Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' Features and Parallel Computing

[geerlingguy]

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.

For some things, yes, for others, no.

Many tasks, such as watching a movie (presuming it's HD), would not speed up so much, due to the fact that the computer is playing the movie back from the hard drive. There's a lot of data going through, and right now hard drives are often the bottleneck for these kinds of operations. On my MacBook Pro, I can play a 1080p, 15000kbps HD movie file I ripped from one of my HD-DVDs, but seeking through it is a bear... because of the slow hard drive access speeds. My processor usage rarely breaks through 70% when watching the movie.

Now, if you were crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, or compressing a movie (say, to H.264), speeds could improve dramatically... especially with the help of the graphics processor (which normally sits almost at idle in the average computer, while you're simply browsing the web or typing a document).

 

[pixelbart]

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.

Basically, no. There are 2 CPU cores, but they use the same RAM, the same hard disk, the same I/O bus. A single core CPU is hardly ever utilized for 100% of its speed (despite what your tools tell you), a multi-core CPU wastes even more cycles while waiting for the data to be available. Of course, you will see some improvement if most of the system services utilize both cores, but not 70-90%. Leopard is already somewhat multi core optimized, so the difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard won't be very big.

 

[theKiwi]

So those of us with 8 Core Mac Pros are in for a real treat when this all start to take effect!

I sure hope so - I've been a bit underwhelmed by my 2.8 GHZ 8 Core Mac Pro since I got it - I get stuck with the spinning wheel of death in an application like Safari while trying to open 6 or 8 tabs, and meantime FileMaker crunching away on a 750,000 record database is barely using all of a single core, and 5 cores are doing nothing.

Roger

 

[Le Big Mac]

"valuable" hard drive space is freed up? At per GB prices today, who cares about that?

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

How simple is this new parallel programming going to be? If it makes using a GPU as simple as OpenMP is then it will be a phenomenal breakthrough.

 

[WilWheaton]

I'm a bit confused as to how's apple's implementation of CUDA could be more advanced than nvidia's own, since nvidia is the only company that would have a full understanding of their own architecture, especially in the case when its a device that wasn't originally truly meant for general purpose computing. It seems more likely to me that it would be piggy backing on CUDA technology, and that the developer would have to specify to use it, I can't imagine a compiler knowing when to chose a GPU function correctly over a general x86 one.

On the other hand, I'm extremely impressed that apple is undertaking such an interesting project. Making intuitive and smooth running applications is one thing, but actually innovating the compiler side of things is a revolutionary thing I did not expect apple to experiment with.

 

[72930]

"valuable" hard drive space is freed up? At per GB prices today, who cares about that?

MBA owners especially.

 

[powderblue17]

Why is this being touted as 10.6?? It sounds like they are just patching and making 10.5 more reliable and effective?? Sounds like service Packs to me..


Without any new added features and just background features this should be a free upgrade or just 10.5.8 or something not 10.6

Because all of Apple's engineering resources are being devoted to Snow Leopard. You don't devote all of your resources to a service pack unless you were Microsoft with XP SP2 but they really had no choice with that.

 

[eric_n_dfw]

Leopard is markedly slower that the previous versions of the OS. I think Snow Leopard is a great move....

Have any benchmarks on that? I find 10.5 to "feel" as fast or faster than 10.4 was on a C2D MacBookPro 2.2Ghz - maybe you're on older hardware or low on RAM?

Stability wise, though, 10.5.2 and 10.5.3 suck for me.

 

[inmotion]

i think all users would like to have more HD space regardless of GB/price... using a MBP im currently confined to the 120gb that i have (1st gen mbp) and i think this will be true for all mobile user even those with the current 250gb hds.

just my 2 cents.

bring on snow leopard

 

[137489]

(Time Machine is nearly useless for laptops. Screw Time Capsule, who wants to spend $500 for a relatively small external HD?).

