Mac OSX.6 Snow Leopard Ping!
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Posted on 06/10/2008 6:23:21 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
SAN FRANCISCO—June 9, 2008—Apple® today previewed Mac OS® X Snow Leopard, which builds on the incredible success of OS X Leopard and is the next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system. Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime® X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.
“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”
Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthering OS X’s lead in 64-bit technology, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*
For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal® and Address Book, making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size.
*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. Benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test on an iMac® 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with 2GB of RAM.
Sounds like it'll be awhile before OS X makes much of a splash again.
Is Steve Jobs letting Microsoft catch up on features, or is he sandbagging?
No, he’s releasing “Snow” Leopard so he can pick up some pocket change to subsidize his “snow” addiction.
It looks like he's taking a release cycle to just concentrate on making things better and faster under the hood. It also looks like there are a lot of programming libraries coming to help developers easily take advantage of all of the power of a modern machine, like multiple cores and the GPU. If it's easy for developers, it means better, more powerful software for us.
Vista could definitely use that.
BTW, getting into OS X development I've noticed some things in applications. I got a library cataloging program for our obscene amount of books, movies, etc., and while using it I noticed all the cool things it did, and how they only had to leverage the built-in libraries to do them.
What I read on 10.6 (Snow Leopard) it is suppose to be for the Intel chips only. The G4 and G5 are left out in the “cold”.
“It looks like he’s taking a release cycle to just concentrate on making things better and faster under the hood. It also looks like there are a lot of programming libraries coming to help developers easily take advantage of all of the power of a modern machine, like multiple cores and the GPU. If it’s easy for developers, it means better, more powerful software for us.”
Yes, as a developer this sounds pretty exciting. Writing software to really take advantage of multicore has been tough so far, it’ll be great if Apple can make it easier. Access to the GPU for compute power is a hot area too.
I’m very happy I made the move to Apple. I feel the added value MORE than makes up for any added cost. The great bundled software helps a lot! BTW, like a Mercedes or BMW, an Apple computer commands top resale value.
“Something’s not right here. I calculate that 16 TB can be reached with 44 bits. A 64 bit address space spans approximately 18 million TB.”
The 16 TB limit is per process, and since it’s approximately 8,000 times larger than the memory in a decently equipped computer today it provides some serious headroom.
At current prices 16 TB of RAM runs approximately $280,000...also providing some headroom. ;-)
The memory controllers and MMU’s don’t support 64 bits of physical address space. Right now, I’m using a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo. While the OS and CPU support 64 bit virtual addresses, the physical address space supported is 40 bits, and the memory architecture tops out at 4GB.
I agree — Apple has been pretty smart about how they’ve:
a) transitioned off the PPC platforms
b) created a new infrastructure
c) created a new app/programming framework (and how they did something a bit more clueful than use C++ as their default language)
As a guy who used to work on “big software” — I have to say that Apple is making some smart moves here. I’ve only dabbled with Cocoa so far, but I’m quite impressed by what I’ve seen to date.
Snow Leopard is a great strategy for Apple. It will improve OS X as an enterprise-class operating system and extend Apple’s lead over Microsoft in software technology.
I believe it will be a compelling upgrade for Intel-based Mac owners, especially MacBook owners who should see improved battery performance, thanks to the more efficient software.
Snow Leopard will also be great for independent developers, and will increase the availability of application software designed for Macs. Apple’s OS roadmap gives us assurance that our work today is a good investment in the future of the platform.
