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Leopard Under The Hood And Requirements Analysis
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UB means that the application bundle has both binaries, yes, that costs some hard drive space. But as application bundle is nothing more than a special folder, there is absolutely zero reason to actually *load* everything inside the bundle into main memory.
So while I haven't actually checked this, I could bet that the system only loads whichever binary version it needs; because wrong binary cannot be executed, so it doesn't need to sit in the memory either. Somebody that has hard facts, please confirm this: getting rid of PPC binaries will not make memory footprint smaller, right?
One could guess that:
400/450/500/550MHz G4 (VGA TiBook era) used the 100MHz bus
667/800/867/1000MHz G4 (DVI TiBook era) used the 133MHz bus
1.25/1.33/1.50/1.67GHz G4 (AlBook era) used the 167MHz bus
So, FSB speed is likely not the reason...
System requirements say 512MB is enough, so I bet it'll run single app decently with that and begin to struggle if you multitask heavily. Your memory is double the minimum recommended, so I bet you will be fine with some multitasking as well, if you don't run lots of PPC code.
If most your work is done via Rosetta, I suggest you either buy another gig of ram or upgrade the software to Intel-native UB version. But that issue would be on your face right now running Tiger, so I think you're okay with the gig.
It'll run, but MS Office in particular will run much quicker for you if you stick an extra 1GB in there. The 1GB modules are quite cheap now (under £20 cheap), so it's definitely worth it.
Yes! I also could not understand why they had to use 32-bit Intels in the first place. I say stupid decision! But hey, they had to release something, didn't they? Stockholders would not have been pleased if Apple had waited for the 64-bit Intels to arrive.
Oh, well... money talks. I guess the 32-bit Intel 2nd hand hardware don't keep their value very well
You mean the older non-Intel versions, right? The soon-to-be-released UB Office will not require Rosetta translation thus I guess it will run smoothly with lesser memory as well.
And besides, 1GB is plenty.
Because they just work and keep on working for many years to come.
People keep using old computers for whatever they wanted to use it for at the time they bought the hardware in the first place. Many computer users only use the computer for email and web surfing, so you don't need a supercomputer for that, do you.
And besides; slow disk storage doesn't mean much. You can run almost everything with a 4200rpm 15GB laptop hard drive, because whatever is loaded to memory will be faster than streaming from any hard drive out there. If you have too little memory, you just don't multitask that much.
I agree with most of what you say, except that a 4200 rpm drive won't cut it for video editing. Well, maybe in iMovie, but for actual editing, 5400 is at the low end of acceptable. 7200 if you can get it is ideal. This is why you don't see a lot of lap tops at the heart of editing suites.
Sort of. Intel had Pentuim 4 class chips available in 2004 which supported most of the AMD64 instruction set. But at the time they still weren't actively pushing 64-bit at the consumer level, and they had no notebook class 64-bit processor.
Intel's first notebook-class 64-bit CPU (and all Intel Macs except the XServe and the Mac Pro use notebook-class CPUs, even the iMac, probably due to cooling concerns) wasn't released until mid-2006. By that time a fair number of 32-bit Macs had already been released.
Well, the argument could be made that, had Apple waited until it could release all of its Intel-based Macs using 64-bit processors, they could have made their own lives simpler. They could have made do with a 3-architecture Universal Binary system (32- and 64-bit PPC, 64-bit Intel) instead of now being stuck with supporting a 4-architecture system - both 32- and 64-bits for both Intel and PPC.
My hope is that software vendors will be inclined to stick with 32-bit binaries only, except in the extreme circumstance where 64-bits is required to perform acceptably. At least under that scheme, we'd still end up with applications being released with no more than 1 superfluous architecture included inside most fat binaries.
Vista requires 15GB - Leopard 9GB
Vista requires 15GB - Leopard 9GB. Your choice.
It's not that space is expensive but geez, we are talking about a system here, not any i-media-pro-sound-video app...
My iBook (1.33 GHZ) has a HD of 30 GB... take out 9...
Of course, I got a few external HDs but still...
Vista requires 15GB - Leopard 9GB. Your choice.
According to MS, users should never need more than 640K of memory and 10 megs disk drives is plenty for anything you may want to store. Dating myself?
It is also the last 32 bit OSX version. 10.6 will be exclusive to 64 bit Intel. Version for phone an other devices will exist, but DVD for MAC's will likely be limited to 64 bit Intel only.
Those of us on PPC are falling farther behind.
I do not like how Apple is keeping it relatively simple and restrictive. Apple's installer checks for required hardware and refuses to install if you don't have that requirment.
I say that Apple should give people a choice, list a minimum recommended hardware requirement, as has been done with many a software package, and that those systems the don't meet the required hardware spec's are not supported, at the users risk of disappointing performance of non-functional parts of the OS, but how difficult is it to remove the Mhz requirement? It only means that for a slower G4, the OS runs slower than Apple's performance police desire.
Who is Apple to mandate how fast their OS runs on a particular system? Bravo for XPF for making it possible to run OSX on slower/less capabile machines. If OSX runs too slow for the person who installs it on such a non-approved Apple computer, they have a choice of either living with that limitation, or better for Apple, this sluggish performance causes the user to upgrade to a newer faster system...how dumb can Apple be?
