Can someone name every app in Leopard that was written in 64 bit?
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All 64 Bit Apps
- Thread starter Mykbibby
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Well people don't (officially) have Leopard yet, perhaps you'll get a better response after Friday.
Actually that's not necessarily true. 64 bit apps can access a larger amount of memory than 32 bit ones, so its not really useful unless you have apps that handle huge amounts of data. Whether you see a speed increase going from 32 bit to 64 bit in an app depends on how the app is written really.
I was under the impression that, in addition to accessing larger amounts of memory, 64 bit processors can also process much larger chunks of information from 64 bit applications, thus inherently being faster.
Yes, but honestly how many apps do you have that have to process chunks of data so large that you need 64bit addressing not to split them up? Not many I would say. Most apps process chunks of data that a 32 bit CPU can handle easily, so in that case, recompiling as 64 bit would not make the app inherently faster.
I would imagine they would, yes. Not exactly what you call "mainstream" apps though are they?
If all other things are equal, that can certainly be true (but not always).
However when 64bit is also coupled with other changes such as CPU and CPU architecture, instruction sets, etc. things get very different. And that's what we have with Core 2 Duos.
Even the objective-c runtime in leopard can do different things if in 64bit or not.
The point is that there's a whole LOT of others things that aren't equal...
Fair enough, the explanation that TextEdit and Mail aren't going to be any faster in 64-bit varieties than 32-bit.
But this is a false statement:
It is inherently faster, it's just that most applications are already fast enough.
No, I don't believe this is a true statement. I have plenty of CPU intensive apps that don't deal with huge (64 bit huge) datasets, that do not run noticably faster when compiled as 64 bit.
Just going slightly off topic, although I am enjoying learning more... but your "Here comes an annoyingly positioned and colored period." got me this time, making me wipe the screen several times before realising. Congrats!
You may not want to believe this, but in situations where memory is not constrained, 64 bit apps are often slower then 32 bit equivalents. It largely depends on the type of application. Any speed increase you see on a desktop platform with under 4G RAM is more likely due to optimizations and additions to the CPU instruction set and the efficiently or the complier.
This isn't to say that 64 bit is bad, just that there is more to speed then just width of the pipeline.
This isn't to say that 64 bit is bad, just that there is more to speed then just width of the pipeline.
So just curious, I have a powermac G5 with 12gb of ram... I do a lot of film editing in final cut... Will I notice a difference?
No, it is you who are incorrect. There is absolutely nothing (at a software level) that makes 64 bit faster than 32 bit. In fact, it can be the opposite because 64-bit compiled binaries are larger which reduces the efficacy of your cache. So, often, you can take the same source code and compile it as 32bit and as 64bit and the 32 bit binaries will run faster.
The only software-level benefit of 64-bit are when your application needs to address more than 4GB of RAM.
There is a benefit to having 64-bit hardware, but this benefit is shared by both 32bit and 64bit applications and is therefore not relevant to this discussion.
Well as I pointed out above, when people get hold of Leopard they will be able to answer!
None that I'm aware of, although some apps may have components compiled to 64 bit. With Tiger you pretty much are limited to Unix type command line apps if you want to compile 64 bit, you can't have a full 64 bit Cocoa app.
In the console a command like:
file /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes
will tell you if its a binary that contains 64 bit app. Apps should be able to contain 32 bit and 64 bit versions of themselves, just as right now they can contain PPC and Intel versions. In fact I have such an app right now I compiled under Tiger that is Universal and has 4 versions (32/64 bit for both PPC and Intel Macs).
Whether the Finder "Get Info" gives you this much detail remains to be seen.
To answer the original question Apple has said in the past that the only app in Leopard which would be 64-bit is XCode because that is the only app which would see better performance from being in 64-bit. I don't have Leopard in front of me but that is what I understand to be the case.
For the question about Final Cut. I don't think you will see much of a difference in running the current version on Tiger vs Leopard since it will be the same application code. You may see a minor improvement due to some optimized system calls, but on a whole the app will be running the same until a new version is released that is more optimized.
For an Pro app like Final Cut, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the app is already running 64 bit, even under Tiger.
For an Pro app like Final Cut, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the app is already running 64 bit, even under Tiger.
So you're saying that a 64-bit processor running a 64-bit application will always process the same amount of information at the same speed as a 64-bit bit processor running a 32-bit application?