Tag Archive for 'os x'

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 10, 2008
. 0 Comments

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ;-) ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

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

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. 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. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment! :-)
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog


Why I think Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is for upcoming Atom-based devices

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 7, 2008
. 10 Comments

It’s the week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). That means the rumor mill is in overdrive. I’m not immune - it’s fun to speculate! :-) Take this post for what it’s worth. I don’t have any inside information, I don’t know any secrets, I’m just guessing and having fun.

Besides the new 3G iPhone (which is almost a certainty), the other juicy tidbit that surfaced this week was news of a new operating system revision - OS X 10.6. Jacqui at Ars got the scoop, letting us know that it’s supposed to be called “Snow Leopard”, move completely to Cocoa (dropping legacy Carbon support), and that it will be for Intel processors only (dropping support for the PowerPC chips in older Macs), and not contain any new features, only enhancements to stability, performance, and security.

But a few things just don’t add up to me. It sounds plausible that a new operating system would get announced at the Developer conference (as opposed to a consumer event), to give developers time to get ready for its release. I could buy that it’s Intel-only - they’ll probably drop PowerPC support at some point. But it does seem a little soon to be talking about the next OS release - OS X 10.5 Leopard has barely been out 8 months. And people would be reluctant to plunk down the $129 that Apple has always charged for a new release of Mac OS X if it doesn’t have any new features.

Then, yesterday, it hit me. What if this new version of Mac OS X, 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, isn’t intended for Macs at all, but for a new class of device altogether? Say, the long-rumored Apple tablet device, a Mobile Internet Device, based on the new Intel Atom processor?

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, and it all makes sense. I can’t find anything that refutes the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think I’m right. :-) I haven’t seen anyone else speculate along these lines (though I could be wrong), so if that’s the case, I may get to say “you heard it here first!” :-)

Here are the reasons I think the new OS is for a new class of Atom-based, non-Mac devices:

  1. A “tablet” device, bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook, has been rumored FOREVER. How many appearances has it made it to John Siracusa’s WWDC and MacWorld Bingo cards? ;-)
  2. An Intel Germany executive was recently quoted as saying Apple would be launching an Atom-powered mobile internet device at WWDC (this was later denied by Intel).
  3. Banners were spied at the Moscone Center this week with “OS X Leopard” and “OS X iPhone” on them. Some have speculated this might mean Apple is going to license OS X to 3rd party manufacturers. But what if it means there will be a new class of device that runs OS X that’s not a Mac computer, but isn’t an iPhone either?
  4. It doesn’t make sense to do a whole new OS release (10.5 –> 10.6), with a new code name (”Snow Leopard”), but not add any new features. If they were just going to improve performance, security, and stability, that’s what point releases, like the recent 10.5.3 update, are for. For every one of the six “full” releases of OS X, up through 10.5 Leopard, they’ve charged $129 for the upgrade, but each version has added significant new features. People won’t want to plunk down money for 10.6 without new features, but if 10.6 IS for a new class of Atom-based devices, it would make sense to classify it as a whole new release, with a new version number and code name, since it won’t be sold on its own. The “Snow Leopard” code name also seems to indicate something related to Leopard, but different. No previous OS X code names (Puma, Panther, Tiger, etc.) have had such a close correlation.
  5. Dropping support for legacy technology, like the PowerPC processors, and dropping Carbon for Cocoa, has to happen sometime. But the timing makes perfect sense if 10.6 is for a new class of device that won’t even have those technologies. No need for PowerPC support if the devices that run the OS are going to have Intel Atom processors. No need to maintain legacy Carbon applications if Apple wants to encourage developers to write new applications in Cocoa for this new class of device.
  6. As I was talking about this idea on Twitter a while ago, @davechen pointed out a Gizmodo article that says 10.6 will still support PPC chips. But what caught my eye in the article was this little tidbit: “A number of drivers didn’t load on a Core 2 Duo MacBook, because it was using a 64-bit kernel and the drivers were only 32. The kernel was not only 64-bit though.” I could be completely wrong here, but I think the Intel Atom processor doesn’t have the 64-bit capabilities that the Core 2 processors do. So the seeming backwards step of not having 64-bit drivers could make sense for Atom.
  7. Maybe developers will use a new version of the iPhone SDK to write apps for these new devices. Perhaps that’s why the SDK has been Intel-only from the beginning. Apps for the iPhone are compiled for its ARM processor, completely different from either Intel or PPC architectures. But why complicate things with PowerPC stuff if you wanted to expand the SDK to create apps for the Intel x86 architecture in Atom (which could compile and run natively on Intel CPUs).

Like I said, it’s just a lot of guessing and speculation at this point, but I think it holds together pretty well. If Steve Jobs wanted to say “oh by the way, we’re introducing a whole new class of device” during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he’s want to give the audience full of developers a heads up so they can start writing apps.

Think I’m on to something? Want to debunk my thinking, and tell me I’m full of crap? You’re welcome to. Maybe this will attract the notice of the Macalope or Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber, and I’ll get the full “you’re an idiot, and here’s why” treatment from them. *swoon* Either way, it should be fun! Only a couple more days until WWDC, and we’ll know if I’m right or wrong! :-)