Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' Features and Parallel Computing

Yay!

I think this Snow Leopard thing is awesome! I love touting that my Mac OSX only uses so little of my memory already, esp. against those Vista PC owners. I can't imagine how much better it will be after OSX SL! I just hope that me, with a MB core duo, that it won't adversely affect it.
 
dashiel said:
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.

[snip]

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.
Click to expand...

Apple obviously feels that it is not a completely new OS... they are calling it snow leopard.

10.5 does feel like it was rushed to me. Keep in mind I'm on a powerbook, but I noticed drops in speed and stability over tiger. Safari crashed on me nearly every day (this has gotten slightly better with the updates). I really feel like I wasted my money with leopard, at least on my machine. What they are calling snow leopard now is what I expected when I bought leopard. Not the new features persay... but concise and cleaned up code, enhanced performance over previous OSes. Jobs said that leopard was going to be the platform that the next OSes would be built on... but oh wait, now after leopard is out it's SNOW leopard that is going to be the platform.
 
So the iPhone has .pages viewing, but XP doesn't...I wish I didn't have to convert my files, and Apple (or someone else) made a simple reader for Windows. I hope this is the kind of non-snazzy thinking Apple is looking into.

ZFS boot should come with 10.7, and there are plenty of other exciting technologies that I'm sure will make Apple's future OSs as speedy as possible.
 
Look at the app sizes in Snow Leopard compared to Leopard... it's insane.
(posted on orchardspy.com):

Automator: 2.9mb in SL vs 28.7mb in L
Dictionary: 2.4mb in SL vs 10.4mb in L
PhotoBooth: 3.1mb in SL vs 16.5mb in L
Preview: 10.7mb in SL vs 70.2mb in L
and more...
:eek:

Although we have monster hard disks these days, it still counts in the RAM. Furthermore, mobile devices will truly benefit from this.
This is impressive. I wonder what they had to scrap from the apps in order to get these results. :rolleyes:
 
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...upside-down/index.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Snow Leopard will also tap the computing power inherent in the graphics processors that are now used in tandem with microprocessors in almost all personal and mobile computers. Mr. Jobs described a new processing standard that Apple is proposing called OpenCL (Open Compute Library) which is intended to refocus graphics processors on standard computing functions.

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”
Click to expand...

My emphasis added. Clearly Apple is not just repackaging CUDA.
 
Looking forward to Snow Leopard

Seeing the press release yesterday was the highlight of WWDC for me. Knowing how big this can be, I feel it should have deserved some attention during the keynote. Get an image of the cat and make a couple of slides with the key features of the new release and everybody is happy. Seeing that this didn't happen makes me cautious. It wouldn't be the first time that promised features are missing when the new version of OS X is released.

Steffen
 
Dorfdad said:
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
Click to expand...

If you don't feel performance enhancements (even large ones) are worth it to you then don't buy it. Plain and simple.

But to categorize what they're doing is just "patching" then it clearly shows you do not understand what Snow Leopard is. Fair enough, since it's new, but the improvements here are far beyond fixing a few bugs and optimizing some algorithms.
 
ltcol266845 said:
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.
Click to expand...

I'm curious - which systems have GPUs that can be used in this way? All of them? Only higher end graphics?

Cleve said:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/snow_leopard_equals_enterprise
it makes perfect sense
Click to expand...

Except for this part: "Oh, and one more thing...does anyone think Snow Leopard will run on PCs? Crazier things have happened." If Apple is going to focus on "stability," they are not going to try to support your random PC config.

ChrisA said:
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.
Click to expand...

I think it's about scheduling, not message passing. With multiple cores the trick is to schedule your active processes so that CPU usage is maximized.
 
Exchange Integration for the win

Exchange integration will sell the upgrade, even if that was the ONLY enhancement. Native exchange access is a key piece holding Apple back from company use.

After that...full disk encryption hard drives, biometrics, internal smartcard support will foil corporate adoption.
 
coreybox said:
If this update isn't free I'm going to be a little peeved.
Click to expand...

