Other Leopard Improvements: Multicore Support

[Thomas2006]

Good thing too. Mail has been going really slow and I am glad I can finally get all of my cores working on things like address book.

Give me a break! Difficult tasks in Mail and Address Book? I can see splitting the work load in Spotlight maybe, what is there to split in Mail though? One core checks spelling and the other adds the signature?

I do not think the purpose of threading the Mail and Address Book applications is to provide a major performance boost like a scientific calculation would get, but to tweak the apps for enhanced performance/usability. Mail, for instance, could have one thread for incoming mail, one for outgoing mail, one for syncing from Mail to the iPhone/iPod/another Mac, one for syncing from the iPhone/iPod/another Mac to Mail, one used by Quick Look, etc.

Remember, "insignificant" tweaks in the right places can improve an application better that "major" tweaks in the wrong places could.

 

[SP Jon M3]

Unfortunately, one of my RAM module (lower) has gone kaput for quite long and I am relying only on 1GB module I have in another one.

You might be able to get Apple to repair this as it's a known issue.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303173

What is the PowerBook G4 (15-inch 1.67/1.5GHz) Memory Slot Repair Extension Program?

The PowerBook G4 (15-inch 1.67/1.5GHz) Memory Slot Repair Extension Program is a worldwide program covering repair or replacement of the memory slot in PowerBook G4 models manufactured between January 2005 and April 2005 (2005-01 through 2005-04) that are experiencing specific component issues. If your PowerBook G4 has a serial number within the eligible range and is experiencing any of the symptoms listed below, it may be eligible for repair under warranty, even though the warranty period has expired. Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) will determine eligibility under the program. Repairs will be covered by Apple for up to two years from the original date of purchase even if your computer is out of warranty.

 

[DanB91]

Okay, to everyone who keeps saying they don't get beachballs in the Finder... note that those complaining are talking about accessing network volumes. I challenge any of you who think there's not a problem to do the following:

1. Connect to a network drive on another computer
2. Browse files on that drive
3. 'Turn off Airport, unplug your ethernet, or shut down the other computer
4. Attempt to do anything in the Finder

If you don't get a beachball, I'll kiss your... hat. Furthermore, it's highly likely that your machine will be totally unresponsive for a minute or more while Finder slowly comes to the realization that the network drive is gone. In fact, the machine and all applications will probably stay unresponsive until you click 'Disconnect' on the dialog that eventually appears saying the drive is inaccessible.

Windows (at least, 2000 and XP) handles this somewhat better. At worst it's just the one Explorer window that locks up - and even that only happens if you actually keep trying to access the network drive. Sometimes you'll immediately get a dialog saying the drive is inaccessible.

What worries me is that I'm not sure just making Finder use two cores is going to fix the problem. After all, it locks the whole system up now. Even if Finder isn't optimized for multiple cores, it seems like the scheduler should be letting other apps use the core Finder isn't hogging. Makes me think the issue is some sort of system resource that Finder locks and doesn't let go of until the network timeout happens.

Could any WWDC attendees reading this please take the beachball challenge above on your shiny new Leopard beta and let us know what happens?

the finder always freezes when i try to access my vista computer. the network feature is unstable as a whole though. luckily b/c of protected memory only the finder freezes so i can just force quit the finder. they'll prob add better support for vista computer networking in 10.5. one think that they should really do is allow me to upload to my website server in the finder. for some reason it always says read only and im forced to use a 3rd party ftp client

 

[jholzner]

Pardon my ignorance, but will Leopard run on G5 machines or will it require Intel processors? In either case, I have an eight-year old G4 400 and am very much looking forward to getting a new machine early next year; hopefully Penryns will be in new Mac Pros by then.

I have a g4 400 too! We must be the last two. It's sooo slow these days. I'm looking forward to my new Macbook I'll be getting in a few months.

 

[stormdrums]

multithreaded applications are wonderful

as i'm developing a multithreaded application myself at work, i know, how hard it is, to use multiple cores efficiently. often, it doesn't make sense to split work up into more then two threads. many benchmarks showed that the 8 core mac pro wasn't nearly twice as fast as the quad.
the biggest problem with os 10.4 on my 2ghz imac g5 is imo a very slow adobe flash player. watching youtube videos often result in over 90% cpu usage.
compared to windows machines i have, this is unbelievable slow.
maybe with multicore macs this changes, or has changed?

