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OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' Seeded to WWDC Developers

cmoibenlepro said:
Would the OpenCL technology have some impact even with an integrated graphic chip? (e.g. current macbook) :confused:
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The x3100 should yield some benefits given its a major improvement over GMA950. It'll be interesting to see what parts of the operating system will take advantage of features in it, and how much of an improvement it provides to the end user.
 
Catfish_Man said:
I'd like to remind everyone of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

This has been a public service announcement from the Department of Setting Realistic Expectations.
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And? ... It's not the be all and end all - By being able to use cores for both GPU and CPU, it's an efficiency.
Even with Andahls Law, these separate cores are going to be able to do more anyhow, so even if the percentage able to parallelise is low, the non parallel part is done faster. Indeed, you could effectively actually plan for this in chip design - make a split chip - a faster core just for the non-parallelised parts needed to be computed, and for the rest to be lower speed. Once you've got it in mind, presumably you can reduce the non-parallel code to a degree. Sounds like they could have this in mind for the OS during a move to Cocoa and 64-bits, and getting Grand Central etc to work (OS, app, etc).

And guess what, there's a law for it:Gustafson's law*
Gustafson's law addresses the shortcomings of Amdahl's law, which cannot scale to match availability of computing power as the machine size increases. It removes the fixed problem size or fixed computation load on the parallel processors: instead, he proposed a fixed time concept which leads to scaled speed up.

Amdahl's law is based on fixed workload or fixed problem size. It implies that the sequential part of a program does not change with respect to machine size (i.e, the number of processors). However the parallel part is evenly distributed by n processors.

The impact of the law was the shift in research to develop parallelizing compilers and reduction in the serial part of the solution to boost the performance of parallel systems.
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I'd imagine it's an area that's hot right now, Microsoft, Intel, Apple all have cash being thrown at it. Amdahl put his law out over 40 years ago.
 

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t0mat0 said:
And? ... It's not the be all and end all - By being able to use cores for both GPU and CPU, it's an efficiency.
Even with Andahls Law, these separate cores are going to be able to do more anyhow, so even if the percentage able to parallelise is low, the non parallel part is done faster. Indeed, you could effectively actually plan for this in chip design - make a split chip - a faster core just for the non-parallelised parts needed to be computed, and for the rest to be lower speed. Once you've got it in mind, presumably you can reduce the non-parallel code to a degree. Sounds like they could have this in mind for the OS during a move to Cocoa and 64-bits, and getting Grand Central etc to work (OS, app, etc).

And guess what, there's a law for it:Gustafson's law*


I'd imagine it's an area that's hot right now, Microsoft, Intel, Apple all have cash being thrown at it. Amdahl put his law out over 40 years ago.
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Thanks man, I wish I had had the time to look all that up and stick it like that, but I didn't, so major props to you. This next OS is going to change the way consumers use computers.
 
gonenutsbrb said:
Thanks man, I wish I had had the time to look all that up and stick it like that, but I didn't, so major props to you. This next OS is going to change the way consumers use computers.
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aye. It'll be interesting to see if it changes the way Apple makes it's computers too. (e.g. A potential trend to use graphics cards both for graphics and computing power, or using bespoke mainboards with custom chips, or the abilty to really make a hugely upgradeable Mac Pro (who's capabilties for upgrading in my opinion is soon going to be potentially seriously boosted once it can shift to X58 and core i7 etc. )
Made a thread in the mac OS X section on SL if you're interesed in a read. Tv conceptnof what new opportunites will come available to tv Mac user due to the new tech is a good angle.
 
t0mat0 said:
Even with Andahls Law, these separate cores are going to be able to do more anyhow, so even if the percentage able to parallelise is low, the non parallel part is done faster.
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With each new microarchitecture, individual cores are getting faster and faster.

t0mat0 said:
Indeed, you could effectively actually plan for this in chip design - make a split chip - a faster core just for the non-parallelised parts needed to be computed, and for the rest to be lower speed. Once you've got it in mind, presumably you can reduce the non-parallel code to a degree.
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Features like Turbo Mode can help with that.

