14 DAY TRIAL // A recent report from MacOSRumors.com talks about the upcoming release of OS X, Leopard.
Apparently, one of the major steps forward in Leopard will be the code which Apple co-developed with Intel to help in breaking up tasks into multiple threads. Currently, the benefit of having more than four cores are increasingly diminishing, because there are simply not enough threads, efficiently enough balanced, to make good use of more CPU's.
According to MOSR, Leopard will see an end to this situation, and applications will be able to take advantage of all the cores present. "It's a thing of beauty to see 16 cores used with bizarrely perfect symmetry even when performing relatively simple tasks that have nearly no application-level threading in their collective codebases. 32 cores work nearly as well, and somehow manage to make tasks that would normally only max out one or two cores and be unable to go beyond that point, spread out across nearly all the CPU's."
Also of great interest is their take on Leopard and virtualization. "Rather than adding Windows application compatibility to OS X or even official dual-boot support to the latest "Macintel" computers, Apple's emphasis in the 10.5 era will be on resurrecting 'Yellow Box for Windows,' a set of Cocoa (and potentially also Carbon) API's for Windows that would allow Universal Binary applications to run on Windows with a mere 150MB software package installation. And best of all, there is no extra work to be done on the developer's part to get fully native, rock-solid stable performance from their Xcode-developed Universal applications on Windows! Expect much more about this in our Leopard In-Depth Reports coming up soon."
Such a move would make a lot of sense for Apple. Instead of being faced with the situation that occurred with OS/2 from IBM, which was doomed by Windows compatibility, as all the developers just coded for Windows since it would also run on OS/2, Apple would be turning the tables around. This approach would entice developers to create Mac software, which could also be run on Windows and reverse the situation. It would be the best way to wean developers off Windows and get them coding those much needed Mac versions.