Do you work for free? No? Then why do you expect Apple's development team to work for free? I don't know where you got the notion that huge architectural and performance improvements are not worth any money, but since you obviously feel they aren't, then the solution is simple - don't buy it. Apple doesn't owe you anything.

Am I the only one that expects an OS to be optimized/stable/whatever?
Click to expand...

You bought Leopard, so obviously you did not. Besides, aren't you getting 10.5.1, 10.5.2, etc. for free. You are getting an optimized/stable/whatever OS.

Snow Leopard is not just an optimization - it is completely new technologies. Just because they don't have a UI on them doesn't make them a simple patch.

What they are pulling makes it feel like I had to buy leopard twice.
Click to expand...

You didn't have to buy Leopard once, let alone twice. Skip Snow Leopard and wait for 10.7 if you don't think it is worth money.

Regardless, I'm sure sentiments like yours are not alone, and Apple will add some whiz-bang features before release to "force" you to buy it.
 
Earendil said:
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 :rolleyes:

Just trust me, if leopard doesn't meet your expectations, blame the leopard update team, not the snow leopard team :cool:
Click to expand...

Just to clarify something here.....

in the keynote, I remember a statement about there are 3 aspects of apple now: mac, music (ipod), iphone

this leads to beleive there are 3 development groups, one that works on computers, one on phones, and one ipods

they probably further have teams that one works on existing leapord and then on snow leopard - then they all collectively work together to have it all integrated. and work smoothly - that is my assumption (which may not mean alot)
 
Best choice for me...

Stay on Tiger and wait til that shiny Snow Leopard arrives :D:D:D
 
Optimizing code for speed and a smaller footprint makes sense - especially for highly mobile computers such as the MacBook Air and the new Tablet(?) :D. - Smaller drives and slower processors (for power-saving).

Also, if you are buying a machine now and are worried about it becoming major-ly out of date with the next OS update, you no longer have to worry if you buy an Intel Mac. :D

I know people with slightly older computers that bought one when Vista was just released and they're still banging their heads against the wall since their machine is sooo slow...

Interestingly enough, people I know buying Vista machines now with "enough power" will be banging their heads against the wall when Windows 7 comes out late next year/early 2010. :eek:

I remember Windows 98 being really slow (on a 386?), but then downloading something called "Linux on a Floppy" and on a measly machine having it run a GUI-Based OS with Internet support run like lightning... :)
 
swagi said:
Stay on Tiger and wait til that shiny Snow Leopard arrives :D:D:D
Click to expand...

Yup. The 40 lattes I've bought with the $129 I saved by skipping leopard have done far more for my productivity than Leopard's funky dock or the iChat Roller Coaster background. I've read healthy debate in these forums on whether Leopard outperforms Tiger, but I don't think I've seen a single post claiming Leopard is more stable than its predecessor.
 
Jobs seems to be pretty ignorant in saying that people don't know how to program multi-core machines; all you have to do is go to any National Lab (like Los Alamos) which has been utilizing SMP machines for quite some time.

But this is a good announcement in that Apple realizes that they have to tighten up the code if they want it to perform.

Should be some interesting times.

-mark
 
iMACTASTIC said:
this might be an ignorant question but i guess ill ask anyways.

Has linux taken advantage of any of these "break throughs" that are giong to be utilized in OSXSL
Click to expand...

Well Linux can do multi-core, but has some locking issues.

FreeBSD 7 however has removed all their locking issues and scales much better than Linux when you add cores to a system. In addition they optimised memory allocation with jemalloc, so I would be willing to bet that Apple will be using some of this technology in Snow Leopard.

The Mach + BSD mungékernel that is used by Mac OS X has thread creation speed issues (at least back in the day when Anandtech did some benchmarks). Possibly the Mach layer is being removed to fix this in Snow Leopard.

However this is all speculation. Apple could be doing something really drastic at the kernel layer to improve scalability, possibly a major overhaul to incorporate very different technology. However I think this would become known as Mac OS XI, rather than a point release.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back