macnn
07/04/2008, 12:15pm, EDT
Friday, July 4th
Snow Leopard shows modest performance gains
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.
Filed under: software, developer, Apple
Other story tags: performance, Snow Leopard, Tiger, Netherlands
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No news…
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.
breaks NDA
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.
what the hell?
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].
Wave Buh-Bye...
...to Entourage - Good Riddance.
Re: what the hell
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.
BTW
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 crap 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.