Road to Snow Leopard: Twice the RAM, half the price, 64-bits - Page 3

I really don't think that's a key reason. I don't think that's even relevent. I would suggest that if they drop PPC, the real reason would be that there's not enough of them out there to justify the work needed to make them run the new OS. Only iMac G5s and PowerMac G5s can run 64 bit PPC code, and their relevance is fading pretty quickly. Only the towers can address more than 2.5GB of memory, all the base models except the dual core ones are effectively limited to 4GB based on memory board availability.

This doesn't make sense. A copy of OS X (generally the latest at time of shipping) is included with every mac. So, Apple only sells OS upgrades to it's qualified (by qualified i mean users owning a recent enough machine) users.

I'm sure PPC and CoreDuo users will have 10.5 security updates for years to come.

I doubt Crysis will ever be out for Apple. SJ has never been big on gaming. Even the 8800gs card would have a problem runnign Crysis.

Well maybe on a MBP is could with a lower res, it would never run well on a 24" iMac if you tried to run it in full 1920x1200

I agree that the reason here is the number of users compared to Intel-based Macs, but I think it's a key reason as to why they are doing it now with Snow Leopard as opposed to doing it with Leopard, which one could construe as an initial key reason or secondary key reason.


Anyone want to figure out what percentage of Macs will be PPC by the time SL comes out? (image is hyperlinked)

Apple did offer point updates to System 9 for about 10 months after OS X came out. The situation is different since Apple was well into selling PPC-based Macs which OS X would install on, but I think Apple will continue with point updates for Leopard, perhaps even adding some aspects of Snow Leopard to the Leopard updates, until a full 36 months of support has passed.

Your posts have no purpose you are just trying to be an ass for no reason.

I have not made a single comment regarding any errors. We come to this forum to attempt civil debates and share information, you are doing neither.

In any case the fact that you are even talking about iPhones and PC's and Servers tells me right theres tells me the number on my W2 is will out of your reach. In my world systems cost 30 million just to start.

You were smugly touting how great Vista 64 was at doing mundane tasks. I pointed out how any machine should be able to do that. You went off on random tangents, (iphones and comparing a stock parts home built pc to a laptop?) that i had fun responding to. I've used forums before, thanks.

why don't u go "encode" some "extreme skating" old guy.

Shouldn't the "e" in "english" be capitalized, i.e. English?
\

You really must be some kid living in his mom's basement. It's the only thing I can think of seeing you are hung up on a guy in his 30's being old.

I am sure you have used forums before, if your big event for the night is your syncing iPhones clearly you aren't getting laid all that often.

Okay now go tell your mom your going to play with your Wii for 15 mins and then go to bed.

My old Dell desktop lasted me for 7 years and was still going strong (as far as my needs went...mainly browsing, some Word & Excel). It was maintained well with regular scandisks, defragmenting, very minimum 3rd party apps, etc. No hardware issues till the end. Finally I got bored of it and can't contain my excitement at the prospect of owning a new Apple...so gave it away to my domestic help and am now the owner of a recent macbook pro ;-)

point is...only 5 years life expectancy for a mac??

The article pointed out, quite rightly, that when buying a gaming system with one of the new 1GB cards only 2.3 GB is available. This is quite true.

Your experience is different. You don't have a high end machine. It's ironic, isn't it, when a lower end machine can use more memory than a high end machine?


You will have to explain this.

It's convincing when you understand it.

How about all the features promised for Longhorn, er Vista, that were pulled, one by one?

I think what happens sometimes, is that with simple things like this, say the spelling and capitalization of Mac - MAC, is that when it's pointed out, instead of saying "oops!", there is embarrassment, and instead, the spelling is insisted upon.

There is overmuch concern about this.

If he wants to write MAC, fine, let him. We all know what he means.

I don't think so. Just not paying attention.

That's embarrassing!

Crysis is the game that no PC player can ever play at high resolution with all features on, and still get decent frame rates.

Anyone who claims (s)he can, is BSing.

It's what he does. Get used to it. We all have.

You can always correct your post after you write it.

I work at that too, but mess up sometimes.

I hate writing like a slob. It makes the point less presentable, and believable.

The 50 MP sensor from Canon is just a rumor, based on remarks from a canon person who was talking about possibilities down the road.

Nikon came out with a 12.1 MP sensor because this is the first high quality sensor the did by themselves designwise. You must walk before you run. They were getting killed by Canon, and decided to concentrate on noise levels first, which is much easier to do on a low MP sensor such as the one they came up with (which they don't actually make themselves).

I guarantee you that Nikon will have a higher pixel sensor. Possibly the 24+ MP one Sony will announce shortly in a new camera.

