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Snow Leopard shows modest performance gains

updated 12:15 pm EDT, Fri July 4, 2008

Snow Leopard performance

At its current stage of development, the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard beta is not outperforming 10.5 Leopard by any wide stretches, as developers dive into the new OS with GeekBench. The Netherlands' Mac Zone writes that benchmarking numbers indicate that 10.6 performs better than 10.5, but only by a small margin. This hardly is conclusive of the final product, however, given that 10.6 Snow Leopard is still under early development – early betas of 10.5 Leopard had a very Tiger-like interface and poorer performance than the final build.

The 32-bit versions of 10.5 and 10.6 each earned total scores of 2859 and 2893, respectively, while the 64-bit versions saw scores of 3271 against Snow Leopard's 3351.

Mac Zone notes that iCal 4.0 introduces Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 support, allowing users to forgo the use of Entourage in favour of Mail and iCal.

 
Previous Comments

No news…

07/04, 12:58pm (1 reply) reply

The news here is no news. It is typical for early builds to not show significant change. News would be have if developers were already seeing huge changes in performance, size, security, etc.

jscotta

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Jun 2002

+1

breaks NDA

07/04, 01:09pm reply

Such testing also breaks the NDA I am sure. It is useless as the code most likely has debug support enabled which slows things down.

chadpengar

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Oct 2001

-2

what the h***?

07/04, 02:32pm reply

There is NO 32 bit/64 bit versions of MacOS X like there is for Windows. There is just MacOS X, which runs using 32-bit code when the CPU it's running on only supports 32-bits, and runs 64-bit code when the CPU it's running on supports 64-bits [and runs 32-bit code if the app isn't built with native 64-bit support].

Guest

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Nov 1999

+4

Wave Buh-Bye...

07/05, 01:35pm reply


...to Entourage - Good Riddance.

ZinkDifferent

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Jan 2005

+2

Re: what the h***

07/06, 10:37am reply

What they are doing is comparing the OS on 32 and 64 bit machines, which, in turn, uses the correct binary (32 or 64 bit).

Thus, while it might not be 'written correctly', the testing is valid.

testudo

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2001

+2

BTW

07/06, 10:39am (1 reply) reply

And, since one of the supposed features of Snow Leopard is the creation of Grand Central (why, exactly, does Apple feel the need to assign 'cute' names to underpinnings is beyond me, it isn't like users are going to give a c*** about it), you aren't really going to see an increase in performance until (a) the API gets set up, and (b) programs take advantage of it.

testudo

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2001

0

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