Huh? dumbest statement I ever heard. I have 1 HP desk top that I have to backup using CD/DVD -RW. takes time to change out all those CD's once they fill up, so I never really get one full clean backup. I have a Dell laptop that the DVD drive will only burn CD's (go figure). I have a Dell desk top (work gave me) that has Norton Save and Restore (which i have had problems mounting backups when I needed to recover data). NSR costs money.

then I have my new macbook. Time machine takes a long time as I have a 250gb drive which is almost full of documents I moved from my HP and Dell, movies and pictures that I have not put on permanate storage yet.

I am very greatful for timemachine. No worry backups. and I even like the way it does backups, as I took my external drive, plugged it in to my dell and copied a document over. Cool part is it backs and preserves the directory levels, not some useless format like NSR where I have to have the software and mount the drive.

I never worked with time capsule, but if you are concerned over the cost for such a small drive, then get yourself a cheap WD mybook. that is what I did, bought a 500gb for about $120. TimeMachine works just fine with it. After I get all my docs reorganized, then I am going to format the drive and partition it out so that I can make better use of it. I will then have 250 for my backups and 250 for data.

 

[arkmannj]

"valuable" hard drive space is freed up? At per GB prices today, who cares about that?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but leaner apps should also execute faster, and have a smaller footprint in RAM, having everything more optimized, leaner and cleaner benefits the entire system in general I would think.

But also, Many people don't upgrade the hard drives in their machines (especially consumers, and those with Mac Mini's, iMac's, portables etc.)
You and I know they could cheaply go get an external drive, but reality is that most people don't want to fuss with it from what I've seen.

I can't wait for 10.6

 

[commander.data]

I'm a bit confused as to how's apple's implementation of CUDA could be more advanced than nvidia's own, since nvidia is the only company that would have a full understanding of their own architecture, especially in the case when its a device that wasn't originally truly meant for general purpose computing. It seems more likely to me that it would be piggy backing on CUDA technology, and that the developer would have to specify to use it, I can't imagine a compiler knowing when to chose a GPU function correctly over a general x86 one.

On the other hand, I'm extremely impressed that apple is undertaking such an interesting project. Making intuitive and smooth running applications is one thing, but actually innovating the compiler side of things is a revolutionary thing I did not expect apple to experiment with.

Yes, I'm also interested in seeing how Grand Central and OpenCL is implemented. In terms of Grand Central, I thought that improving multithreading has been a major computer research project that people still haven't found a good solution to yet. If there has been a breakthrough, it's interesting that Apple hasn't written a scientific paper on it yet. But the way they make Grand Central sound, it's like it's a multithreaded framework that you can use rather than a very optimized compiler.

In terms of OpenCL, I guess it'll be layered on top of CUDA for nVidia and CTM for ATI. I believe ATI is more flexible with their GPUs since CTM allows a lot more low-level access, so you could in theory implement CUDA on ATI GPUs, while nVidia wants to have more control and define CUDA themselves for higher level access. Maybe, all this talk between Apple and nVidia, is that nVidia is letting Apple have lower-level access, although I can't really see nVidia sidelining their own CUDA tech.

 

[FoxyKaye]

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.

Hope springeth eternal. I'm not counting on it, though, and I've already contacted Apple re: the last possible date I have to buy Software Assurance before it becomes unavailable for upgrading to 10.6.

 

[Bertmg]

A free OS version is a kick ass strategy over MS

It does sounds like a SP, but there is nothing wrong with that being called 10.6 as long as we are going to be getting a REAL "remarkably speed up - accelerated - more stable" version of what we already have. Good under the hood improvements will obviously show at the time of performance and third party apps!

As much as I am an Apple fan, we would be extremely disappointed with any fee different form CD room's price s/h (free if downloaded). It makes sense (even marketing wise) for Apple not to charge for this one upgrade and show MS their loyalty with their customers.

Isn't their slogan "think different". after all?

 

[klagermkii]

I don't know about that - Apple's been plenty distracted by porting OS X to the iPhone (and building the subsequent iPhone 2.0 system), and even though "about a year" is much more of a realistic timeframe than MWSF 2009 to release Snow Leopard, I've got a bad feeling that Leopard 10.5 is going to become much less of a priority.