 

[Evangelion]

Those keynotes are the only events were there's press and all. The WWDC is a week long and there's tons of sessions where the developers can go to to learn about in depth stuff and ask questions. Most of which would be considered geeky and boring by most people, even IT professionals because it's really advanced and Mac centric.

If that is the case, why are we constantly being reminded that "iMacs (for example) are not going to be announced at WWDC, since WWCD is about developers!"? And we are talking about the keynote here, not the other sessions.

If goofing off with iChat is OK, why isn't consumer-hardware not OK?

 

[ntg]

I have a g4 400 too! We must be the last two. It's sooo slow these days. I'm looking forward to my new Macbook I'll be getting in a few months.

No - me too too!!

I also use a 1.5 G4 PB daily, but the G4 has a new USB2 card with a 500Gb LaCie Porsche drive for music and a new Firewire card with a 250Gb drive for all 20000+ iPhotos!!

all works a treat too! (and also has 2 internal drives too, one for boot and one for docs.)

nig.

PS main reason to keep? - SCSI card for all my old drives from II+ and GS days!

 

[xUKHCx]

one thing that they should really do is allow me to upload to my website server in the finder. for some reason it always says read only and im forced to use a 3rd party ftp client

ftp via the finder is read only hence the message.
you can upload via termianl so you don't have to use third party but i do agree that it is something that should be added.

 

[JPark]

Improved Finder?

It's not flashy, and it won't generate a lot of press, but if they really did finally improve the finder then they can have my $129 (or $199 for the family pack ). I'm sooo tired of hanging Finder windows and spinning beach balls.

Death to the Beach Ball!!!

 

[savar]

Now, why didn't Steve draw more attention to this during the Keynote?

Seriously! WWDC is a developer crowd...this is the kind of stuff they geek out for!

I noticed they didn't mention processor affinity though...I'm hoping thats one of the improvements in their scheduler.

 

[savar]

OK OK OK, so lemme get this straight. . . The computer I just got will actually get FASTER with time? Multicore support, 64-bit programs. . .ROCKIN!

Yeah, I dont know how long you've had macs, but when OS X first came out (in public beta), it was pretty darn slow. Even on the newest hardware at the time. Between 10.0 and 10.3 there were noticeable improvements each time. I didn't see such a big change with 10.4 but by that time my machine was already getting pretty old and crusty.

 

[Multimedia]

Multicore Support Is The #1 Reason I Want Leopard

It may not be as sexy as the new Finder, Spaces or Time Machine, but my main reason for wanting Leopard is simply for better management of multiple cores. I don't see myself ever running a Mac with less than 4 by 2010 and then only because the mobiles prolly won't have 4 'til then. So the whole multicore management thing is a very big deal to me. We've seen by the Barefeats studies on the 8-core Mac Pro that this is a big problem in Tiger.

I still think the switch to a 2007 Stoakley-Seaburg motherboard with Leopard will be a much better performer than the current 8 core on the 2006 motherboard with Tiger. So I continue to wait for that improvement before dropping $6,000+ for a loaded 8 core.

 

[macinfojunkie]

....I'd rather hear about Leopard and the tens of other things Apple should have been working on that we already know are on their way... like that new iPod or redesigned iMacs and Mini towers.

That's the downside of having a closed market for the OSX platform. Apple can only do so much by itself. Obviously what it does manage to update/release is much better for having total control on the integrated experience, but that comes at the expense of not being able to keep everyone happy a once. Whilst they are a large company, Apple obviously has to priorities what it can and can not achieve in a given quarter if it is to maintain its track record of quality.

I think we're starting to see some of the cracks in Apple as a result of the expansion in the market segments and products - delays in Leopard, security holes in latest Safari beta etc. Nothing deteriorates a company more than fast growth of staff combined with hard schedules. I'd much rather wait for Apple to get things right than they rush stuff out just to please the market. In the long run they will be better for it. I really hope that Apple take stock after Leopard and the iPhone are out the door and restrain their growth and diversity so that they can grow their capability to match their product ambitions.

I hope we'll see more focus on mac hardware upgrades once the iPhone release and initial support "spike" issues are addressed. Until then I'm happy to see that Apple are still providing value to customers by providing incremental and solid improvements to existing hardware through their OS and software updates.

Can't wait for Leopard if this Multi core stuff pans out to make a 8 core system worth having.