Apple should actually be paying XPF a percentage for every system non-supported system that XPF lets a user install the the latest OSX of their choice on, as it's only good for Apple in the long run.
BTW, I do not agree with MR /arn for posting system requirements as though they are fact at this point (even if this turns out to be 100% correct). At present, until OSX 10.5 ships, only Apple knows what the system requirements are. Notation should still be given that this info is still rumored/alleged, not accepted as "fact".
As to the 9GB install, yes it's a pig, growing almost as fast as excessive bloatware M$ ships- sad day, 3x the size, without 3x the benefits. And how long does this install take in minutes, compared to the prior one? I mean, what happens when you need to do a full re-install, is it going to take 3x as long
??? So what if HD storage is cheap, would you be just as enthusiastic if the install was 20GB and took 4+hrs each time you had to do it? And think about the updates, will they now be 3x the size...10.5.1 will be what, a 1+GB update???, meaning that unless you have a 5mbs internet connection, you might as well give up on doing the software update panel, and go to an Apple store to get a CD copy of any updates.Sloppy inefficient coding make for faster hardware requirements and huge bloatware files.
Really? I thought this was meant to be a key thing...could it comes as a 10.5.X update or is it to big and needs a new OS?
Getting rid of PowerPC binaries will buy you nothing but a small amount of harddisk space (and less than you think, because for many applications the code is not the biggest part) and the potential for major annoyance if for some reason you need to use a PowerPC Macintosh, plus more annoyance if the tool you use to get rid of PowerPC code doesn't work as expected.
Today external harddisk space costs about 14 pence per Gigabyte. Getting rid of PowerPC binaries is not worth the effort. And it doesn't make any difference at all to RAM usage. Actually, if you don't use some features of an application, then the code for these features will not be loaded into RAM anyway.
I use XSlimmer, and it has saved me a good few GBs...not so little if you're using a disk almost to the full...
That is completely wrong. 10.6 will have to support 32 bit applications. Dropping 32 bit support would be suicide, just as dropping support for PowerPC apps 18 months ago would have been suicide. Even in ten years time, many apps will be 32 bit.
At the moment Apple still seems to refuse to release a 64 bit version of Carbon. That guarantees there will be 32 bit apps around for the next ten years
From what I have read, AMD memory access is actually _not_ faster than Intel's. It is beaten both on latency and on bandwidth, and to top it, Intel has absolutely massive amounts of L2 cache that AMD can only dream of, 8MB shared between four processors instead of 0.5MB per processor. And that is server chips, where AMD used to be ahead. There is nothing from AMD that comes close to the Core2 chips for laptops.
Since when? Intel has closed the gap a bit, but they are not there. I just looked it up to see if anything has changed since we were measuring it; it hasn't in any significant way. AMD is the memory latency champ and has a very well-balanced memory architecture. While Intel does have higher theoretical memory bandwidth by some computations, in practice the higher latency means that the real bandwidth is substantially less and no better than AMD. The memory architectures are sufficiently different that "memory bandwidth" is not easily comparable; when you throw multiple processors into the mix the AMD destroys Intel thanks to the very fast and much more scalable ccNUMA fabric.
You realize, of course, that L2 cache is compensation for poor latency, right? And that the extra cache on the Intel apparently doesn't buy that much, right? AMD intelligently made the choice that if you spend silicon on wicked fast memory, you don't need an L2 cache and it will still be fast for those applications that a larger L2 cache doesn't help on. Since AMD purchased a supercomputing memory fabric design, they had interesting options.
The fact remains that AMD still manages about 20-30% better memory latency than current Intel for high-performance computing apps, which is actually a significant improve for Intel (it used to be more like 70-80%). Unfortunately for Intel, AMD is beating them using a five-year-old memory design that is getting replaced in a matter of months with the next generation.
It really is a pity that AMD can't get their act together with the fab processes. Their CPU designs are top-shelf, but they have serious difficulty getting them built on modern processes.
Yes, it's a laptop.
I would throw in larger drive, and was planning to some time soon, but I am about to spend several thousand on a new bike, so I'd rather not have to go to the expense of a new hd as well as Leopard right now. I might have to wait for Leopard for a while until I have the funds for both.
On the other hand it has some features I want (quickview, revamped finder annotating pdf's, etc.), so I might just have to bite the bullet.
I have a feeling that that Leopard is going to run like a dog on anything except an Intel processor. I am sure all of the optimization and fine tuning was done with Intel in mind and that the PowerPC version was just slapped together to keep some customers happy. It is in Apple's best interest to get the PowerPC customers to buy new hardware so the user base shifts at a quick pace. I'd think it is safe to say that Leopard will perform much better then Tiger on the Intel based Macs and it will perform worse then Tiger on the PowerPC Macs.
We will know by next week if it is time for the PowerPC owners to upgrade to new hardware.
I'm even a little worried myself running an Intel Core Duo because I am not sure how a 32 bit processor is going to handle an operating system that was designed for 64 bit. Well I guess I will know by next week since I ordered a copy.
We will know by next week if it is time for the PowerPC owners to upgrade to new hardware.
I'm even a little worried myself running an Intel Core Duo because I am not sure how a 32 bit processor is going to handle an operating system that was designed for 64 bit. Well I guess I will know by next week since I ordered a copy.