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

[Will Robertson]

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.

Ciao,
Will

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