 

[jellomizer]

1024 processors ought to be enough for anybody . Well, excluding SGI of course.

I have actually did development on a system With 1024 processors. With larger number of processors like this you can actually Up your processing power to the next Big O.

Where you use to use a for statement you can use a Plural If statement. You can sort Data with a Logorithmic speed. At this processor count Multi-Threading is no longer the way to go but Plural assignments and commands are.

For todays use if everything was program multi-threaded then around 512 core system would be optimal for normal use. After 512 then multi-threading looses it advantage and would need a different method for parallel processing such as Plural Programing.

 

[jellomizer]

Trust me, back in the days of Microsoft Word 6.0, some people probably did max out their RAM to make word processing bearable...

Or modern cases where people put High Resolution Pics in the word documents and don't bother scaling them down. So when it loads a lot of Pics it could use a few gigs of memory to run smoothly.

 

[milo]

Now THAT'S something to shout about! Much better than the eye candy fluff.

PS I thought all shipping Macs now were multi-cored?

They are. The last one was the core solo mini, and that went away a while ago.

Umm....multiple cores in Mail and Address Book? That's like needing 8GB of RAM to run Word "faster".

Searching and sorting? Opening the apps, and opening gigantic folders and files? Downloading huge files and huge numbers of emails? Why not update every app to be as efficient as possible? I'll take even modest speed boosts and ones that don't seem necessary.

All I want for my $129 is for my entire machine, all applications, to NOT freakin' completely lock up for several minutes when the Finder suddenly can't find a previously-mounted network volume. Is that too much to ask?

Someone at the conference played with Leopard there and already reported that this is fixed.

To all the people that are saying stuff like this....WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? Do you have power PC machines? Because I have a Blackbook 2.0 CD 2GB 80Gb and I have never beachballed in the finder...

If you've never seen it, you've probably never done the action described, it's extremely widespread.

Yeah, I have a G4 400 running Panther and it doesn't beachball in the finder.

If it doesn't, you're not trying to connect to network drives (and failing). Read the posts, people aren't saying they get beachballs all the time in the finder, mainly in this one specific case. I'll bet you'd have those if you were doing that too.

Personally, i'm still disappointed by the lack of more things in Leopard that will alter my computing experience.

I'm baffled how anyone can consider an overall speed boost not "altering the computer experience".

If they keynote was aimed at developers, why did they waste time (again) going through those "cool" PhotoBooth-effects you could use in iChat? Are developers interested in that stuff? I honestly have not figured out any real use for that feature, apart from goofing off. But why would the advertise that to a bunch of developers?

Because if they didn't, people would feel like even less was shown and bitch even more. It's just something for the whiners who can't understand under the hood improvements and only respond to bells and whistles.

 

[iPoodOverZune]

You might be able to get Apple to repair this as it's a known issue.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303173

I came to know about that actually an year ago. But my PB model (late 2003) does not fall in that time period or any model numbers. Actually one of their advertised models came very close to that of my powerbook. Hard luck!

I contacted Apple store here and they said it will probably take between 300-400 bucks to get the whole logic board exchanged (which is what they have to do; repair wont work, they said). Now thats a lot of money. I may be better off selling this PB and buying a new one. If I could only drag thru these times for one more year, I should be good to go! So I thought of putting a new hard disk to speed things up. Dont know if there is any other way though.

 

[iPoodOverZune]

Do it as soon as you can! It's going to be a *huge* performance boost, bigger than you can imagine. I have been using 7200rpm drives in my laptops since Hitachi introduced the 7k60 in July-2003 and wherever I have used my laptops everyone have been blown away. The bigger 160GB drive will be even faster due to higher data density.

Hard drive is the biggest bottleneck on a laptop. Improving the bottleneck pays off very well — in performance and resale value

160 GB hard drive?! I found out that, that capacity is only available for 5400 rpm. where do you get that capacity for 7200 rpm internal laptop hard drive. Also, isnt the previous PB models (like before 2005) can only take 120 GB of physical memory. Well, I guess even if it takes only 120 out of 160 GB but gives me really some speed boost due to higher data density and that said if 7200 rpm is available for that capacity, I will go for it. Do you know of any model that has that?

 

[HiRez]

All I want for my $129 is for my entire machine, all applications, to NOT freakin' completely lock up for several minutes when the Finder suddenly can't find a previously-mounted network volume. Is that too much to ask?