16 TB can be reached with 44 bits. A 64 bit address space spans approximately 18 million TB.
Now as you mention it, that sounds exactly right . . . if you keep to the convention that 1k = 2^10 =1024 rather than 1000, and 1k*1k = 1M, 1k*1M = 1G, 1k*1G = 1T, 1K*1T = 1P, and 1K*1P = 1E, that should not read 16T but 16E.Unless they contemplate doing something really weird with the other 20 bits of available address space . . . like using the 20 most significant bits to assign the lion's share of the address space to mass memory other than RAM? That probably wouldn't do much that virtual memory concepts already, I suppose, in Unix, wouldn't already do anyway? http://www.sengpielaudio.com/ConvPrefe.htm">source
The 16 TB limit is per process,“Something’s not right here. I calculate that 16 TB can be reached with 44 bits. A 64 bit address space spans approximately 18 million TB.”
. . . but that still seems arbitrary and not obviously necessary.and since it’s approximately 8,000 times larger than the memory in a decently equipped computer today it provides some serious headroom.
At current prices 16 TB of RAM runs approximately $280,000...also providing some headroom. ;-)
Since RAM cost has been declining according to Moore's Law, I look at "headroom" on a log scale. It took 16 bits to address the 64K memories readily available in the early 1980s, and it takes 32 bits to address the 4Gig of RAM readily available now, one human generation later. Were Moore's Law to continue in effect for another human generation, that would suggest the need for about 48 bits to address the memory that would then be in common currency. And it would take another generation again to exhaust the full 64 bit address space.Recall the big issue over the Y2K transition, and it does give one pause over assuming that Moore's Law will break down before reaching 44 bits of address space. Of course I have to admit that it would be no trick at all to go to 128 bit cores long before that - were there a reason - but still. What bang do they get for that buck? What it means is that your son could very easily see the time when an unnecessary software limitation creates a crisis in the operating system. Which, looked at in that way, is pretty optimistic after all. Why would OS X necessarily last two human generations?
“Which, looked at in that way, is pretty optimistic after all. Why would OS X necessarily last two human generations?”
Exactly. My point was that 16 TB of memory per process represents considerably more room for expansion than we’ve had in previous memory addressing jumps. Many other things are more likely to be an issue than this limitation.
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There are PowerPC drivers in Snow Leopard according to some in the know. . . and the G5 is fully 64 bit. . . so they may be dropping support for the G3 and G4. Time will tell.
Snow Leopard is a great strategy for Apple. It will improve OS X as an enterprise-class operating system and extend Apple’s lead over Microsoft in software technology.
I believe it will be a compelling upgrade for Intel-based Mac owners, especially MacBook owners who should see improved battery performance, thanks to the more efficient software.
Snow Leopard will also be great for independent developers, and will increase the availability of application software designed for Macs. Apple’s OS roadmap gives us assurance that our work today is a good investment in the future of the platform.
. . . so you see Snow Leopard more from a SDK point of view - you see it empowering you to efficiently exploit all the number crunching capability of the Mac hardware, so that you can develop good software with less pain. And the more developers see that opportunity, the more of a critical mass of developers will assemble around the Mac and that will insure your investment of your own effort into the platform since it will be "where it's at" in software development. This then sells more Macs to enterprises, and to the public. Hmmm!In my present superannuated state, I buy a Mac and the only apps I'm thinking of come with the OS or iWork. The one unmet use I see for the tremendous (by historical standards) computational power you are working to harness is: Speech Processing. I'm familiar with
DragonNuance Naturally Speaking, and that seems to be getting fairly mature. But it's not on the Mac, SFAIK. And I guess that I will always give at most two cheers to an OS which can't be run by voice. I hope that Snow Leopard will induce Nuance to port their product to the Mac. Because in the long run the keyboard must inevitably be looked back on as a clumsy, anachronistic input device.
Like a motherboard that can take 16 TB of memory? Right now we're up to 4 GB chips, 16 slots on servers, 8 for high-end desktops. That's only 64/32 GB. Slots aren't likely to proliferate much more (except on very large servers) simply due to room on the board, so we're waiting for 1 TB memory chips, 2 TB chips for desktops. That'll be a while.
I know, virtual memory technically makes this possible today, but that much address space is usually reserved for high-performance applications, and it would be counter-productive to do that in virtual memory.
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