Apple: Next Mac OS X unlocks chip power
Summary
Topics
At its Apple Worldwide Developer Conference here, Craig Federighi, vice president of Mac OS engineering, shed light on technology called Grand Central Dispatch that's designed to make Mac OS X 10.6, called Snow Leopard, take better advantage of multicore processors and graphics processors.
Computer chips for years improved in performance through faster clock speeds, but processor engineers ran into problems with chips consuming inordinate amounts of power and producing inordinate amounts of heat. In addition, the faster clock speeds sometimes meant chips just idled faster because memory access speeds couldn't keep up.
The new direction: multicore processors that put multiple processing engines on the same chip. The problem with the approach, though, is that PC software typically had been written to run with one thread of instructions at a time. Multicore processors work best when software does many things at the same time, which is much harder to program.
Grand Central Dispatch is designed to address that problem for software developers, making it easier to program multithreaded software, use operating system services, and tune program executions.
It also improves how Mac manages those threads, Federighi said. For example, when running Apple's Mail app, today's Leopard OS uses about the number of threads when busy as when idle.
"When it's busy, it uses more threads to take advantage of multicores. When idle, all those threads go away, giving back resources to the system," Federighi said. "When you apply that to every application, you get a big win in performance and responsiveness."
Graphics chip power
The new Mac OS X also is designed to support a programming technology called GPGPU--general-purpose graphics processing unit--which lets a graphics chip run some computing jobs in addition to its ordinary job displaying graphics.
To make its GPGPU technology work, Apple uses OpenCL, a C-like programming technology that has the support of graphics chipmakers Nvidia, AMD's ATI, Intel, and others.
Graphics chips aren't good for every sort of computing task, but they are good for mathematical calculations--including they physics calculations often needed in video games that simulate flowing fabrics, bouncing balls, and other real-world actions.
Mac OS X will be available in September with an upgrade price of $29, a big notch less expensive than the $129 price of earlier upgrades.
Apple also is working to support 64-bit x86 processors, now the prevailing standard. One big advantage of 64-bit processors is support for more than 4GB of memory; Federighi also touted faster mathematical processing such as the doubled speed of fast Fourier transforms.
Apple has been gradually making its operating system fully 64-bit. "Snow Leopard is final stage where all the major system applications are written in 64-bit mode," Federighi said.
This article was originally posted on CNET News.
Talkback Most Recent of 6 Talkback(s)
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One question ...
... never mind the marketing crap ... does it speed things up a lot, or not?
johnfenjackson@...9th Jun 2009 -
It ultimately depends...
...on the processes that are running. But their new thread manager should show a noticable difference. By lowering the number of threads when most processes are idle, the system should feel more snappy. As before with 10.5 the OS would spawn a bunch of threads to handle the task. But this actually slowed things down when it came to quick, small tasks. However, when the system is busy, then the OS will spawn threads to better make use of all the cores available to it.
As for OpenCL, this largly depends on the GPU that is in the system, and what processes are able to be offloaded to it. But if some apps such as Final Cut, Aperture, Photoshop, or other math heavy apps are able to make use of it, it could be a huge speed bump. As most GPU's are significantly faster than the average CPU when it comes to pure math operators.
Stuka9th Jun 2009 -
As always, the answer is: it depends
It won't speed up surfing, email, or word
processing. To suggest that this will help
speed up Apple's Mail application is laughable
to the extreme.
It might speed up games (depends on what the
bottleneck is, if GPU is holding back FPS then
this won't help at all).
It WILL drastically improve things like
transcoding. I used a transcoder that took
advantage of my NVidia card and it was at least
5X faster than anything I had tried before.
The problem with the approach, though, is
that PC software typically had been written to
run with one thread of instructions at a
time.
This is blatantly false. Nearly every non
trivial application you use on your desktop
computer has been written to run with more than
one thread.
NonZealot9th Jun 2009 -
Grand Central doesn't speed up anything come September
But maybe in the future.
It requires applications to use an entirly new API to perform tasks leveraging the GPU power.
No existing applications will be able to use this out of the box. The developers will need to go back and change the code to use the new API and offer a new "grand central enabled" version in order to take advantage of this.
Only then will you see speed increase.
Some application types lend themselves really good to parallelization, others don't.
Applications processing large quantities of numerical data like e.g. PhotoShop can potentially benefit a great deal from this (unfortunately Apple left Adobe hanging with their lack of backwards compatibility, so PhotoShop CS4 is still a 32bit app - but that's another story).
honeymonster9th Jun 2009 -
GCD != OpenCL
GCD helps with multicore processors.
OpenCL for leveraging your GPU.
Both are useful additions.
Richard Flude10th Jun 2009 -
Until developers use APIs, minimal speed up.
Better internal handling of threads will make a minimal difference for existing applications. When applications start using the specialized APIs, the speed increase will become far more substantial. So, the answer is, not yet, but soon.
BillDem9th Jun 2009
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