Snow Leopard arriving early
EVEN WITHOUT Steve Jobs at the helm, it looks like next month's Macworld keynote could announce good news for Macolytes, if the current round of rumours is to be believed.
According to the Grauniad, Apple insiders and third party developers have been dropping hints that the next iteration of OSX, currently codenamed Snow Leopard, will be released into the wild at the eagerly-anticipated annual shindig.
And apart from the widely-predicted slimming down of the OS, pundits are predicting two major changes to the way the operating system crunches numbers.
Grand Central is a new technology designed to better use the Intel processors inside all modern Macs. But OpenCL promises to make even the lowliest Mac into a speed demon by passing chunks of complex calculations onto unused graphics card processing power.
Low-end Macbooks currently have 16 processors sitting idle on the graphics card most of the time. Using this additional number-crunching facility can speed up some operations tenfold. Top-end Mac Pros have up to 64 GPU cores sitting around doing not a lot most of the time and so may benefit from GPU offloading even more.
Apple originally said that the new OS would be ready for a June release, but it looks like Macaddicts' intense excitement over OpenCL has accelerated the process somewhat. And with Windows 7 looming on the horizon, Apple's got good reason to want to get Snow Leopard out the door sooner rather than later. µ
L'Inq
Grauniad
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"Low-end Macbooks currently have 16 processors sitting idle on the graphics card most of the time. Using this additional number-crunching facility can speed up some operations tenfold. Top-end Mac Pros have up to 64 GPU cores sitting around doing not a lot most of the time"
You of course realise these graphics cards are the same as PC graphics cards. Sound like you been sucked in by Apples marketing hype...
"You of course realise these graphics cards are the same as PC graphics cards. Sound like you been sucked in by Apples marketing hype... "
What's your point? Did they say they're any different from PC gfx cards?
does all other idel graphics cards utilise the idel power using openCL? thats the right question.
And your point is what exactly? You know, since it's an article about Mac OS 'n stuff...
Does it fix nVidia performance in the Apple "Pro" series of applications?
Until the AMD 3870 came out a few months back, the best performance in the "Pro" applications was from the ATI X1900XT. Much fun was also had cleaning dust from the X1900XT cooler. The cooler the Mac X1900XT used was the same reference dual-slot cooler used on the PC X1800/X1900. Also, in order to use the Mac X1900 on a newer Mac Pro, 64-bit EFI compatible firmware needed to be flashed onto the card using an older Mac Pro. In other words much fun was had.
If you were curious, the nVidia 8800GT and friends do win in gaming performance on MacOS X, but fall seriously flat in performance on the "Pro" apps.
Snow Leopard may well be demo'd and bigged up at the show but it won't be released for consumers to use in January. This is a non story.
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Can Person Play SnowLeopard on X86 desktop, just bit behind on that,here, yet of course Pc techie be Nuts NOT To BUY it! Seems Whole Gang Slimming down. Architecture Developing Drashekor pu,(R.PP~TM.C.BOBO'd) as Store upper level Arch. Commands in level one cache libaries,then bobo back on two way scooter, speeding up bunch of string internal enuciations. get it En u , cia ations? Well, its all code, code I tell you.TS Drashek WHHEEEEE....River botom BiNightMare Blande
Its not like macs have cutting edge graphics cards anyway. Especially not ATi ones