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Sharky II

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 6, 2004
957
345
United Kingdom
Hi

Do you guys think leopard will give g5 machines a worthwhile boost, given that it's supposed to be truely 64bit? Tiger didn't really take advantage of this.... nor did any of the applications

Thanks
 

Sun Baked

macrumors G5
May 19, 2002
14,937
157
Not a power boost ...

The biggest boost will be in the RAM space available to the apps, which will mean a perfomance boost for apps that can use more RAM.

But don't expect a whole lot out of the apps, since they would need a moderate rewrite and a OS X 10.5+ label. Which doesn't happen too often.
 

Krevnik

macrumors 601
Sep 8, 2003
4,100
1,308
The apps can be recompiled without sacrificing compatibility with older versions. The 10.4 Universal SDK can be used to write 64-bit apps with XCode 2.4 (yay). However, the app's 64-bit payload will only run on Leopard where the frameworks have 64-bit versions.

Although hate to break it to you, the kernel is still 32-bit so that it remains compatible with drivers, which I think is a good choice in the short-term, before breaking every non-Apple driver (again). On the plus side, for the G5, the speed difference between 32-bit and 64-bit isn't really anything to get excited about (actually, it seems in quite a few cases to be slower). 64-bit on Intel is only exciting because it increases the numbers of registers on the chip, so you /do/ get a speed boost from 64-bit, despite the extra overhead of the larger integers.
 

AppliedVisual

macrumors 6502a
Sep 28, 2006
813
315
Sun Baked said:
Not a power boost ...

The biggest boost will be in the RAM space available to the apps, which will mean a perfomance boost for apps that can use more RAM.

The larger RAM addressing of a 64bit system is already present in Tiger. Many people, including myself, have 4 to 8 GB of RAM installed in their Power Mac G5 systems and make use of it just fine. Many applications (on the pro level anyway) are capable of using 64bit instructions and larger amounts of RAM on the Power Mac and Mac Pro. With Tiger, the core OS functions are all 64bit capable. With Leopard, everything is pretty much 64bit capable. Don't expect any real speed boosts, but just a more rounded and fine-tuned OS with what looks to be a lot of nice new features. ...And I'm sure there will be a lot of nice new bugs initially too. :D

And yes, we are still waiting for applications to catch up to the memory capacities of the new OS and hardware. Within the next year or two, most of this should be remedied as newer software versions are released. For me, I use Final Cut Studio and Shake -- which are already working fine with all my RAM. I also use Photoshop, InDesign, Lightwave and Modo. All of which are still awaiting a 64bit port. Hopefully we'll see 64bit ports of the Adobe stuff when universal CS3 releases next spring.
 
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