
Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit. By holding down the '6' and '4' keys during boot, you can to boot into full 64bit mode - that is, if your Mac supports it. As it turns out, some Macs with 64bit processors cannot use the 64bit kernel because the EFI is 32bit.
Note: I should have included in the article that 64bit applications will run just fine (including benefits) on a 32bit kernel in Mac OS X. Since this was already possible in Leopard, I assumed people were well aware of that. Turns out some were not, so my apologies for that.
Member since:
2005-11-16
"as well as the information from one of the more famous Mac OS X hackers"
I did not reply on that one. I did not say that what he says is wrong, i said that it is incomplete as issues may arise with a 32 bits EFI and not saying it is purely biased reporting.
And also this guy being a Mac OS X hacker as you call him does not make everything that he says the ultimate truth. I have quite some experience in OS X development and writing high performance scientific code, so i guess i can handle him.....