GrandCentralDispatch
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Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent
It'll take some time before we see the true impact of OpenCL and the newly-open-sourced Grand Central Dispatch on OS X, but we're definitely intrigued by this early report from Christophe Ducommun, developer of MovieGate, who says that shifting his app to use the new tech has increased performance by around 50 percent on the same hardware. Testing on a 2007 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro with a GeForce 8800GT, MovieGate MPEG-2 encode speeds went from 104fps under Leopard to 150fps under Snow Leopard, and decoding CPU usage dropped from 165 percent to 70 percent. Now, yes, that's just one app, and most users don't have four cores to play with, but it's still an eye-opening result, and we're definitely hoping it's the start of a trend. [Via MacRumors]
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch goes open source -- get at those cores, people
Grand Central Dispatch may not exactly be a household name to the average Apple user, but it's certainly a hot topic among developers, who may know it better as "libdispatch," and are no doubt thrilled that Apple has now made the whole thing open source. Among other things, that means developers are now able to take full advantage of multi-core processors in Snow Leopard, which obviously has some fairly big implications for applications as soon as those developers are able to get a handle on things. Know what you're doing? Just like to get in over your head? Then you can find the complete source code and other necessary information at the read link below.[Via Slashdot]
What Snow Leopard feature are you anticipating the most?
Now that we have the actual ship date for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (August 28th for those who haven't yet had a cup of coffee to wake them up), it's time to start thinking about what benefits you can gain from the newest member of Apple's cat family.Apple has told us from the start that Snow Leopard is predominantly about streamlining both the size and speed of the operating system. Installing Snow Leopard should take about half the time of performing a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install, and it's expected that you'll gain about 7 GB of space back on your hard disk.Snow Leopard is also bringing some new features to the table, including 64-bit support, Grand Central Dispatch's multicore support, and OpenCL, all of which can provide better performance for applications. There are amazing improvements to the Mac OS X Universal Access features, particularly for the vision-impaired. For those who use their Macs in a predominantly Windows office environment, the full built-in support for Exchange should make life much simpler. TUAW would like to know what Snow Leopard feature you're anticipating the most, so we've come up with a short list for you to choose from in a poll. We'll use these results to provide you with detailed coverage about those features. If your favorite improvement or feature isn't on the list, leave a comment and tell us what you're excited about.%Poll-33656%
Snow Leopard shipping August 28th for $29, order now
Well, it's not September, but we're not going to hold an early launch of its performance-focused Snow Leopard OS against Apple. The Apple store has come back online bearing an order page for OS X version 10.6 in Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Pro... oh wait, it's just $29 as an upgrade from 10.5. August 28th, that's when, now go 'n get it.While you wait for that order to ship, Apple wants you to know that Snow Leopard's Finder is more responsive, Mail loads messages twice as fast, Time Machine will complete initial backups 80 percent faster, and a 64-bit version of Safari 4 is 50 percent faster than its predecessors. There's even QuickTime X with a redesigned player that lets users view, record, trim and share video. Of course, this release also includes Grand Central Dispatch, a new way for devs to take advantage of multi-core processors as well as OpenCL support to accelerate apps with the help of that idling graphics processor. Oh, and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange too. All in all, a worthy update, especially for the price.P.S. Requires Intel-based Mac.