The MP race has not ended by a long shot. This has given Nikon some short term breathing room.

Canon will come close in noise with its newer cameras, if not equal it, with higher pixel counts, which ARE important.

Why would that screw anyone? I would hope that by the time 10.6 comes out, that people who wanted to, will have upgraded already.

If not, they can buy new copies at a very good discount at various places which usually sell older versions, at least for some time after they've been discontinued.

I don't believe that there won't be features that others won't want.

Even though jobs did say that this isn't going to be a feature upgrade version, I don't see anyone really believing that there won't be at least, the coming out of some features that we've been seeing included in the OS now, but not implemented for the general user, such as resolution independence.

Plenty of people will really want that. That's a minimum.

While I'm not taking side on this argument (enough problems with my own), but didn't you say that you were in IT for 21+ years? You started when you were how old?

so this means:

Stripping down the PPC code base out of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) but still 32 bit en 64 bit support.

You've only got to look at what they're adding in 10.6 Server to realise there's lots of new features in OSX Client.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/snowleopard/

That was probably in reference to the performance-hurting cache-flushing phenomenon described in the article we're all commenting on in this thread. Apparently in any version of OS X released for the Intel architecture to-date, a certain cache needs to be flushed at least twice every time any system call is made in any current version of OSX, while such flushes only happen during context-switches with a Windows NT kernel.

As described in the article, it apparently has to do with the design decision Microsoft made to place a protected, shared 2GB kernel partition inside every process's virtual address space at the expense of leaving each process with less usable memory for its own code and data. With OS X, on the other hand, each process needs to switch to a totally different virtual address space every time any system call is made, and the addresses actually used by the kernel and the application within their respective address spaces directly overlap.

The article claims that with Snow Leopard, OS X is going to start doing the same thing as Windows - mapping a copy of the kernel into each 64-bit process's virtual address space. The kernel and the application have many terabytes to play within each virtual address space, so avoiding overlap won't be a problem. The trade-off of addressable memory per process versus performance will not be as severe as it has grown to become for 32-bit Windows.

I'd agree - because it isn't just PC users, it is users in general. The average user is an idiot - "I need a computer to get on this internet thing - I don't know what the hell it is, but apparently I should have it" is the mentality of many people out there.

The fact that you stated PC user instead of computer users in general - some how claiming that Mac users were 'superior'.

I started working for them as a junior computer operator right out of high school at 17. So while I am in my late 30's im still only in my 30's, don't think I can apply for a Medicare card yet...

As far as Vista x64 or x86 for that matter both work fairly well. I have had no real problems with either but I will say x64 appears more stable now that I have been using it a while.

As to your point about features dropped, I am sure there have been several in Vista, nothing I can really say I miss. I my opinion both operating systems are getting closer and closer to having the same feel.

For me Leopard has been more of a nagging pain because it's issues affect my work. The biggest that has bugged me are the network issues.

I would say most of the problems with Vista in the begining were users attempting to install it or bought systems that simply could not handle the OS. If someone had a system with 1 gig of ram paging would go crazy and the system would take forever to start.

So what you're saying is that you understand it, but no-one else does. It's just your little secret. Or maybe you just don't know what you're talking about.

I don't think it's a very well-kept secret at all.

Consider a single thread of execution containing a tight loop performing iterative mathematical operations on a set of variables. In a traditional 32-bit x86, you basically have 4 general-purpose registers available (*AX, *BX, *CX, and *DX) in which to hold those variables and perform the math. Of course, it is often possible to re-purpose the *SI and *DI registers for such information, and with major caveats sometimes (but not often) the *BP and even *SP registers. But there's clearly still a fairly limited slate of registers available for a single thread of execution to work with.

If you have more than variables to work with than will fit in the available registers, then some of those variables must necessarily be transferred back and forth with system RAM, in conjunction with the cache. Operations where one or more source and/or destination operands are located in RAM are are slower than what could be accomplished if all sources and destinations were limited to CPU registers.

On an x64 CPU operating in long mode, you have 8 more general purpose registers available (R8, R9, ..., R15), it is possible to as much as triple the number of variables that a single thread of execution can keep track of before it needs to resort to RAM (and cache) transfers. Obviously, to be useful, a compiler must be made aware of the availability of the extra registers. But equally obviously, if an application is 64-bits, then it is automatically the case that it must have been produced by a compiler that is aware of, and thus capable of taking advantage of, the extra registers available in that mode.


They did. The Itanium architecture had 128 registers. It failed where x64 succeeded, in part, because Intel didn't provide a backwards compatible path for existing software. Conversely, the x86 architecture continued to thrive with few registers for as long as it did, not because adding more registers wouldn't have been helpful, but rather because maintaining compatibility with older software was more advantageous.

