CoreDuo, Intel users and OSX 10.5

[XP Defector]

Are we to receive any substanital performance increases seeing as Leopard is, I presume, being programmed specifically for intel machines?

 

[rogersmj]

Nothing more than previous releases for the PPC, I assume. Leopard wasn't programmed "specifically" for Intel machines; for one, it will work on PPC machines as well, and two, there have been x86 versions of OS X inside Apple since 10.1, I believe.

 

[MisterMe]

... there have been x86 versions of OS X inside Apple since 10.1, I believe.

Inside Apple there have been Intel versions of every version of MacOS X and of Rhapsody before that.

 

[mkrishnan]

Nothing more than previous releases for the PPC, I assume. Leopard wasn't programmed "specifically" for Intel machines; for one, it will work on PPC machines as well, and two, there have been x86 versions of OS X inside Apple since 10.1, I believe.

True, although, OS X still seems to be on the uptick in terms of optimizing the core components... at least, that's been one major explanation why OS X gets faster with new versions while most OSes, or at least Windows OSes, get slower with new versions on the same hardware. The core architecture is new, even if Apple has been developing for Intel for some time, as is the level of prevalence of multiple cores... so there might be more of a boost for Intel than for PPC.

Also a very minor possible boost is that there may be more core resources that work in 64 bits and can take advantage of 64-bit processing in the G5 and C2D lines.

 

[sunfast]

Even though intel versions of OS X existed behind closed doors at Apple, surely they wouldn't have put as much work into optimising them as PPC versions in the wild?