[OS X TeX] What kind of operation is TeXing? (concerning hardware)

Bernhard Barkow bb at creativeeyes.at
Fri Mar 4 09:03:25 CET 2005


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On 4. Mär 2005, at 8:21, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 4 Mar 2005, at 5:37 PM, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>
>> On 4 Mar 2005, at 01:40, Doug Fields wrote:
>>
>>>> Anyway, this is on my list. Why is TeX so hideously slow on Mac OS 
>>>> X (PPC)?
>>>
>>> Obviously I'm out of my league here as a recent convert, but, TeX 
>>> seems fast to me.
>>
>> http://www.nslog.org/latex.html
>>
>> A 1.3GHz PIII (7s) outpacing a 1.6GHz G5 (10s)? An 1.2GHz G4 (my 
>> iBook) using 18s (almost 3 times as slow as the PIII)?
>
> It's well known that the compilers for x86 architecture are 
> considerably more mature (hence, produce faster output) than the PPC 
> ones. Using emacs for a while, I've noticed that everything seems 
> faster when it compiles because it uses \batchmode...but besides that 
> I'm not sure if there is much that can be done. Probably the new GCC 
> that ships with Tiger will improve things a bit.
>
> It's certainly annoying, but then x86 users don't even have XeTeX or 
> pdfsync, so we've still got a couple of aces in our sleeves.
>

Interesting to hear that; I wouldn't have thought that it is just 
compiler efficiency?
But you're right, XeTeX alone would be worth switching to a Mac; 
besides, as mentioned before, you don't really notice the difference 
when working on "normal-sized" documents (at least, normal for me).

Bernhard


____________________________________________________
_________________________________ Bernhard Barkow __
__                                                __
__ mail bb at creativeeyes.at __ www.creativeeyes.at __
__ Phone  +43 699 12660415 __ Fax   +43 1 8775334 __
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