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Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' Features and Parallel Computing

will it also dramatically reduce screen issues with alu imacs? :p

FoxyKaye said:
Hey Apple: Just remember that a goodly lot of us are depending on the regular "Leopard" to become as hassle free as Tiger did by 10.4.11.
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maybe it'll be a free upgrade for 10.5 users... i can't really see them not making this a free upgrade, since they'll want people to switch to it to reduce problems, and also if there' not new features than there not incentive to really buy it as 10.5 is stable enough... but i can see the 10.1 free upgrade happening all over again, which would be great.
 
I wonder if this signifies huge breakthroughs (GUI/experience-wise) coming in 10.7? Perhaps Apple is solidifying "normal computer stuff" to get ready for new innovative ideas?
 
Good stuff, but performance increases alone aren't going to convince me to upgrade unless the price tag is cheaper than usual. I started off with Leopard so I can't really compare my experiences with any other version of OS X.

So, no to $129 this time round! (since I'm quite happy to hang on until 10.7 otherwise)
 
Does anyone know what is this "grand central" technology. The name, to me means some kind of switch. Grand central is where people get off one train to catch another. Message passing seems maybe the way to go to enable easy parallel programing with more than 8 cores. A big message pasing system would need a way to route messages. The passiger terminal model would be attractive. Passengers each know where they need to go and millions of them all get move around in parallel

For example if my program just downloaded 1,000 RAW format photos and it wanted to create 1,000 jpg thumbnails I could write 1,000 mesages to some queue where each message has the name of one file. Then I could create some large number of converter tasks that would all run at once. each task pulls a message from the queue, does the job then gets another message. This is an easy way to put any number of cores to work.

But how to use this model in a word process or or a web browser? I hope Apple has figured this out. The message queue solution is a decades old idea. Possable "Grand central" implies a meeting place and not place where people switch trains.
 
Zfs

So, I just scanned the article on Wikipedia about ZFS and not being too computer illiterate, I'm not gonna lie... it came out as a LOT of greek to me. It just seems like a terrific file system when it comes to handling TB's of information... lots and lots of TB's.

So how exactly does it benefit the average, normal end user? I can start to understand the need on a server side of things, so building it into SL would be advantageous, but why would the avg iMac consumer benefit from it any better than HFS+ is doing?
 
They need to focus on cleaning up the code and reviewing the code for security issues. It is worth the time. If they don't do this, every version is going to take longer and longer to produce. I think also they have the roadmap for the features they will add in the next 10 years so they can provide a foundation to make those changes easier. It makes sense to do it now. I am sure the developers working on it would call it a 10.6 release even though a user wouldn't call it that.
 
wheezy said:
So, I just scanned the article on Wikipedia about ZFS and not being too computer illiterate, I'm not gonna lie... it came out as a LOT of greek to me. It just seems like a terrific file system when it comes to handling TB's of information... lots and lots of TB's.

So how exactly does it benefit the average, normal end user? I can start to understand the need on a server side of things, so building it into SL would be advantageous, but why would the avg iMac consumer benefit from it any better than HFS+ is doing?
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I can answer that one.

Much faster I/O performance.
 
If this update isn't free I'm going to be a little peeved.

Am I the only one that expects an OS to be optimized/stable/whatever? What they are pulling makes it feel like I had to buy leopard twice.
 
wheezy said:
So how exactly does it benefit the average, normal end user? I can start to understand the need on a server side of things, so building it into SL would be advantageous, but why would the avg iMac consumer benefit from it any better than HFS+ is doing?
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It doesn't, especially if you only have one disk.
 
I find Leopard a little slower than Tiger, but not too much so. There is more system overhead with Time Machine in addition to Spotlight from before, etc.

If Snow Leopard is a significant improvement in speed/performance, then that will shift things back to the other side, where each new version actually improves performance.

Some of those app sizes are dramatically smaller! I don't care that much since in a year 1TB HD's will probably be around $100. But it should result in faster opening apps in any case.

I really doubt Apple will charge $129 for this, unless they somehow find a way to add at least 1 big new feature. I think we're probably looking at $49 to $79, depending on how the bean counters' sales projections go at different price points.
 
It looks like the development of the iPhone OSX has had a more profound impact on Apple than we first realised, resulting in a more 'stripped down' and 'efficient' Mac OSX.
 
Although I haven't had any technical issues with Lepoard on my New Mac Pro, it is slower at doing the basic stuff than my old G4DP500 used to be.

Hopefully 10.5/6 will be able to take advantages of the new instruction sets we have.
 
Sure hope Snowy will set my 8 cores to work at 100% finally, at least for all the Apple apps.
 
Looking at the promised features for iCal Server 2, it looks like Apple finally figured out that iCal Server is unusable for all practical purposes. (And I'm not talking about the many bugs people have encountered, but simply the missing features and bad implementations).

Too bad if they decide that you should have to pay for an upgrade to get something that you can actually use. iCal Server was a big selling point, but it has been a huge disappointment.

Audun
 
Peace said:
Google and Wikipedia are your friends :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing
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True. the problem with wikipedia is that almost anyone can update it, and thus there has been articles about false or inaccurate information in it. I read anything on the web with a grain of salt.
but in the case of parallel computing - the whole point of multi CPU/processors is for the hardware to break down a command and offload each part to a separate processor than assemble it all back together again. faster than one person (per say) doing all the work.

simple enough terms?
 
So my Core 2 Duo would start using both cores to perform every task the OS puts to it? Which would theoretically increase the speed of every task performed, from watching a movie to playing a game to building a spreadsheet, by 70-90% wouldn't it? *Plus* whatever help the GPU can throw in?

Sounds like a full "point" $129 upgrade to me. And well worth it.
 
I think I'm more excited about Snow Leopard than I have been about most other OS releases!
 
I personally wonder if Apple will charge (or will charge the normal amount) for this upgrade. I wonder if the Snow Leopard moniker is even an indication that Apple don't see this as a "normal" rev. In general this does, as another correspondent suggests, not feel like a full OS release but rather a SP+.

SOX might get in the way of it being free if they add new features, but I must admit they are making such a point of saying "no new features" that I do wonder if this will be a free upgrade.

I can't remember if pricing was discussed at all at last year's WWDC? I don't think it was.

Nigel
 
BoyBach said:
It looks like the development of the iPhone OSX has had a more profound impact on Apple than we first realised, resulting in a more 'stripped down' and 'efficient' Mac OSX.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, this had to happen at some point or another. It seems Apple and Microsoft have both had feature-madness lately, and neither have spent enough time debugging, fixing and stripping away extraneous things. But most people don't do that enough anyways.

I have a few thousand documents/media files on my computer, probably more than half of which I could delete if I had the time to run through them... but I don't. So there's a wasted 60 GB or so of space.

I'm sure Apple sees that they've been spending a ton of time incorporating new features, and much less time optimizing old ones. And they also see that the future of computing is multicore. Notice how in the past 5 or so years, processor MHz speeds haven't increased much at all. In fact, instead of touting, "My computer has a 3.06 GHz processor!," people now say, "I have 8 cores!"

I can see a day (quite soon, possibly) where we have a 16 or 24 core computer, running at 3 or 4 GHz, with maybe 64 GB of RAM... Apple will be ready. Microsoft, in my opinion, will not.
 
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