14 DAY TRIAL // Sujan Kamran, regional marketing manager for client platforms at Intel in Singapore, has confirmed the company's intentions to bring quad-core to laptops in August. According to an InfoWorld report covering the topic, "getting a quad-core processor into a laptop is more about bragging rights than a genuine boost in performance." Is that really so?
What about Snow Leopard? Dennis Sellers of MacsimumNews points out to a recent announcement made by Apple, particularly that of Snow Leopard's new set of technologies which brings unrivaled support for multicore systems on Mac OS X. The InfoWorld report says that "very little PC software is designed to take advantage of multiple cores and it's unclear what performance benefits a quad-core chip would offer over a dual-core chip, such as the 3.06GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9100."
This is not false, but with Snow Leopard's said capabilities, things are going to be a tad different for MacBook users, for instance. "Grand Central," a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores (not faster clock speeds), will drive performance to increase in today's processors, Apple says. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems. An additional benefit is that increased performance will extend the life of the hardware, while virtualization is also taken a step further with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and its multicore emphasis.
Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL, makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently "locked up" in the graphics processing unit (GPU), according to Apple. OpenCL is based on C (programming language) and has been proposed as an open standard. Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM, the company says, emphasizing OS X's focus on 64-bit technology.