[net.micro.apple] Mac speedup?

tynor@gitpyr.UUCP (Steve Tynor) (11/02/84)

I've heard a rumor that it's possible to speed up the Mac's
computaion time by somehow turning off the display (which eats up
something like 80% of the CPU time...)

All inquiries from local gurus have indicated that while it is
possible to do this on the Lisa, it is not possible on the Mac..
Still, the rumor came from a fairly reliable source.  Maybe it's
buried away in the Inside Mac documents...  Can anyone help me?
I really want a Mac, but it's too slow for what I need to do
(real time control of a digital music synthesizer which will require
a fair amount of floating point calculation)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Eschew Obfuscation.

    Steve Tynor
    Georgia Instutute of Technology

 ...{akgua, allegra, amd, harpo, hplabs,
     ihnp4, masscomp, ut-ngp, rlgvax, sb1,
     uf-cgrl, unmvax, ut-sally} !gatech!gitpyr!tynor

ech@spuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (11/07/84)

You have the numbers backwards: the Mac display hardware steals
approximately 25% of the RAM cycles from the 68K, reducing its "effective"
clock from 8MHz to about 6MHz.  Apple makes a point of the fact that the
cycle-stealing does NOT affect ROM access, so the toolkit code runs full-out
at 8MHz.

But no, I don't know of any way to turn off the display.

=Ned=