Tidbits: C4D, ArchiCAD, Apple and NVISION

Bring Your Vision to Life – C4D and ArchiCAD

DigitalCAD has a two part series on working with Cinema 4D and ArchiCAD to bring your architectural visions to life. There are several levels of screen shots and some QuickTime videos in this short tutorial on working with these two applications together. Go here.

Apple and Nvidia

This blog post has a very credible and interesting comment regarding the Mac platform and Nvidia as the candidate for providing new motherboard designs which venture away from the limitations of Intel boards while maintaining full compatibility with Intel processors. Nvidia is an Intel chipset licensee and has been developing its first nForce mainboard chipset for Intel-based notebooks, currently code named MCP79.

The architecture would support Intel’s latest announced Core 2 processors as well as a 1,066MHz system bus and the option of DDR3 memory. More importantly, the MCP79 consolidates onboard graphics and memory controllers onto a single piece of silicon, thereby shrinking the space needed for these internals — always a bonus for Apple’s ambitious “slim-design” plans.

Certain models of the chip will also use workstation-level Quadro integrated video and support for SLI technology to support dual discrete video chips. Mac users have been waiting for Apple to support SLI and Apple has recently implemented drivers for Nvidia’s CUDA general purpose compute technology. With Snow Leopard and OpenCL a more industry-standards based approach will win out over CUDA specifically.

The article concludes that the secrecy around MCP79 is unusual for Nvidia and a possible sign of the shroud Apple typically puts over its future product plans. It is possible an Apple-related announcement at NVISION may come forward.

VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2

The latest version of Fusion 2, the virtualization program from VMware adds the ability for Intel-based Macs to run both x86 and x86-64-bit operating systems as “guest” operating systems under Mac OS X as the host operating system, simultaneously. This includes not just 64-bit Windows but Linux, NetWare and Solaris.

Fusion’s Unity view creates a seamless desktop environment between Windows XP and Mac OS X applications.

For power users Fusion 2 beta 2 allows users to assign multiple CPUs to one virtual machine to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive work and the system has improved 3D graphics support. You can test drive Fusion beta 2 for free here.