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.
I know this is OT but did anyone else think that Steve Jobs didn’t look well yesterday? He looked thin to the point of appearing gaunt. I hope he’s all right.
They already left my iMac G4 out in the cold. OS X 10.5 doesn't work on G4's below 867MHz and my 17" iLamp G4 is 800 MHz.
I am running Leopard on my 17" PowerBook Pro 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and love it.
Access to the GPU for compute power is a hot area too.
I notice mention of that, and I have to ask: how does the processing speed of a GPU relate to that of a core of a CPU?Is a GPU effectively an array processor, or suchlike?
Mac OS® X Snow Leopard sounds like a mainframe Unix op/sys to me.
They already left my iMac G4 out in the cold. OS X 10.5 doesn't work on G4's below 867MHz and my 17" iLamp G4 is 800 MHz.
I had the same thing - and was salivating over Leopard for so long before it came out that when they sprung that 867MHz requirement on me I jumped and got a 20" iMac to be able to use Leopard.I gave my G4 to my daughter for the granddaughters - they love it. When I was visiting them recently and tried to use it, I found that I am thoroughly addicted to the 20" screen and to the expandable text windows in the Leopard version of Safari.
OS X has speech recognition built-in. I discovered this when playing chess. I don’t know if it’s as advanced as these other products, but it’s there.
I’m just trying to figure out the economics of this. If I have an existing Mac and want to connect to an Exchange server, I will have to purchase a new OS? It isn’t a service pac or free upgrade?
Scotty: “Hello, computer!”
CPUs can do pretty much anything, but not so quickly. GPUs can do a limited set of computations, but they're highly parallel vector/matrix processors with massive memory bandwidth. So for those calculations that they can do, they are vastly more powerful than a CPU. Check out the Folding@Home site and see the relative speed of the GPUs involved in the effort.
OS X has had three service packs so far, as we’re at 10.5.3 now. This will be the next version of the OS, probably $129. However, it looks like upgrading will in general extend the life of your hardware due to all the speed increases, so it’ll probably be worth it.
Mac OS® X Snow Leopard sounds like a mainframe Unix op/sys to me.
Does sound like it, when you say it. Good Point. And when we get into arguments with the Windows fanboys, I like to point out that Unix wasn't designed for personal computers, it was designed for real computers - and now that personal computers are real computers, Unix makes sense for them.And that's what OS X.5 officially is - and as you say, X.6 will be more so. And I guess that answers my question as to whether Jobs was giving up a tempo to Microsoft. To the contrary, he is putting pressure on the soft point of Windows - the fact that Windows wasn't industrial strength from the ground up, and would have to lose compatibility with its vaunted legacy apps in order to become so.
So the fact that Snow Leopard won't do anything for me as a personal home user reflects the fact that it is the long awaited (and despaired of) thrust by Apple at the corporate market?
I believe that .6’s increased emphasis on threading/scheduling on multi-core products is aimed at the weak spot for both Windows and Linux. The only OS that has a *really* good threads/scheduling infrastructure out there just now in the Unix space is Solaris. Everything else is a step down from there.
If OS X could really go after this issue, it will be an entry into the database server market. Right now, if you want to run Oracle on multi-CPU/core iron and get your money’s worth, you choose Solaris for the threading.
That said, writing multi-threaded apps is something that is beyond the ken of many programmers. Apple is laying the groundwork first in the OS, but to capitalize on this, I think they’ll need to come out with some slick tools in the development suite to help programmers unfamiliar with multi-thread programming to ID the weak spots in their code; things like locking, resource contention, cache coherency, etc.
You’re thinking like a software user.
The real limitation here is in the chips where the memory controller and MMU come together.
Carrying around a whole lot of extra bits that cannot possibly be used (and wouldn’t be - because there quite simply are not applications that demand that much memory - yet) clutters up the address bus, the speed of the bus, the size of the MMU internal data structures, you name it. So the designers strike a balance here — how many bits of physical address are really needed in, oh, say the next 10 years?
Apple was throwing out so many features that I was starting to get worried quality may suffer and bloat would ensue, especially with another bag of features I expected for the next version. I'll be up front in line for this version even if just to appease the purist side of me.
GPUs can do a limited set of computations, but they're highly parallel vector/matrix processors with massive memory bandwidth.Is a GPU effectively an array processor, or suchlike?
That's what I sort of suspected, from what was being said. My experience of twenty years ago was that that sort of thing was an expensive special purpose box about the size of an old PC system unit. Called an "array processor." Why would I expect that something which was the size of a PC back then would take any more than a board, if not indeed a single chip, today!
I don't know what they plan in general, but right now OS X just does it for you in some cases. The one I know is in Core Animation, which automatically multithreads calls to it (and automatically GPU-accelerates it). Your program doesn't even have to be multi-thread aware.
But for general programming I would appreciate something better than in Visual Studio. VS helps a bit at run time, such as catching some illegal cross-thread data access, but it's not all-encompassing. The Background Worker simplifies basic threading, but is also mainly a solution to the Windows problem of your UI operating on the one and only main thread. Locking and race conditions are still possible, and hard to catch.
Or part of a chip. The SSE units in Intel and the 3DNow! units in AMD are the same kind of thing, only a little more general purpose, and thus slower, than a GPU. The Cell processor in a Playstation 3 has seven such units (actually 8, but one deactivated to increase yield) in addition to a generic PowerPC CPU core. IBM is building the world's first petaflop supercomputer using Cell chips.
Seymour cray used to say what would you want to plow a field, 2 strong oxen or 1,024 chickens. The problem with that is we can make a 16-legged chicken these days that's stronger than both of his oxen.
Hey Shadow,
With my above post this has me thinking about yields. IBM is now seriously using the Cell for such applications. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for them to send all 8-core tested Cell processors to such use and then use all 7-core tested ones for the PS3? Right now they’re just deactivating the extra core even if it tests out to make all PS3 Cells the same. Or maybe they’re already doing this...
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