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Snow Leopard and Multi-Core Computing

Started by William Grim, 2009-09-02T00:32:43-05:00 (Wednesday)

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William Grim

Ars Technica has done a really good job of reviewing Apple's latest operating system, Snow Leopard.  You can find that review here.

I have to say, the two main features I was looking forward to seeing were Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.  However, I didn't realize the latest builds of LLVM and CLang (gcc-compatible front-end written for LLVM) are building code 3x as fast and producing executables that run several percentage points (5-25%) faster.  That is pretty impressive, and all this can be setup on Linux or BSD as well, for those of you wanting to do that.  Not to mention it has much better error reporting, and Xcode utilizes that well with actual graphs in your editor.

Anyway, Apple extended all C-derivative languages it has (C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++) with anonymous functions they call "blocks".  Hopefully this will make it into the final C spec, but it lets you take easy control of GCD to multithread your app easily and scale up to however many CPU/GPGPUs you have (see first link in last paragraph).

I don't want to repeat the whole article, but check it out!  You guys with Macs should try it all out like I am doing, and those of you just interested in the state-of-the-art should just have a read to see what's going on in this space.  It's going to get interesting...
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Bryan

Yes, but can it play games?

(sorry, Mike, I had to!)
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.

William Grim

Well, they've got WoW and Super Breakout.

P.S. Starcraft 2 is coming to it!
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Shaun Martin

I just recently purchased a Macbook Pro and it runs WoW better than my gaming PC.
Shaun Martin
SIUE Alumni
Associate IT Analyst, AT&T Services, Inc. St. Louis, MO.

Adam C

I'm running snow leopard as we speak. Its great so far!

Shaun Martin

Also meant to add that I am running Snow Leopard.
Shaun Martin
SIUE Alumni
Associate IT Analyst, AT&T Services, Inc. St. Louis, MO.

Jeff Croxell

Yes improved processor core usage is nice, but how's everyone like their new file/drive sizes?

http://www.macworld.com/article/142471/2009/08/snow_leopard_math.html
Jeff Croxell
CS Support
SIUE

William Grim

Quote from: Jeff Croxell on 2009-09-02T21:05:49-05:00 (Wednesday)
Yes improved processor core usage is nice, but how's everyone like their new file/drive sizes?

http://www.macworld.com/article/142471/2009/08/snow_leopard_math.html

Jeff, I'm not a major fan of it, because it's inconsistent across the system and Unix tools.  In reality, if they want to be more correct and cause the least amount of disruption, I think they simply should have changed the prefixes from, say, "MB" to "MiB".  Having said that, I completely understand the reasoning and agree CS got it wrong.  We should all just complain to Apple, and I'll try to complain on their developer forums.  I don't know how much impact it'll have, but maybe they'll at least put in an option to change it, as they seem to listen to their 3rd party devs, no matter how big or small you are.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley