tom, shouldn't the title be 10.6 and not 10.7? :eek:

I am a lousy proofreader.

I'm running OSX 10.6 as we speak, waiting for a Shark build, thank you.

the other tom

I think it will be quite a while before we see any of 10.6's multiprocessing, 64 bit support and Open CL being taken advantage of by Spatial. From what Tim told me back in January at MacWorld it sounds like they are pushing out multi-threading and 64 bit first on the Windows version. I would guess that they will only implement Open CL if it catches on on the windows side which means we are probably looking at at least a couple of years and are at Nvidia and ATI's mercy as to how hard they push it.

I am thinking that my next machine (probably a Hackintosh) will have a fast SSD in place of a mechanical hard drive, as I think that might improve performance of large files that take forever to open and save more than anything else. It would be interesting to see some benchmarks for opening and saving a 300+MB file on a system with different speed drives to see whether it really does make a difference.

>> like they are pushing out multi-threading and
>>64 bit first on the Windows version.

The first ACIS release to have multi-threading enabled is ACIS R20 SP1 which is due 18th Sept. This will PC only. Note "enabled". Developers will then need to add threading to specific tasks. I'm hoping they will thread certain areas on behalf of the developers.

They have not provided details when this will be available on Mac. When I talked to the threading developer, he did not see any issues with Mac because of its unix core but it still had to go through their release/test process.

Tim

>>So does that mean that ACIS R20 SP1 could be included in Shark V6

We are going to look into getting it into V6. I'm pretty excited about SP1. Currently we are at ACIS R20 SP0. But Depends on how stable it is and how it handles our regression cases. In addition to threading it is supposed to fix some issues with the new Inventor translator in Shark FX V6. My enhancement request into Spatial is that they start adding "thread hot" api's for critical areas such as faceting so that it is easy to take advantage of threading in ACIS.

>>and that latter versions say SP1 / 2 / 3 might be
>>multithreaded on the Mac

I could not get the developer to make any comments but continue to push this with Spatial.


>>as well as 64 bit so we could have both bigger files and faster

This is probably a bigger all around impact then threading. I've told Spatial our preference is to drop 32 bit libs for Mac and only distribute 64.

For PC users, we are looking into a 64 bit version for PC and working on Windows 7 certification. The 64 bit version will probably be limited to Shark FX.


Tim

Tim,

Autodesk is providing product support for Windows only products running under Bootcamp on Apple hardware (and possibly Vmware Fusion or Parallels), and there has been a very positive response from its Apple user base.

Providing a similar level of support for Shark on Apple hardware would go along way towards bridging the gap until 64 bit/multithreaded support for Shark under OSX is available. I'm of the opinion that you would only need to provide a minimum of installation support.

tom

Hey ZLC why don't you switch to a Mac? You could get a hackintosh (or even better, the real thing!). Lotus Symphony is also Mac friendly and is available as a free download. :)

Hi Tom

We provide a hybrid(Mac &PC) license for Shark where you can install on both platforms. Tech support does not care if you are running XP or XP on a Mac.

In fact, I have XP and Windows 7 installed on my mac via Fusion which I use to test the Inventor and CATIA V5 translators which are PC only. I also have XP installed on Bootcamp, but I like Fusion because I dont have to reboot if I need to do a quick PC test.


Tim

Trouble free, but what is the performance like on large files ?

Running through Fusion can be slow for programs like CAD. The larger the file, the slower. However, it's great if you just want to quickly jump back and forth. Maybe better if you're on a Mac Pro with more processors and memory than the IMac I am using.

Running XP from Bootcamp I have found to be a good user experience.

Tim