Is the Oct 2010 Macbook Air able to run WP7 tools with GPU recognition? - macos

Pretty much as the title says, using bootcamp.
WDDM1.1 compliance and GPU recognition confirmed by the WP7 emulator running with EnableFrameRateCounters showing.
I'm considering a Macbook air as a compromise to resolve a need to access iphone dev tools and upgrade my Win7 mobile capability to something reasonably performant with one device.
My current laptop barely runs Win7 and borders on unusable for WP7 tooling hence the interest to try and solve two problems with one device - if realistic.
I assume if the device can run WP7 tools satisfactorily, it would be capable of anything else I might want to do when booted under Win7.

The new MacBook Airs do not have very powerful processors. The 11" maxes at 1.66 Ghz, while the 13" maxes at 2.13 Ghz. However, they do have the same GPU as the current 13" MacBook Pro. Also, since they use solid state drives, data access is significantly faster. Overall, it will not be the fastest computer you've used, but it should be enough to work.

I've bought one, but since it's going to the wife, I won't be able to test it in depth.
Instead, the MacbookPro 13" from '09 works fine (monoTouch+iOS dev and bootcamp to vstudio+wp7 dev). I upgraded to 4 gigs memory and that helped, also the disk is slower than I'd like. It responds like a mid-grade desktop, imo.
The problem I see is that the processor on the air's is ULV with a really slow clock, also the sdd in the base version is only 64g which is going to be cramped, I think.

Consider this: many Mac gamers install Windows with bootcamp just to have better gameplay experience.
That's because Windows have native access to the GPU through bootcamp.
http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~shaww/web_page/grid/macgpu.htm (2009 article)
http://www.gpgpu.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3766&highlight=bootcamp (2007 article)
So the answer is yes.

Related

Android Studio on Dual Xeon Workstation

Curious if anyone out there is doing Android Studio development on a dual Xeon machine.
I would like to know if the additional CPU gave a dramatic or visible (50% or more) boost in build performance.
You probably found out, but for others wondering: Chances are - it won't.
Did some testing with two relatively quick E2650 v4 Xeons on a largish Java + Kotlin project and Xeons were considerably slower than low core count / higher clock CPU's.
Check out the benchmarks here:
https://superuser.com/questions/1115206/will-dual-xeons-improve-android-studio-build-times/
I have tried to measure speed of Android Studio 3.1.4 on the same hardware: Macbook Pro 2011, RAM 4Gb, SSD 240GB Samsung, Core i5 2.4Ghz.
I have installed on this machine 3 different OS: Windows 10, MacOS Hight Sierra 10.13, Ubuntu 18.04.
Avarage build time (running command: gradlew clean build, gradlew clean assembleRelease) on MacOS/Ubuntu was around 30% faster than on Windows.
On my another working machine: Core i5 3.0 Ghz 7400, RAM 16Gb, SSD 250Gb. Build time takes 4.34min on Windows 10 machine.
The same project on a little bit slower processor, but with the same RAM and SSD and it is running Ubuntu 16.04 build time takes two times faster!!
Well I was shocked with results, but still I choose Windows as development machine, because it's much more comfortable for me to use comfortable and
usable keyboard and sotfware than on Unix like systems. And even if I had to choose between MacOS and Ubuntu - mac is really much easier to setup everything, and
Ubuntu is too complex to use for usual people. Choise is up to you.

Running windows under virtual box for software development - performance issues?

So I have a question about what system I should use to do some C# development. In my course this year at least half of my courses require me to be using Windows specific programs i.e visio, MSSQL, C# etc. I know there are alternatives but I would like to stick to these. I'm wondering about two choices and wanted to know what people could suggest - I am more concerned with performance issues. I have a Macbook Pro and I could run windows 7 on it under virtualbox where I could give it 4gb of ram. Remember I would need windows open a lot with potentially multiple programs running. I also have a desktop gaming rig from a year ago which is much more grunty and am contemplating just using that instead where I could run windows natively. I would prefer to use the mac, but really what I wanted to know is if anyone else uses windows under vb with 4gb of ram dedicated to it with no performance issues?
It depends on what type development do you want to do ? If you will develop desktop,web,console application 4gb ram will work fine for you but if you develop mobile projects or games it will be a problem future times. I have co-worker friend who using MacBook Air and developing C# programs he is using two OS one of them is orginal MacBook OS other one W8 if you have 2 section HDD you can create another OS on your notebook. I think best solution for this stuiation is setup Windows 8 to your computer.