Also, a CPU could have a few large and powerful cores for single-threaded tasks, and lots of small cores for multithreaded tasks. Intel has hinted at CPUs like that in the first half of the next decade or so.
 
Trajectory said:
It will sure be nice to have faster Java and Javascript implemented.
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Java is NOT the same thing as JavaScript, guys. The Snow Leopard updates will most likely have a minimal effect, at best, on Java. JavaScript, on the other hand, will get an enormous speed boost thanks to SquirrelFish (for you Safari users, at least).
 
The work going on on javascript - it's pretty darn great. It's finally bringing it to the forefront, and the community benefits. And it's needed too. If it's CSS, javascript, and html 5.0 the general community needs all it can get to battle the likes of AIR, Silverlight etc. HTML has it's drawbacks...

Kinda reminds me of the work on LLVM: e.g. see an old post here

kabunaru said:
Will Snow Leopard look like iTunes 7? That is the question.

Aqua should just go in Snow Leopard.
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Why would it? It's coming with QT X, and presumably iTunes 8 or above.
I'd imagine you could mod it back to how you like it - see the reflective dock fandango.

On another note - Question:
Could you buy and use Snow Leopard Server on your machine, instead of just SL? Presumably then, a prosumer could get ZFS?

Overkill? :D
 
Genghis Khan said:
i'll pay for it, the speed increase is always worth it:) but that said, a lot of non-power users won't see the value in a new operating system that doesn't add any 'features'

i'm expecting at least 10-20% speed bump across the board, and that makes it cheap at $129
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Yeah, I looked it over on the Apple website.

On question: does this have a depreciated effect for users with less overall power? Say, I would have much less speed increase from my 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo than a user would from a quad-core processor?

I might pick it up just in case, but I'm not sure if it really would be worth it fore me.
 
Please forgive me for not rereading all 215 posts. A quick question for anyone in the know. I know no new features, but will all 10.5 features be kept intact?
 
really looking forward to this. Especially the need for all drivers to be rewritten (for 64-bit). The MacBooks could really do with better GPU drivers.

Going to need to increase my RAM though. 2Gb on 64-bit is about the equivalent of 1Gb on 32 bit. Every pointer and handle is going to have double the width, meaning more RAM will be needed to keep the same effective capacity.
 
Saladinos said:
really looking forward to this. Especially the need for all drivers to be rewritten (for 64-bit). The MacBooks could really do with better GPU drivers.

Going to need to increase my RAM though. 2Gb on 64-bit is about the equivalent of 1Gb on 32 bit. Every pointer and handle is going to have double the width, meaning more RAM will be needed to keep the same effective capacity.
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Actually, this isn't true - all drivers will not break, in fact, until the kernel is made 64-bit. All Apple is doing is extending the dual 32/64-bit technology to work with more RAM, which is a GOOD thing. Apple hasn't announced any plans to make their OS 64-bit only, and probably won't do so until, at the very least, the minimum requirement to run it is 64-bit capable. This won't happen until 10.7/11.0, most likely.
 
Keeval said:
Hi,



I could be wrong, but according to Apple Insider it is going to be a 64-bit Kernel in Snow Leopard.
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Hmm... thank you! I wasn't aware of this change, but it makes perfect sense if Apple's excluding the Core Solo machines from running 10.6, since those are NOT 64-bit capable, yet are Intel... as well as all the PowerPC Macs. However... this will cause virtually everything that interfaces with the kernel directly to break. For us end users, this means such things as printer and other device drivers. Existing applications, even 32-bit ones, will continue to run unchanged, if they work with Leopard and don't use any deprecated APIs - be fortunate that this is the case, unlike with Windows.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Hmm... thank you! I wasn't aware of this change, but it makes perfect sense if Apple's excluding the Core Solo machines from running 10.6, since those are NOT 64-bit capable, yet are Intel... as well as all the PowerPC Macs.
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There will be a 32-bit version of the system for 32-bit Macs.

However... this will cause virtually everything that interfaces with the kernel directly to break. For us end users, this means such things as printer and other device drivers.
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That's right, 64-bit Macs will require a complete upgrade of all system software.
 
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