Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' Features and Parallel Computing

[freebooter]

Leopard has lots of sizzle, but not much meat as far as I'm concerned. I'll stick with Tiger.

But Snow Leopard looks to provide what I hanker for in a computing experience--speed and stability.

Bring it on.

In a year or so I'll be ready to replace my iMac 24" white with a 4 core unit (a MacPro Jr. would be ideal).

I just hope Adobe will have the same focus on taking advantage of multi-cores in its next CS release. I suspect it will.

 

[nuckinfutz]

I'm reaaaaaly interested in seeing more infor about Grand Central and OpenCL.

These are potentially HUGE features that are very cutting edge. Today your GPU access is primarily handled through using Core Image/Video etc. OpenCL should be far wider in scope allowing for more unique uses of your GPU. Finally a decent reason to upgrade the GPU beyond gaming.

Grand Central- MUCH needed. Next year there will be Mac Pros with 8-Cores that have hyperthreading. So in essence you have 16 logical CPU to manage. Apple is certainly doing the right thing if they're concentrating delivering performance and stability based on the presumption that most users going forward in 09 will have 4 logical cores at a minimum with 8 logical cores becoming the new midrange/mainstream config.

Toss is better video performance (Quicktime X) and hopefully OpenGL 3.0 and voila. We LEAP into the future.

 

[milo]

So still no word of PPC/intel support?

Why is this being touted as 10.6??

Actually, none of the apple web pages or press release use 10.6...did Jobs or someone else say 10.6 at the event?

From Apple.com "..Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM. "

WOW

Wow? Nah - since 10.5 ALREADY supports up to 4 terrabytes of physical ram (which we won't see in hardware for a long time), that's a complete snooze.

Apple is hyping something that we basically already have.

Back that up with some evidence and then I *might* believe you. I disagree right now, though.

One example is Logic, there was a sizable and measurable performance drop on 10.5. That has been improved with 10.5.3 and Logic 8.0.2 although I'm not sure if is all the way back up to 10.4.11/7.x performance.

 

[daveporter]

I have had the opposite experience with Leopard, and it has bumped performance on all of my machines.

I agree, same here.

 

[dashiel]

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

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.

recognizing that nobody outside of apple and those at the WWDC have significant information, it is fair to say calling this a maintenance release or service pack is ill-informed at best.

10.5.1, 10.5.2, etc... are optimized, stabilizing, security fix versions of leopard.

just from the information that has been released so far snow leopard will fundamentally change at least three massive components of the operating system:

the filing system (at least on the server), that's something microsoft has been promising since before windows 95 and was touted as a pillar of vista - it still hasn't shipped. ZFS is a bigger deal than HFS to HFS+ and will make time machine screamingly fast and use a tenth of the space it does now

openCL - offloading non-graphics tasks to the GPU isn't a new idea, it's also not an easy idea. my graphics card is running at 800Mhz, i have no idea what apple will be able to squeeze out of the card, but even if it's an average 200Mhz that's a big deal, like $200big when you look at how much apple charges when upgrading your processor on the imac.

multicore support - offloading the heavy lifting to gain multicore support from developers to the OS is going to make performance boosts to almost all your applications. i honestly don't know enough about how this will be implemented, but i suspect the spinning beach ball will appear much less frequently than it does now.

these are not simple service pack updates, they're huge engineering tasks and well though apple is saying they're not "new features" they are in fact new features; just ones that jobs & co., can't sell to the "shiny object" crowd.

and who knows. a year from now jobs might take the stage and drop a whole list of new "shiny object" features on us. perhaps they learned to under-promise after the disappointing "top secret" leopard features.

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.

i doubt it. 10.1 was released because 10.0 was basically pushed out the door a year before it was ready, but apple desperately needed to get it out (similar to vista, shipped missing a bunch of promised features, simply because it was so delayed). 10.1 wasn't an update, it was filling in the blanks.

 

[Earendil]

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. It's not that I won't buy Snow Leopard for our Intel XServe, or even care that Apple's likely going to ditch PPC in 10.6, in fact, I think it will make our XServe scream. But I don't think Apple has proven it can multitask in the OS department very well, and me fear is that for those of us who can't run Tiger (or upgrade to 10.6), Leopard 10.5 in an enterprise environment is going to become an "abandon hope, all ye who enter here" situation. I'd love to be proven wrong on this, as a matter of fact I'm hoping I am wrong, but seeing as 10.5.3 is really what should have hit the shelves last fall, there's not a lot of time left for improvement in 10.5.

I'm going to humbly suggest that you don't know how well Apple is doing at Multi tasking because you don't even know how many different Software teams they have working on Operating systems.
For example, $100 says the team working on Leopard and the one working on Snow Leopard are completely different teams, with different goals, different funding, different computers, different rooms etc etc.

You can only throw so many programmers at a problem before the addition starts to hinder and harm progress instead of promote it.

If the Leopard update team falls behind, or vice versa, then resources COULD be shipped. But since their are no release dates for either product, I doubt you'll see the kind of shift you did for the iPhone, which was a different beast.
It had a determined launch date.
It was a brand new product with more media spot light than snowleopard could ever have.
It was essentially the leopard OS, so having the leopard OS team give them a hand made sense.

It makes less sense for the guys fixing bugs in 10.5 to shift over and give the 10.6 guys a hand on GPU integration

Just trust me, if leopard doesn't meet your expectations, blame the leopard update team, not the snow leopard team

 

[milo]

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.

I don't know where you got that silly idea. Of course Apple has resources working on 10.5.x as well as 10.7 among other things. What makes you think they're putting everyone on Snow Leopard?

 

[nuckinfutz]

Leopard has lots of sizzle, but not much meat as far as I'm concerned. I'll stick with Tiger.

But Snow Leopard looks to provide what I hanker for in a computing experience--speed and stability.

Bring it on.

In a year or so I'll be ready to replace my iMac 24" white with a 4 core unit (a MacPro Jr. would be ideal).

I just hope Adobe will have the same focus on taking advantage of multi-cores in its next CS release. I suspect it will.

I would disagee with you. Leopard a lot of meat. It may not be evident to those looking for drastic external changes but there has been a lot of work done over Tiger. I couldn't move back to Tiger. I'm too used to a better Spotlight, Quicklook is something I do NOT want to be without and the Calendar Store framework has made reliable two way sync to Addressbook and iCal a workable solution. Hell I don't even use Time Machine or Spaces yet but I will soon enough.

 

[BostonMJH]

I think Apple would charge $129 for the full version if you are upgrading from 10.4 or an older version. If you have 10.5 you could by the upgrade for $59 or $69.

 

[hulugu]

...Snow Leopard, GOD why did they have to call it that?...

People keep complaining about this detail and I don't understand it.

Apple has already used Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

Clearly, Apple wanted to connect Snow Leopard to Leopard and since other kinds of Leopards are Black Leopards (or Panthers), it makes sense to use Snow Leopard.

Ocelot, Cougar, Jagarundi (not really a cat, but a close cousin) and others are being held for future distinct releases. At least, that's my theory.

I would disagee with you. Leopard a lot of meat. It may not be evident to those looking for drastic external changes but there has been a lot of work done over Tiger. I couldn't move back to Tiger. I'm too used to a better Spotlight, Quicklook is something I do NOT want to be without and the Calendar Store framework has made reliable two way sync to Addressbook and iCal a workable solution. Hell I don't even use Time Machine or Spaces yet but I will soon enough.

I have a similar experience. Each time I have to use a Tiger machine it's a little painful because I've come to rely on Quicklook, Spaces, and Spotlight. I also use Time Machine also.

I like Leopard and I don't feel there's the performance hit others have described. My machine didn't get faster, but I work faster due to the little extras in Leopard that Tiger didn't have. Of course, I remember the same complaints since 10.3, so I tend to take them with a grain of salt.

 

[WilWheaton]

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.

I suspect Apple will be pairing with nVidia specifically for this technology. We haven't heard anything from ATI and now that ATI is AMD's company anyway, I could see it distancing relations, never-mind the fact that nVidia seems to have the lead for the foreseeable future in GPU technology. Besides, it would be a huge effort to have optimizations for both nVidia AND ATI cards, hell, its a huge effort to have them for nVidia cards in the first place at all.

If nVidia did make any lower-level changes to their CUDA language development, I don't see them making it specific for apple, there would be no reason for them to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple tries to make it seem that they've done all of nVidia's work at the end of the day. That's how their PR seems to work sometimes .

 

[Earendil]

Well, I would disagree. Sure, maybe the changes wouldn't be as obvious as a new dock or transparent bar on the top, but this ability to really use a system's potential will certainly wow people. If this Central Station is really able to offload some work onto the GPU, then man can that help make our systems SCREAM. This really could be a huge performance increase accross the board. This is truly exciting, and way more exciting than adding a boat load of features that have limited usefulness (Time Machine is nearly useless for laptops. Screw Time Capsule, who wants to spend $500 for a relatively small external HD?).

Perhaps all example for my point were not detailed enough.

Sit your mom down and show her Time machine when she loses a doc.
Sit her down with Expose when she opens too many windows and doesn't close them.
Sit your mom down and show her a 30% increase in speed while sending an email.

See while the techies, nerds, and people who push hardware to the limits will notice a speed increase, the majority of us will not. That is why the majority or Apple users aren't running MacPros and MacBookPros, because they don't need the speed.

