Mac OS X Tiger Now Enhanced for Intel Core 2 Duo

[macusersoon]

I was surprised to read the following:

Mac OS X Tiger Now Enhanced for Intel Core 2 Duo
"Apple has enhanced Mac OS® X to take advantage of the technology advances from Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors, resulting in increased performance in professional applications like Aperture™ 1.5, Final Cut Pro® 5 and Logic Pro 7"

Link

What did Apple do to enhance Mac OS X for the Core 2 Duo chips?

 

[ksz]

Very interesting find. While I don't know what Apple did, it is likely that they recompiled some of the Core Libraries to take advantage of the Core 2 architecture. Compilers that optimize code for a particular processor architecture can render significant performance increases not unlike the 39% that Apple is quoting. While I have to see the benchmarks myself to judge the merit of Apple's claim, it is quite possible for code optimization to render such large improvements.

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm curious, too. I'm guessing it really just means that elements of Tiger were re-compiled using an optimized compiler for C2D from Intel. I don't understand all the subtleties of the difference between the Core architecture and the pre-existing architecture that Core Duo used, but I'm guessing there are probably advantages for large memory manipulations and so on?

 

[macusersoon]

Hopefully Apple will publish some details on the "enhancements". I'm eager to know what they are.

 

[kzg]

It will probably have apps compiled to use the 64-bit features of the cpu. On the Core 2 Duo you a nice little speed boost just by using the 64-bit instruction set and its extra registers