It's always comforting to me to know that, in 20 to 30 years, you'll be scratching your head trying to understand why your children/neighbors kids/anyone younger than you, dismisses you out of hand with the "old guy" tag. Provided, of course, that you survive the "growing up" process.

Of course. There is no way that 10.6 would come out with NO features.

That doesn't look as though its a detriment right now, when compared to Windows. Performance wise, Vista has been a dog. It's only recently that most of that has been fixed. Comparable programs also seem to perform about the same on both platforms.

No, basically, you don't seem to understand it.

The register "problem" has been held up as a major reason why 64 bit X86 chips have an advantage in program run speeds over their 32 bit counterparts, whils the same thing isn't true for G5s vs G4's and earlier.

Obviously, there are other factors at work as well.

more non specific crap from the IT specialist. What networking issues? All that iphone syncing? It's the same setup as a Windows Mobile phone. username/pass/OWA addresss takes 20 seconds, just like you.

So you were installing Mainframes for IBM when you were 17 out of Highschool huh?

for the record, Schenanagans. I don't even think your an IT guy.

Please! Just a little bit more civility. I you're attacked, you can respond, but not just because you don't agree, or believe. If someone isn't responding, then you can get a bit snarly, but otherwise keep the level down.

Thanks.

Totally agree. It is grounds for a class action law suit I would imagine. The misleading and untrue information is in print for heaven's sake!
(Yes still in the mountains!)

"killed"? Boy, you're morbid.

Anyway, to me, it appears they were doing pretty well in the business even before they introduced those two models.


I don't think the MP deal has ended, but it seems most people put way too much emphasis on it, I was happy to see a few examples of focusing on something else instead, those aren't the only ones, but it's rare enough. I understand that some people truly need it, a great deal more think they need it but really don't, and I'm not in either category. The files are already getting plenty big enough and for the most part, it really doesn't benefit me to have them get bigger when many of the current pixels are already getting thrown away en masse because of the output medium.

Ah, come on, you know that's just an expression. Canon and Nikon have 90% of the D-SLR market together. Canon has had about two thirds of that 90%, so they were "killing" Nikon there. With the D3 and D700, Nikon has made up a bit of that.

Canon won't let them keep it. They have a history of pushing back hard when required. They also have a good deal of research into sensor and processing chip technology going on, which they have related in a public way.

Canon also sells about half of the point and shoot digital cameras out there.


It depends on which "people" you're talking about. Most amateurs (I mean serious shooters) don't need anything above perhaps 16 MP. But pro's and advanced amateurs want, and need, as much as they can get.

For example. The Canon 1Ds II was deliberately made to have a sensor of 16.7 MP. Why? Because a double page magazine spread of 11 x 17 at a 150 line screen is best with a 300 ppi file. That turns out to be 16.7 MP plus or minus a tenth MP or so.

But pros often have to do a bit of a trim (or the editors do), so voilá, 21 MP for the 1Ds III.

My printer is 17" by whatever. To make a print with a file that's 300 DPI on the print (my printer raises that to 600 DPI when printing with interpolation, if I don't do it first in PS, which I do) requires a file that's (for a 3/2 file format) 5100 x 7650, or 39MP, which is the size of a large medium format back. That gives me no option to do any cropping at all at that size and remain at highest quality. That file is increased to 156 MP for the print as I've just explained.

Does that give you an idea of what the problem is?

I don't think most amateurs benefit from anything far beyond 10MP.


There are pros that really do need it, but going much beyond 10MP is really serving mediums that appear to be fading in relevance. I mean, there's not much point in someone demanding 600ppi from a C sized print like your example. Most people aren't going to look that close. I try to point out detail in a letter sized photo prints, but pretty much no one cares. Knock photos down to VGA size for email and nobody seems to be any less impressed with the photo.

You don't think, don't you?

And other than a "feeling", exactly what technical justification makes you say this?



You use the expression of one who knows little of the matter.

I can assure you that people do look closely at prints. You are just not interested in photography enough to do so, and so you think that others don't either.

I was in this business since 1969, when I did my first fashion photography. I've made prints, and viewed many others over that time. There are plenty of people who would disagree with you.

If you haven;t ever seen really fine prints, which you obviously haven't, you would see the difference between them, and soft unprofessionl ones.

While I certainly agree that people wanting $200 point and shoots don't need it, they make smallish prints that can't use it, those making prints of larger sizes and of high quality, do.

I always find it interesting that people are willing to exclaim that others don't need what they don't appreciate, or understand.