slemishwoodcrafts
Established Member
Just purchased the upgrade for apple's latest version of OS X snow leopard. It promises to be even better than the previous leopard, and the upgrade price was £25!!
michael
michael
Snow Leopard
- Thread starter slemishwoodcrafts
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RogerS
Established Member
You're very brave! Might just wait a while. Are you on Intel or PowerPC chips?
RogerS
Established Member
kityuser":2mkjcc3z said:
That's interesting, Steve, and you're dead right. Somewhere along the line I thought that SL was still going to be for PowerPC chips as well. The rumour mill got it wrong. They were talking about PPC support the last time I looked but clearly Apple bailed out. Looking at the new features of Snow Leopard there's no 'imperative to buy' for me and so I guess I can soldier on with my lowly G4 Mac a while longer.
RogerS":2nm33gho said:kityuser":2nm33gho said:
That's interesting, Steve, and you're dead right. Somewhere along the line I thought that SL was still going to be for PowerPC chips as well. Perhaps the rumour mill got it wrong. So maybe now is the time to buy a new Apple
LOTS of people VERY unhappy that quite capable G5 Powermacs (some even quad cores) can't run the new SL.
If you want to upgrade, now would be the time.
I`d say 10.5 will be fine for many years, poke open CL, 64 bit apps, how many bloody emails will you need before "Mail" requires more than 4 gig of ram ! :shock:
If I had unlimited money I might get excited, as per usual "I" probably won't see any benefit with my old hardware.
Steve
slemishwoodcrafts
Established Member
yep, my macbook has Intel chips. I just bought it because at that price, I saw it has good value.
I too thought it was going to support PPC chips? Obviously not then!!
michael
I too thought it was going to support PPC chips? Obviously not then!!
michael
Yeah I ordered it too, in my case for €29. Excellent value for a new operating system which will speed up your machine and also give you back a couple of gigs disc space.slemishwoodcrafts":30haav1r said:
Neil.
RogerS
Established Member
neilc":25tb8uob said:
A couple?/ They're claiming 7Gb reclaimed which is rather good.
I'm struggling with this one I must admit. People are talking about a OS re-install to save 7 gigs of ram and an unknown performance boost.
As I understand it, the "apple way" of upgrading is "archive and install" (which I`ve never done). Now assuming you keep the archive then its far more than 7 gigs you`ll be DOWN.
Assuming you re-install leopard from scratch I`m pretty sure you'd save in excess of 7 gig just down to the baggage one seems to collect as an OS has been installed for some while.
as for the performance boost I have read that the new kernel is optimised to run faster than the old one. And certainly if the PPC extension stuff has been removed then theres a good reason why it should run faster. But, remember that some of the performance boost stuff reported is hardware specific. i.e. open CL, grandcentral AND 64 bit apps.
At present the 10.6 kernel defaults to 32 bit, which isn't a massive issue unless you want to run more than 32Gig of ram. All of the 64 bit apps will run fine on top of the 32 bit kernel. BUT the real gottya is that some of the older x86 macs aren't 64 bit, i.e. the core duo variants (NOT the core2duo, they are 64 bit) and core solo. The modern hardware is fine, but be aware that some of the older apple x86 machines won't be running the 64bit versions of native apps. The thinking behind the 64bit apps is that they can take advantage of 64bit CPU op codes and with code optimisation run faster.
hard to grasp what the performance boost will be, but I know for sure that i have a whole raft of software on my mac that is not going to be 10.6 compatible for a while :?
I`d most certainly not upgrade an OS (and start from fresh) unless there was a bloody good reason, 7 gigs of disk space and maybe a bit faster doesn't cut the mustard for me.
