Snow Leopard and newly announced Intel chips should make a sweet combo
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 22, 2008 at 2:37am
In covering Intel’s announcement of upcoming quad-core chips for laptops Infoworld says that “getting a quad-core processor into a laptop is more about bragging rights than a genuine boost in performance.” That’s true for many Windows-based systems, but less true for Mac OS X systems.
Infoworld notes that very little PC software is designed to take advantage of multiple cores and that “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.” However, with the upcoming Snow Leopard, having a quad-core laptop will make even more sense. One of the additional benefits is that increases in performance from better use of multi-core chips will extend the usable life of the hardware further. Virtualization is another big place where multi-core chips will play a big part.
“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings “unrivaled support” for multicore systems to Mac OS X, according to Apple, who says that “more cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors.” 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. Apple says that Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
So the combination of Snow Leopard/Grand Central with Intel’s quad-core laptop processors should result in some really fast Mac laptops (and probably iMacs, as well).
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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