How to limit PC performance to test software

I am developing a .NET application, and have the luxury of doing this on a fairly powerful desktop PC. I want to ensure it runs okay on PCs with much lower spec, but I don't have spare machines kicking around and can't really afford to buy them. Is there any way to simulate a lower-spec PC on my current PC, to get a feel for how the software might run?
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
*My PC is Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with 8-core Intel i7 and 16GB RAM.
You could install VMWare and install any OS you want, with any hardware specs you want, provided that they don't exceed your current working hardware of course.
Keep in mind that VMWare is just a virtualization layer. It emulates an OS but you are still running your code on the same i7.
http://www.asp.net/mobile/device-simulators Here is an example of several Visual Studio plug-ins that emulate devices. You can also install Windows 8 and run hyper-v. It's great for this kind of thing.

Macbook Pro running VMWare Fusion 4 on Native apple partition or Bootcamp partition?

I've been experimenting quite a bit with my new macbook pro and have run into significant performance issues with VMWare fusion as well as running natively from bootcamp.
My three scenarios are:
1) Native booting from bootcamp (16gig, SSD)
2) Native booting OSX, VMWARE fusion running from bootcamp partition (8 gig ram for vmware plus 4 of out processors)
3) Native booting OSX, VMWARE fusion running from files on native OSX partition (SSD) (8 gig ram for vmware plus 4 of out processors)
I don't have enough space to try all these at the same time but I'm suspicious that number three is significantly faster than either 1 or 2.
I've found that in both 1 and 2 (which is what I have loaded now on my computer), doing things like building large projects with visual studio 2010 boggs down, where as on my Lenovo W520 running on the same type of SSD, I don't get bogged down. I am surprised native bootcamp is any slower, but it seems to be.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Native boot has always been faster for me (understandably, with no abstraction layers)
As for the other two, there shouldn't be much difference. Windows is still running through the same abstraction layer, so if the same amount of computing power is available then they should be comparable. If one is on an SSD, that would explain some of the speed difference.
On the one running on top of OSX, does it slow down when you do a lot of processor-intensive tasks under OSX? If so, it's the SSD making the difference there - but it still shouldn't be faster than VMWare.
I've found that 3 is faster than option 2, and option 1 was by far the fastest. Natively booting to windows with bootcamp was much quicker and felt more like a normal native windows laptop. When I run vmware with a clean image (non bootcamp) it seems to run ok, however I've found the best option is as follows.
vmware settings (best option for me considering my system specs)
2 processors for windows VM
4gb RAM allocated within vmware
My system specs:
2.4ghz i7 (oct 2011 model MBP).
8gb total ram
I've found that bootcamp was slightly faster than vmware (non bootcamp image), but I still use vmware the majority of the time because I like using the host OS for things like mail/chat/browsing.
I'm running visual studio 2010 SP1 on a .net 4.0 WPF project. I use Telerik control suite, Entity framework and Oracle data access components. Our project is pretty small still but it builds in about 6 seconds after a "clean". (1 solution with 3 projects).

XNA Windows Phone Simulator on 'Mac-Windows' vs. regular Windows

I installed my .net stuff recently on a Mac, i.e. preinstalled a version of Windows 7 before using Bootcamp. Does anyone have an explanation, why the Windows Phone 7 Simulator is so slow, compared to a Simulator installed on a 'regular' Windows system when deploying a target onto it?
Performance overhead might be caused because of the non-nativity of the hardware platform you are running it on. The emulator itself has a set of requirements - if these aren't met then you should expect serious drops in performance and stability (in case it starts).
When you're comparing the performance "Regular Windows", do you mean on another machine (PC)? If so, it could be down to hardware differences - (Graphics card, processor speed, less RAM, slower hard disk).
It could also be down to drivers - I don't know much about the Mac hardware, but it's possible Windows drivers aren't as good for hardware that's more commonly used by Macs.

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