Panther is 32-bit according to MacWorld UK article
Not having seen the keynote yet nor having read anything on this matter yet, I thought I'd post the following excerpt from a Macworld UK article in case it wasn't mentioned in another thread.
Quote:
In the short term this [64-bit] power will be restricted to such fields as scientific research and cryptology, but will eventually filter down to more desktop-orientated operations. Yet the G5 can still happily run today's 32-bit applications, even those running in OS X's Classic environment. This is because when Apple, IBM and Motorola designed the original PowerPC back in the early 1990s, it was always planned to be a 64-bit chip - unlike Intel's Pentium. The Pentium's 64-bit successor, the Itanium, is "years away from reaching the desktop" claimed Boger.
Panther will remain 32-bit, however, as nearly all that power is still only needed at the very highest levels of computation. Developers can still write calls that take advantage of the 64-bit architecture. And Apple has rewritten the way that 10.2 Jaguar addresses memory. Mac OS X 10.2.7 - which ships in the G5 - has no memory limit, allowing up to 4GB of RAM per processor using the DIMMs that are available today.
In the short term this [64-bit] power will be restricted to such fields as scientific research and cryptology, but will eventually filter down to more desktop-orientated operations. Yet the G5 can still happily run today's 32-bit applications, even those running in OS X's Classic environment. This is because when Apple, IBM and Motorola designed the original PowerPC back in the early 1990s, it was always planned to be a 64-bit chip - unlike Intel's Pentium. The Pentium's 64-bit successor, the Itanium, is "years away from reaching the desktop" claimed Boger.
Panther will remain 32-bit, however, as nearly all that power is still only needed at the very highest levels of computation. Developers can still write calls that take advantage of the 64-bit architecture. And Apple has rewritten the way that 10.2 Jaguar addresses memory. Mac OS X 10.2.7 - which ships in the G5 - has no memory limit, allowing up to 4GB of RAM per processor using the DIMMs that are available today.
Comments
It is good that Apple's included support for 64-bit applications and 64-bit memory addressing in Panther.
I don't know of anything part of Panther that would be significantly helped by being transmorgified into 64-bit. But then, I'm not a l33t programmer. Maybe cryptography would be helped, I don't know.
Barto