I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
If SL leverages the power of multi-core processors and the GPU then I'll gladly pay for it.
I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
Why would they is my question? Apple's cult following will clearly pay for anything Jobs is selling.
I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
What do I think?
Macintosh Next for Prez 2012!
Hell why not make it free? The quicker you get the majority of OS X users on 10.6 the more impact things like Grand Central Dispatch/OpenCL/Quicktime X make. The more developers have a keen motivation for leveraging the new features.
Releasing it for free would ameliorate some of the potential backlash over bugs. I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
If the upgrade version is free for Leopard users then they wouldn't complain but they would if it was free for everyone. If it's not free for everyone then it won't have quite the same uptake.
There are a lot of things Apple could do like why not charge less money for their products to get people on board. The reason is they don't care about market share. They care about making money.
Do they care that the app store reduces an end user's choices? No because they take a 30% cut from every single sale and control what apps you actually use. It's not about furthering technology, it's about money and power.
When Jobs goes on stage and says about how many people are on Tiger and Leopard, it's not so much a 'hey, look at how much people like the new systems' as 'look at how many people we forced to upgrade by making products incompatible with earlier versions'.
Getting Apple to give away a product free would be like the guy in Hancock trying to get drug companies to give away drugs to needy causes to earn a merit badge. The merit badge doesn't pay their salaries. At the end of the day, engineers had to work on the OS to reach 10.6 and they need to be paid.
That money is included in a hardware purchase so if they ship a few million machines and sell a few million standalone versions:
$129 * 10 million copies = $1.29 billion
If they can squeeze an extra billion out of the users why wouldn't they?
Flat out - this is not a rumor. It is a stated fact by an Apple senior engineer, Jordan Hubbard, at an industry conference. This wasn't an partner company employee mouthing off like those PPC and Sun zfs comments, this was Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies. Hubbard is pretty senior in the Apple engineering food chain.
With that said, Hubbard may not have had explicit clearance to say that so it may not be 100% accurate. He may know when the OS is supposed to be finished in engineering, but may not have baked in the rest of what would need to happen before shipping. Or maybe he has? Either way it isn't rumor, it is Apple provided public information.
I don't see it happening either. OpenCL has been finalised, there is still a couple of months before it is turned and blessed as a standard - I doubt Apple would want to ship a OpenCL implementation which isn't conforming to the OpenCL specification when it is finalised. Quicktime X hasn't been merged yet etc.
Some here will claim that Apple could change things - it is doubtful they would add/change a major feature before shipping, without adequate external testing.
I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
Many. Look at what happens everytime Apple releases a free 10.x.x update that does not correct some bugs. Now imagine what will happen with a major update, which in people's mind would be like a major improvement, so major expectations. OK, I am somehow joking but the fact remains.
Also, I agree with what Marvin said previously. Apple has shown throughout the years it cares more about getting our money than acquiring the charity charisma.
I hope they use OpenCL to improve the performance of their audio/video CODEC's because god knows its pretty pathetic when a free x264 is outperforming the x264 one written by Apple. If the whole of Quicktime X is optimised with OpenCL, I'd be a very happy person - the price would be worth that feature alone.
I hope they use OpenCL to improve the performance of their audio/video CODEC's because god knows its pretty pathetic when a free x264 is outperforming the x264 one written by Apple. If the whole of Quicktime X is optimised with OpenCL, I'd be a very happy person - the price would be worth that feature alone.
There's no need. The CPU is still the superior path for AV encodes (according to the heads at Doom9). I think the reason for this is fairly simple. The power of a GPU comes from fast processing and parallel processing. Video encodes don't always perform well when you try to parallel process them because with most recent codecs, the encoder looks at frames before and after a target portion. If you split these up and assign to different parts of the GPU this look backward/forward stuff is gone.
Nehalem improves some video encodes by 40%. I'd rather see Apple optimize Quicktime X for quality and speed using the CPU.
There's no need. The CPU is still the superior path for AV encodes (according to the heads at Doom9). I think the reason for this is fairly simple. The power of a GPU comes from fast processing and parallel processing. Video encodes don't always perform well when you try to parallel process them because with most recent codecs, the encoder looks at frames before and after a target portion. If you split these up and assign to different parts of the GPU this look backward/forward stuff is gone.
They'd do parts of the encoding on the GPU:
"only parts of the codec are very parallelizable (motion compensation, motion estimation, DCT and iDCT) but other parts of the pipeline (syntax decoding, variable length coding, CABAC) are not so well suited for NVIDIA's array of Streaming Processors."
A lot of GPU computation will be used to boost processes done by the CPU rather than replace them. No sense letting the CPUs go to waste and have the GPU do all the work so rather than it being CPU vs GPU, it's more CPU vs CPU+GPU and the latter should be equal or faster in pretty much every scenario.