This is precisely why Snow Leopard is a priority to Apple. They're not doing this work for the desktop, they're doing it to primarily to make the iPhone/iPod Touch platform snappy and performance increases for their laptop and desktop machines are a nice side effect. We see the WebKit team spending significant time increasing JavaScript performance, but few of us can say that our web browser is that slow on your laptop/desktop. It's there to help the iPhone! The only apps which really feel sluggish on the Mac are things like Photoshop/Final Cut Pro which already have the technology needed to take advantage of multi-core chips.

Why then are they doing all the multi-core work? Well it looks like the portable devices have hit a hard frequency limit of around 400MHz (we were at this same frequency 5 years ago with the Palm Tungsten T3), and Apple is needing to work on other ways to get performance up. Dual-core iPhones would use less power than trying to doubling the frequency, but right now OS X can't properly take advantage of this. Snow Leopard will put in the technology needed to make this really work.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Good news. Now I can just wait, and sit tight with my trusty Dual G5 until Snow Leopard, GOD why did they have to call it that?, and the Nehalem Mac Pros come out.

Hopefully, along with fixing the new features and adding stability Apple works on fixing the old features that never worked in Leopard. It'd be nice to have back to my mac working securely no matter what network I am on.

 

[slackpacker]

My Mac Pro yearns for your precious nectar

 

[nubero]

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.

true. though i understand that such a system is very complex i too think that by a 10.x.3 version number they should have really fixed most of the stuff.

one of my personal examples:
the notes in mail were broken from the start and are still not fixed.

not a dealbreaker or anything but many small annoying things still present.

 

[Bubba Satori]

How simple is this new parallel programming going to be? If it makes using a GPU as simple as OpenMP is then it will be a phenomenal breakthrough.

It's not going to be simple. It's extremely complex. That's why the majority of a whole system X release is being used to perfect it.

" Parallel computer programs are more difficult to write than sequential ones, because concurrency introduces several new classes of potential software bugs, of which race conditions are the most common. Communication and synchronization between the different subtasks is typically one of the greatest barriers to getting good parallel program performance."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing

 

[panamajack]

Echos of 10.1

It's been pointed out that this echos the 10.0-10.1 transition, dubbed "The Mysterious Case OfThe Free Mac OS X Upgrade That Will Cost You US$20".

I assume they'll charge something along the order if $29 in order to keep the bean counters/share holders happy.

I think it's a brilliant move: follow up the most successful year for the Mac with a leaner, more reliable platform that allows developers to do what they do best. Tons of PR upside to this in the face of Vista's troubles.

 

[nostaws]

"dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos."

I have always had a problem with how big and bloated apps, and OSes have become. As technology improves, I thought we should be able to do more with less.
I have no problem paying for an update that focuses on efficiency/speed. But I wouldn't want to pay for an update like that every time. But it had better be a pretty significant size reduction/speed improvement.

And "snow leopard"? I guess it is simply leopard changing its spots/color? How about Cheetah - that is a fast cat. Too bad that is gone. Better yet, play the irony card, and call it Garfield.

 

[72930]

And "snow leopard"? I guess it is simply leopard changing its spots/color? How about Cheetah - that is a fast cat.

Cheetah was the first Mac OSX cat.

 

[slackpacker]

I have always had a problem with how big and bloated apps, and OSes have become. As technology improves, I thought we should be able to do more with less.
I have no problem paying for an update that focuses on efficiency/speed. But I wouldn't want to pay for an update like that every time. But it had better be a pretty significant size reduction/speed improvement.

And "snow leopard"? I guess it is simply leopard changing its spots/color? How about Cheetah - that is a fast cat.

This is Apple Cleaning House Just as they did with Panther Upgrade.

 

[Virgil-TB2]

That's not entirely true. I've tested ZFS on anything from thumb drives to external Firewire/USB drives and the performance is staggering.

Also even without the speed increase the reliability is vastly increased on the read/writes. No more corrupt files from what I understand, and that's a big deal from my point of view.

Random file corruption is one of the biggest culprits in any computer crash/data-loss/screw-ups that I have to deal with.