I'm betting there are more people out there with too much power, than there are people with not enough power in a strictly technical (not psychological) sense.
It's for these reasons that I think that Snow Leopard, while very important for the future of OS development, will not be something that the general Apple public will see as a needed upgrade, or heck, they may not see it as an upgrade at all if you try and explain the details of things to them.

Thus, from where I'm sitting, Snow Leopard will not be featured as a full fledged update, and that if people who recognize the power, and can use the power, they will pay for the power. Those who don't understand these things won't buy it for $40 let alone $130, so it makes no difference.

That was my point.

 

[junkster]

I'm glad Apple will be reducing the footprint of the OS. It's ridiculous that a standard OS X installation on an x86-based system includes universal binaries that contain full PowerPC code.

 

[zioxide]

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

Patching != complete rewrites

10.5.x is going to keep improving by patching and bug fixes, therefore increasing performance, stability, and security.

10.6 is going to be major rewrites of the operating system.

I posted this analogy in another thread. 10.6 is like getting a whole new engine put in to your car, while 10.5.x would be getting an oil change or replacing a worn out part.

Also, you know Apple is going to at least add a few new features and fancy **** that they can market to the people who are less technologically savvy and don't care about getting the best performance.

 

[pohl]

...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.

I have a feeling that the OpenCL compiler is based on the LLVM framework. This post might provide some insight as to how that decision could be made transparently at runtime.

 

[numbsafari]

Steganography

Wouldn't it be so hot if Apple put in a secret feature of these developer builds that put a steganographic watermark in any screen capture?

This way they could secretly figure out who is leaking screenshots and such in violation of the NDA...?

Curious... I should probably go patent that.

 

[nuckinfutz]

I have a feeling that the OpenCL compiler is based on the LLVM framework. This post might provide some insight as to how that decision could be made transparently at runtime.

I was thinking about that as well. LLVM may be around version 2.5 by next June and another hit is that Clang right now (Front End GCC replacement for LLVM) is C only right now. OpenCL just so happens to be programmed in C as well.

Makes sense that Apple goes this right so they can target AMD/ATI, Vidia and Intel Larrabee GPU at runtime or via executables.

 

[grappler]

I suppose I won't be the first to note that Grand Central is a web-based voicemail service that Google bought recently (and, sadly, doesn't seem to have announced anything new since)

 

[rexamafex]

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.

Best post yet. Couldnt have said it any better myself.

 

[Diode]

Does anyone have any more details on the Exchange feature other then what is on the website?

I want to show it to our IT guys ....

 

[Jalvez]

This is what Leopard should have been when it was released. I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with the JesusPhone hogging all of the programming resources.

 

[Shasterball]

Back that up with some evidence and then I *might* believe you. I disagree right now, though.

Really? Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Leopard is quite sluggish. I get the spinning beach ball of death way more often than I did with Tiger. My HDD is in good shape and not too full. I also don't have a ton of programs running in the background. I don't know if it is due to the new graphics that Leopard takes advantage of or the new processes added by Leopard (e.g., Time Machine), but something is kinda off.

I've had friends say similar things. I don't have any hard numbers, just my impression....

 

[andiwm2003]

theyprepare the OS to run on MBA like machines. expensive limited SSD's can be the only reason why the stress the smaller footprint. also mba like notebooks will always be slower than full size computers so a speed optimized system is necessary to convince people to buy a $2000 "Macbook thin" over a Dell or HP brick for $1000.

it also gives me some hope that apple will have a Asus EEE competitor for under $600 at some point to compete in the subnotebook range.

a typical mac user has then:

iphone
imac superthin
macbook air
airport extreme or time machine
mobile me
(and maybe a ultrasmall notebook like the EEE.)

that are $4000 in hardware alone and you are locked into the apple platform. and once you are used to the light MBA and the imac you don't want to go back to larger machines with vista anymore.

 

[milo]

Wouldn't it be so hot if Apple put in a secret feature of these developer builds that put a steganographic watermark in any screen capture?

This way they could secretly figure out who is leaking screenshots and such in violation of the NDA...?

Curious... I should probably go patent that.

Cool idea...but the dev builds will probably be leaked as well.

 

[ibwb]

just from the information that has been released so far snow leopard will fundamentally change at least three massive components of the operating system:

the filing system (at least on the server), that's something microsoft has been promising since before windows 95 and was touted as a pillar of vista - it still hasn't shipped. ZFS is a bigger deal than HFS to HFS+ and will make time machine screamingly fast and use a tenth of the space it does now

Just some computing history pedantry for you -- Microsoft has been talking about WinFS for a long time, which has never shipped as you say. However, from Windows 95 forward they upgraded the filesystem twice: first with FAT32 and then with NTFS. In particular, the switch from FAT32 to NTFS was a massive change with major benefits, probably comparable in scope to Apple's coming switch to ZFS.