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macz1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 28, 2007
315
5
Did someone notice an improvement in speed with Leopard using multi-threaded applications? Apple claims having improved multicore support with the new operating system, but I don't see noticeable differences...
 
Did someone notice an improvement in speed with Leopard using multi-threaded applications? Apple claims having improved multicore support with the new operating system, but I don't see noticeable differences...

I thought that what they meant was that API changes help developers use more cores more efficiently? I didn't understand it as meaning that an existing application would particularly handle multiple cores better without modification. Although, I'm very open to being wrong. This is definitely a big issue... if four and eight and even more cores become commonplace, programming has to catch up. Even among programs that are heavily threaded, work has to actually be well distributed between threads, or else there won't be much advantage.
 
Leopard has features that allow more effective use of processor cache and doesn't swap the program so much between cores.

Also all of the Apps bundled eg. Mail, iPhoto, Disk Verifier are all multi-threaded which should speed up things to.

Tracer
 
i've noticed that when launching programs speeds have been dramatically increased, ~2 seconds for Safari directly after restart, ~1 second for mail, ~4 seconds for iPhoto with 4000 pictures. about 15 seconds for iTunes...not much of a increase over the ~20 before, but still better:apple:
 
i've noticed that when launching programs speeds have been dramatically increased, ~2 seconds for Safari directly after restart, ~1 second for mail, ~4 seconds for iPhoto with 4000 pictures. about 15 seconds for iTunes...not much of a increase over the ~20 before, but still better:apple:

Hm, I think launching speed of the application depends more on Harddrive speed and has mainly to do with the application itself that has been rewritten. The new versions of these apps should launch faster under tiger as well.
I'm wondering whether multithreaded number crunching has become any faster...
 
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