Someone at the conference played with Leopard there and already reported that this is fixed.

Wow, I certainly hope you're right, but I'll believe it when I see it! That bug has been in every version of OS X since pre-10.0 and I can't believe it was never a top 5 priority to fix, it just drives me nuts and it's completely unacceptable from a company that purports to produce professional software (and charge for it).

 

[scrambledwonder]

Yeah, I dont know how long you've had macs, but when OS X first came out (in public beta), it was pretty darn slow. Even on the newest hardware at the time. Between 10.0 and 10.3 there were noticeable improvements each time. I didn't see such a big change with 10.4 but by that time my machine was already getting pretty old and crusty.

Yeah, I didn't get OS X until it was really up and running, just about four years ago? I believe that was Panther on a 12-inch PowerBook, but it may have been pre-Panther back then. The upgrade to Tiger did make the machine run better, but it seems like Leopard will really unleash the raw power of the new Intel chips. Exciting news, considering that I finally have a Mac with a Core 2 Duo!

I'm also interested in 64-bit. . . Jobs showed a photo being manipulated in 32 bit vs 64 bit and there was quite a speed improvement. Wonder if real-world results will be similar. Also got to consider that he was running a Mac Pro, not a notebook. . .

 

[scottlinux]

Multi-Core addressing will be highly welcome with these apps, as well as the proapps; FCP, Logic, Photoshop, and iLife & iWork suites.

Logic is already multithreaded, but as of right now limited to 4 cores. PPC or Intel.

 

[milo]

Yeah, I didn't get OS X until it was really up and running, just about four years ago? I believe that was Panther on a 12-inch PowerBook, but it may have been pre-Panther back then. The upgrade to Tiger did make the machine run better, but it seems like Leopard will really unleash the raw power of the new Intel chips. Exciting news, considering that I finally have a Mac with a Core 2 Duo!

I'm also interested in 64-bit. . . Jobs showed a photo being manipulated in 32 bit vs 64 bit and there was quite a speed improvement. Wonder if real-world results will be similar. Also got to consider that he was running a Mac Pro, not a notebook. . .

That's more of a ram issue than a speed issue. That image was over 4 gigs, so in 32 bit the app had to keep using swap space on the drive instead of being able to load the whole image into memory at once. So that particular improvement will only help with images over 4 gigs on machines that have more than 4 gigs of ram. Which means probably no difference for that on a laptop, at least not until they ship ones that can hold more than 4 gigs of ram.

 

[MarkCollette]

WOW, now changing font is going to be really snappy!

Most graphical designers have way more fonts than regular users. And showing fonts is a really parallelisable task. So, for creative types, this will probably be a very noticeable change.

Good thing too. Mail has been going really slow and I am glad I can finally get all of my cores working on things like address book.

Give me a break! Difficult tasks in Mail and Address Book? I can see splitting the work load in Spotlight maybe, what is there to split in Mail though? One core checks spelling and the other adds the signature?

Well, when you get a mail, it has to do spam classification, apply rules, index the whole email for spotlight, and show the email in the user interface. By using multiple cores, the user interface can be more responsive, while actually doing more work in those other tasks. For example, spam processing is not just about looking for "VIAGRA" like keywords, but also involves contacting RBL servers on the internet, checking SPF DNS entries for the mail servers, possibly comparing new emails against previously received ones, etc. For speed purposes, a mail client might not do every possible thing to see if something is spam. But, if the program runs faster, then you might get whole new qualitative advances.

 

[SiliconAddict]

To all the people that are saying stuff like this....WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? Do you have power PC machines? Because I have a Blackbook 2.0 CD 2GB 80Gb and I have never beachballed in the finder...

Then you aren't using your laptop with network shares. Finder sucks like a black hole with networking. I can consistently lock finder up either when the connection drops or coming back from sleep.

 

[ChildOL]

Yes, Leopard will run on G5 machines, and really well indeed. It will even run on your G4 400, although you'd need to upgrade your graphics card to at least an ATI 8500 to allow the Core Animation to run well. (yes, it can handle it power wise, if this is a tower we're talking about) Hopefully, we will see Penryns in the new MPs in 2008.

What about my Dual G4 533 Power Mac? Will I see much improved performance from Tiger to Leopard? Safari gets very slow just because I'm downloading, same with iTunes when it is downloading files, and other performance/beach ball oddities.