Just A Quickie...

[simontarr]

I read somewhere that Leopard will have full multi-core support & currently Tiger doesn't. Is this true?

Second, what kind of performance gains are we to expect with full multi-core support? Will start up times be reduced? (I assumed that this would stay limited by crappy HDD speeds) What other gains will we notice?

[robbieduncan]

That's simply not true. OSX has fully supported multiple CPUs and cores since the first release.

[simontarr]

Sorry, I really meant optimised.

Programs like handbrake etc have to be specially written to take advantage of the multi-threading + multiple cores.

[emptyCup]

Leopard will have full 64 bit support where as Tiger does not.

[robbieduncan]

The kernel of the OS is already multi-threaded to a massive degree. 10.4.8 or so already brought multi-threaded OpenGL. CoreImage (and CoreVideo) are automatically multi-threading (so the programmer does not need to worry about the threading aspects). Only the Finder could really do with threading support!

[simontarr]

Ah cool. Well, at least I know now!!

[robbieduncan]

I forgot to say: Apple already altered the startup process for 10.4 to start multiple services in parallel instead doing them all in series to improve startup times!

[mkrishnan]

Ah cool. Well, at least I know now!!

Open up Activity Monitor sometime and see how many threads are active (there are a lot). In principle any thread can be distributed separately to a core of choice by the OS! :)

[simontarr]

I love this forum :D