Why you will want Snow Leopard
Mac OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard, is coming soon. Why on earth should you be interested in it? Much less buy it???
New End-User Features?
No, not really. New features that you and I could use are scarce on the ground. Apple’s promised to “pause on innovation” to optimize for speed and stability.
Speed and Stability?
Snow Lepoard’s code has been written to work with Intel chips, and most apps that ship with OS X are supposed to be re-written to work with Cocoa, the preferred run-time. Whatever that means.
What it actually means is that apps written to run in Cocoa will be much faster than older apps. The Finder is reported to run in Cocoa, which means the Finder should be faster and more stable.
Rumors are about that there will be a new look-and-feel to the finder as well, similar to the appearance of the most recent Apple apps.
So Why Bother?
Make no mistake, the White Cat will be a major update. Mail, iCal and Address Book will have integrated support for Microsoft Exchange 2007, so Corporate Types can sync email, calendars and contacts to Macs and iPhones, without resorting to 3rd party work-arounds. This is pretty cool, but not the big deal.
What IS the big deal?
Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system. The OS and apps that run on it can use up to 16 TB of RAM, at least theoretically. Two new technologies will help to rocket performance: Grand Central manages and assigns tasks to multiple processor cores (most Intel Macs use ‘em) more efficiently, boosting performance. Multi-tasking will benefit considerably.
Programmers can use this new technology to build code that will work better on multi cores/processors as well. It’s a tough thing to do, up unil now, and more often than not, apps are designed for single core CPUs and hope that the OS will assign tasks efficiently.
Apps designed from the ground up to efficiently use multi-core, multi-processor machines will be speed demons compared with single-core designs.
The other technology is OpenCL, which taps the potential of graphics chip to take unused processing capacity and use it for general use when the GPU is not fully utilized. We won’t be able to run apps from the GPU alone, but think of it as a booster jet that can take an app like Photoshop and blast off.
QuickTime X is another technology Snow Leopard will use to boost performance, replacing QuickTime. More audio and video codecs are supported, and it leverages OpenCL and GrandCentral to offload video processing to the GPU. QuickTime X uses only a small part of the processor time to decode HD video compared to QuickTime.
Will everything speed up?
Snow Leopard will show up best with apps designed to make use of the new technologies. Current apps will see modest boosts in performance, but new apps will blow the old ones away.
Every OS X version has been more optimized than the last, so users have seen better performance with each upgrade. Windows hasn’t been doing this, so it will be interesting to see if Snow Leopard widens the performance gap with Windows 7.
When will Snow Leopard make the scene?
The iMac is overdue for an update, and it makes sense that it will debut with the new OS. Rumors have it that the new iMacs will shop with the latest Intel Core 2 Dual and Quad processors, instead of the same Intel Core 2 processors used in MacBooks. We may see new Nvidia graphics as well.
One way or another, Snow Leopard will be welcome to any user who has the need for speed.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
