Mac OS X 'Leopard'-related Discussion

By .Neo
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Grand Master

SnowRanger13

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For those wanting to see the large performance boosts that a lot of people are talking about I'm pretty sure most of the boosts are from the way 10.5 handles multiple cores, so single core computers don't expect a huge boost.

Grand Master

raskren

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For those wanting to see the large performance boosts that a lot of people are talking about I'm pretty sure most of the boosts are from the way 10.5 handles multiple cores, so single core computers don't expect a huge boost.

But surely 10.4, being proclaimed as the "world's most advanced operating system" was also multi-threaded?

Grand Master

Chicane-UK Veteran

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I would imagine its a similar setup to XP / Vista from a multithreading point of view in that yeah XP supported multiprocessors but didn't understand multicores quite that efficiently (well, not without a driver update at least) where as Vista apparently uses them optimally out of the box. I'm assuming its just optimising multicore support.. multiple processors would have been supported in OSX for a long time considering that its built on UNIX!

Bear in mind that Tiger is a few years old and at the time multicore processing wasn't that heavily on the radar.. really, two years ago you just could not have known how much the demand for multicore processing would explode in the way that it has in the last year or so. Yes, multicore technology was looming but it really did not have a foothold at the time. Fully optimising the OS for multicore processors now was probably the right thing to do rather than betting on a paradigm that ultimately came to nothing.

Grand Master

Timan Veteran

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Bad news for those hoping Finder would be fixed.

Still crashes when you deal with network related stuff. Beach balled for about 1min then restarted. Why apple can't you fix this. Also seems bootcamp is being iffy on my imac. Internet is drastically slow, when it wasn't on Tiger, trying everything at the moment to fix it. Things are downloading at like 50"BYTES" vs 2~mb in osx.

Grand Master

BajiRav

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Bad news for those hoping Finder would be fixed.

Still crashes when you deal with network related stuff. Beach balled for about 1min then restarted. Why apple can't you fix this. Also seems bootcamp is being iffy on my imac. Internet is drastically slow, when it wasn't on Tiger, trying everything at the moment to fix it. Things are downloading at like 50"BYTES" vs 2~mb in osx.

Guess Apple did copy something from Vista :p

Seriously though Finder.4 and Vista is the worst combination if I dare transfer something over network. Finder almost always times out + dies and with Vista it's usually me who times out. :p

Grand Master

giga Veteran

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Bad news for those hoping Finder would be fixed.

Still crashes when you deal with network related stuff. Beach balled for about 1min then restarted. Why apple can't you fix this. Also seems bootcamp is being iffy on my imac. Internet is drastically slow, when it wasn't on Tiger, trying everything at the moment to fix it. Things are downloading at like 50"BYTES" vs 2~mb in osx.

Finder on Tiger doesn't crash or time out with me when dealing with networks. (it's usually my Vista which goes dumb) :s Sure it's not something on your network? Networking with other macs or xp/vista/linux?

Grand Master

Quillz

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I haven't seen this mentioned, but spotlight... is FAST.... Super super super fast.

Yup, Spotlight has been vastly improved in Leopard. I honestly have no use for Quicksilver anymore, now that Spotlight works an application launcher. (And between the new wireless keyboard and other keyboard shortcuts, all I ever used Quicksilver for was an application launcher.) Also, Spotlight now searches entire networks, not just your computer like it did in Tiger.

Yep. I think they look fine.

I don't. The scroll bars just seem out of place. And it's not so much that the iTunes 7 scroll bars *HAD* to be there, but why didn't Apple update the scroll bars to use a more matte design, like what we've seen on the new progress meters on the iPod nano/classic?

Grand Master

Xero

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I'm shocked bootcamp still hasn't been improved much since the beta a year ago.

Be nice if it put your osx into hibernation, then boot into windows, vice versa when you leave the os.

Lets hope they fixed the time clock issue that ****ed me off so much, everytime XP would jump ahead like 4 hours.

Grand Master

Timan Veteran

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Lets hope they fixed the time clock issue that ****ed me off so much, everytime XP would jump ahead like 4 hours.

Well, you have to install their stupid time service to fix that. But it it still meses up my time when I boot back into osx. Leopard was rushed :p hehe

Grand Master

Xero

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Whats this time service thing you speak of, I never heard of it. All I remember hearing was modifying something in the registry which didn't do anything.

And yea Leopard was rushed, I hope they patch a lot of the various issues soon in a 10.5.1 update. At least in their defense they seemed to get the crucial pieces ready and left the other things unfinished.

Grand Master

CPressland

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Details please.

Load up Doom 3 in XP and then in Vista and use a application to monitor CPU outputs, nuf said. XP has been modified to use Dual Core but it dosnt do it to the full potential. The Windows Server 2003 core (vista) has always had dualcore from the get go. Hence most people have better framerates in games after moving to Vista (providing they're not using Cheep DDR RAM)

Grand Master

the evn show

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Load up Doom 3 in XP and then in Vista and use a application to monitor CPU outputs, nuf said.

No, it isn't. Run an AfterEffects run on XP/Win2k, or a FinalCut render on OS X.

Load up a GCC compile on either OS and you can max out as many processors as you want.

Photoshop is noticeably worse on 64-bit Vista than 64-bit XP when you start working on gigabyte images.

If you're going to make a claim specific to CPU performance then it's best to come up with a test that would stress the CPU performance exclusively (or as close to exclusively as possible). Things that involve the video and audio subsystem (ie: games) are probably a fairly poor choice to test this specific claim, as are IO bound tasks like compiling files (disk system) or memory bound application (image manipulation) as changes to the VMM, Disk sub-system, or media apis will mask bottlenecks or improvements in things like the process scheduler.

The best test I can come up with would be an easily parallelized task that can be coded very tightly (minimizing trips to main-memory or to disk): Calculating pie to the Nth digit, factoring primes. Other tasks like video trans-coding or heavy number crunching for seti@home provide a less specific but more realistic test of the multithreadding performance of an operating system. I did a bit of Googling and found a number of people noticed similar or worse performance on these sorts of applications under Vista than XP.

For example, Tom's Hardware tested a number of applications, games, and synthetic benchmakrs on a multicore system and found that Vista hampered performance (they blamed the new background processes running on Vista "chewing up" CPU cycles)

XP has been modified to use Dual Core but it dosnt do it to the full potential. The Windows Server 2003 core (vista) has always had dualcore from the get go.

NT has been multiprocessor aware since it was shipping for Digital Alphas - it wasn't "modified" to support multicore processors any more than it was modified to work to work with dual cores any more than it was modified to work with <random piece of hardware>. 2,4,N-way support has been a core feature of the NT line for as long as it has existed.

When Apple posts source for XNU we'll be able to see the exact changes that went into improving kernel multi threaded performance - I don't expect to see anything as significant as the abolition of the system/kernel funnels in 10.4. There has been some fine-tuning in XNU (more threads, automatic load balancing) but those are evolutionary changes to the kernel. Those may make existing multi threaded applications run more quickly but that I don't think that means OS X 10.4 had "poor core priority design" -- whatever that means.

EDIT: There are new additions to Cocoa that will make witting multi threaded applications and distributed applications easier but they're much like Cocoa Bindings in that it doesn't allow you to do anything new, it just makes it easier to do things you already could.

The really interesting update to XNU is dtrace.

Edited by the evn show
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