Comments
I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
If SL leverages the power of multi-core processors and the GPU then I'll gladly pay for it.
I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
Why would they is my question? Apple's cult following will clearly pay for anything Jobs is selling.
I got a crazy idea. What if Snow Leopard was free? Yea, I'm throwing it out there. If it really is just a refining Leopard, no new features, natta -- then why not just make it free? I mean...really, why not? Or at least very, very cheap -- but free would be better. What you guys think?
What do I think?
Macintosh Next for Prez 2012!
Hell why not make it free? The quicker you get the majority of OS X users on 10.6 the more impact things like Grand Central Dispatch/OpenCL/Quicktime X make. The more developers have a keen motivation for leveraging the new features.
Releasing it for free would ameliorate some of the potential backlash over bugs. I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
If the upgrade version is free for Leopard users then they wouldn't complain but they would if it was free for everyone. If it's not free for everyone then it won't have quite the same uptake.
There are a lot of things Apple could do like why not charge less money for their products to get people on board. The reason is they don't care about market share. They care about making money.
Do they care that the app store reduces an end user's choices? No because they take a 30% cut from every single sale and control what apps you actually use. It's not about furthering technology, it's about money and power.
When Jobs goes on stage and says about how many people are on Tiger and Leopard, it's not so much a 'hey, look at how much people like the new systems' as 'look at how many people we forced to upgrade by making products incompatible with earlier versions'.
Getting Apple to give away a product free would be like the guy in Hancock trying to get drug companies to give away drugs to needy causes to earn a merit badge. The merit badge doesn't pay their salaries. At the end of the day, engineers had to work on the OS to reach 10.6 and they need to be paid.
That money is included in a hardware purchase so if they ship a few million machines and sell a few million standalone versions:
$129 * 10 million copies = $1.29 billion
If they can squeeze an extra billion out of the users why wouldn't they?
Flat out - this is not a rumor. It is a stated fact by an Apple senior engineer, Jordan Hubbard, at an industry conference. This wasn't an partner company employee mouthing off like those PPC and Sun zfs comments, this was Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies. Hubbard is pretty senior in the Apple engineering food chain.
With that said, Hubbard may not have had explicit clearance to say that so it may not be 100% accurate. He may know when the OS is supposed to be finished in engineering, but may not have baked in the rest of what would need to happen before shipping. Or maybe he has? Either way it isn't rumor, it is Apple provided public information.
I don't see it happening either. OpenCL has been finalised, there is still a couple of months before it is turned and blessed as a standard - I doubt Apple would want to ship a OpenCL implementation which isn't conforming to the OpenCL specification when it is finalised. Quicktime X hasn't been merged yet etc.
Some here will claim that Apple could change things - it is doubtful they would add/change a major feature before shipping, without adequate external testing.
I mean who's going to complain about a free OS X update?
Many.
Also, I agree with what Marvin said previously. Apple has shown throughout the years it cares more about getting our money than acquiring the charity charisma.
I hope they use OpenCL to improve the performance of their audio/video CODEC's because god knows its pretty pathetic when a free x264 is outperforming the x264 one written by Apple. If the whole of Quicktime X is optimised with OpenCL, I'd be a very happy person - the price would be worth that feature alone.
There's no need. The CPU is still the superior path for AV encodes (according to the heads at Doom9). I think the reason for this is fairly simple. The power of a GPU comes from fast processing and parallel processing. Video encodes don't always perform well when you try to parallel process them because with most recent codecs, the encoder looks at frames before and after a target portion. If you split these up and assign to different parts of the GPU this look backward/forward stuff is gone.
Nehalem improves some video encodes by 40%. I'd rather see Apple optimize Quicktime X for quality and speed using the CPU.
There's no need. The CPU is still the superior path for AV encodes (according to the heads at Doom9). I think the reason for this is fairly simple. The power of a GPU comes from fast processing and parallel processing. Video encodes don't always perform well when you try to parallel process them because with most recent codecs, the encoder looks at frames before and after a target portion. If you split these up and assign to different parts of the GPU this look backward/forward stuff is gone.
They'd do parts of the encoding on the GPU:
"only parts of the codec are very parallelizable (motion compensation, motion estimation, DCT and iDCT) but other parts of the pipeline (syntax decoding, variable length coding, CABAC) are not so well suited for NVIDIA's array of Streaming Processors."
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3339&p=2
A lot of GPU computation will be used to boost processes done by the CPU rather than replace them. No sense letting the CPUs go to waste and have the GPU do all the work so rather than it being CPU vs GPU, it's more CPU vs CPU+GPU and the latter should be equal or faster in pretty much every scenario.