Rocket Silence

Many years and many software updates ago, the iTunes visualizer was a very prominent feature of the application. It was used in television ads to illustrate the power of the iMac G3 coupled with the the iTunes jukebox/CD-burning application that was miles ahead of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player. However, as the version number climbs for iTunes, the visualizer has declined in importance, cast away and buried in the ‘View’ drop-down.

When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?

(click to view full-size)

Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 – great ad by the way.