Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Jun 2008 21:52 UTC, submitted by Taylor
Mac OS X TestMac.net has published a quick look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard. "The biggest changes are under the hood. Snow Leopard is fast. Very fast. Like, surprisingly fast. From boot times to general application usage, Snow Leopard was noticeably quicker then Leopard when using the same system. Apple and 3rd party applications alike, they all launched faster and performed smoother. I'm sure this can be attributed to the new 64-bit architecture, but its amazing how much of a difference it really is." Screenshots included.
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RE: I wonder
by John.Gustafsson on Fri 27th Jun 2008 09:18 UTC in reply to "I wonder"
John.Gustafsson
Member since:
2005-08-08

Darwin has another kernel, xnu, which is quite different. MacOS X isn't FreeBSD + stuff, it's Darwin + stuff, and my guess is that even though they use some stuff from FreeBSD it's not really something that would give such a speed-up.

My guess is that the speed comes from the jump to 64-bit (more registers etc) and optimizations. Which is great news indeed. What I do wonder is if they are using some cool SSE(1-4) voodoo as well:) Nice not having to focus on old CPUs ;)

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