If i had a tower mac, with the bees knees GPU and (for a living) rendered graphics or processed video or worked with CAD then I`d be at 10.6 (in a few months when the bugs have fell out of the mix) like a shot. I`d get a boost from open CL, grand central and 64 bit apps
of course I`m interested to hear what people experience after the update/upgrade.
steve
As I understand it, the "apple way" of upgrading is "archive and install" (which I`ve never done). Now assuming you keep the archive then its far more than 7 gigs you`ll be DOWN.
Assuming you re-install leopard from scratch I`m pretty sure you'd save in excess of 7 gig just down to the baggage one seems to collect as an OS has been installed for some while.
as for the performance boost I have read that the new kernel is optimised to run faster than the old one. And certainly if the PPC extension stuff has been removed then theres a good reason why it should run faster. But, remember that some of the performance boost stuff reported is hardware specific. i.e. open CL, grandcentral AND 64 bit apps.
At present the 10.6 kernel defaults to 32 bit, which isn't a massive issue unless you want to run more than 32Gig of ram. All of the 64 bit apps will run fine on top of the 32 bit kernel. BUT the real gottya is that some of the older x86 macs aren't 64 bit, i.e. the core duo variants (NOT the core2duo, they are 64 bit) and core solo. The modern hardware is fine, but be aware that some of the older apple x86 machines won't be running the 64bit versions of native apps. The thinking behind the 64bit apps is that they can take advantage of 64bit CPU op codes and with code optimisation run faster.
hard to grasp what the performance boost will be, but I know for sure that i have a whole raft of software on my mac that is not going to be 10.6 compatible for a while :?
I`d most certainly not upgrade an OS (and start from fresh) unless there was a bloody good reason, 7 gigs of disk space and maybe a bit faster doesn't cut the mustard for me.
If i had a tower mac, with the bees knees GPU and (for a living) rendered graphics or processed video or worked with CAD then I`d be at 10.6 (in a few months when the bugs have fell out of the mix) like a shot. I`d get a boost from open CL, grand central and 64 bit apps
of course I`m interested to hear what people experience after the update/upgrade.
steve
RogerS
Established Member
kityuser":xogy8ef3 said:
Ooh..thanks for that Steve - you've just stopped me potentially making a very bad mistake!! It's very hard to fathom out which CPUs the ones on eBay have and even on the Apple site for that matter. For example, on the Apple site, the iMac clearly says Core 2 Duo but the current Mac Pro just says a Nehalem Xeon quad core...so does this not run 64 bit stuff?
Roger
RogerS":pr357y4a said:
I`m far from an expert (although I design processors so I should be I suppose
)Core solo
Core Duo
are not 64 bit
Core 2 Duo (including extreme)
Xeon
Nehalem
are all 64 bit
its really the older mac hardware you need to be careful of
OpenCL leverages GPU porcessing power but only for:
* NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX5600
* ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870
grand central is suppose to open up multi-core processors, and in a way it does.
The holy grail of software at present is getting singled threaded programmes to run on multiple cpu cores. Its an age old problem, you have 4 or 8 cores in your machine, but with single threaded programmes you'll only go as fast (on that task) as the fastest (single) core available, i.e. your work can't be slip across all the processors you have. Its not easy......... grand central comes along and we all thingk"yey" but reading between the line:
"With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores"
ok, it all sounds nice, but the programme has to be muti-threading to start with and "GCD-enabled". all sounds cobblers to me!
This will only really give you a nice big speed boost on number crunching programmes, transcoding, compressing, image processing etc.
Its hard for me to see what an average Joe is going to benefit from GCD with everyday tasks.
ah well....sigh
Steve
RogerS
Established Member
kityuser":3mnujd24 said:
I'd be seriously worried if the individual applications were allowed unfettered access to the threads and not the OS !!!!
Thanks for the clarification BTW. Second hand 4Gb iMac with a decent sized hard drive and a good CPU speed looks favourite. As with all things there is good news and bad news. The good news is that SWMBO's philosophy is to buy new and has no objections to me buying a new one...even thinks it makes more sense than buying a second hand machine. The bad news? No cash!
