COMMELL LV-670 Intel 845G series mini-itx</a>

With so many of them around, there's gotta be one that would rock

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Wed May 03, 2006 11:20 am

Yeah that looks nicer. Still, the Intel Graphics Extreme thingy uses the system's main memory, and it looks like it might also share the PCI bus. The IDE interfaces also look like they are sitting on the PCI bus (a bit too lazy to check the chipset's specs stuff in detail.) So you will likely get much less performance than with a desktop system with a PCI bus dedicated to the PCI cards.

It's also a bit pricy. That 98 pounds cost doesn't seem to include a processor, plus trying to fit a bunch of DSPs + embedded computer in a small enclosure might end up heating things up a fair bit.

Still not completely a bad idea, I'd be curious to see how well it performs.

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Wed May 03, 2006 4:24 pm

The thing is,

This is not in at the full sense an emulation, the parallels application is actually using the Intel VM-x technology which is entirely different than Virtual PC.

I have a MacBook Pro, and once you install the Parallel tools it runs extremely fast and smooth, doing just about any task feel native performance wise.

The real test would have to come from a PCI to PCIe Magma chassis to get the PCI card to run once they actually come out with the new Intel Mac desktop units.

For some reason I think it may work since all the processing is done on the scope card rather the CPU, its all about just getting the bridge to access the PCI to PCIe slots and so far that looks like its going to work since you have the ability to select and hardware and enable a driver to access it.

You never know, it would be nice to have a dual monitor with scope running XP in one monitor and OS X running Logic or Nuendo in the other.

Only the future will tell.

Cheers!

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Wed May 03, 2006 5:09 pm

But the CW cards communicate with system RAM too.. especially when using samples, delays and verbs. How would the memory be split? Would you allocate memory to each OS? This is just one example.. the Scope app itself does not run on the card - it runs on the computer and communicates with the card. Again, sorry to be sceptical.. keep us posted on any progress.

Basic Pitch · Post by **Basic Pitch** » Wed May 03, 2006 7:03 pm

Q: How do you allocate ram to one OS?

A: In the start up tool for Parallels there is a location where you specify how much ram to allocate for the windows OS, as an example my MacBook Pro comes with 1G, by default Parallels allocated 256Megs and can be adjusted by how ever much you want.

Once the desktop Intels come around they will allow for up to 16 Gigs of memory since the G5's already support that and has 8 dimms. I am guessing you could have enough ram to sport XP at least 2 gigs and have the rest for OSX apps.

Cheers!

valis · Post by **valis** » Wed May 03, 2006 10:20 pm

That still doesn't really answer my question, how is this any different from running 2 machines side by side? There's no way to easily get the OSX side and Windows side to 'share' audio & midi data beyond what you would do to 2 separate machines. As someone else pointed out, synergy would even allow the sharing of the same mouse & keyboard. If you're only looking to run a single system and are a Mac user I can understand the (moderate) appeal, but I still suspect a TUSL-c with a 1Ghz+ p3 and your scope cards would keep the burden off the Mac and make everything happier.