Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 4th Jun 2008 19:04 UTC
Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, may only be six months old, but rumours are already abound as to the next update to Apple's operating system. According to several sources, it's going to be called Snow Leopard, it won't contain any major new features, and is planned to go gold master December 2008, available a month later. The big rumour: it's going to be available for 64bit Intel machines only.
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RE[2]: 64-bit Hardware does not mean 64-bit Software
by google_ninja on Thu 5th Jun 2008 03:06
in reply to "RE: 64-bit Hardware does not mean 64-bit Software"
Member since:2006-02-05
It is the kernel that talks to the hardware, and the APIs (or frameworks) that talk to the kernel, so from that point of view there is no real difference (except in a few edge cases)
Now the difference between 32 and 64 bit has to do with the size of the registers (think of it as super-ram inside the cpu). It's not a big deal to run 32bit apps inside 64bit registers, it just means you aren't using them to their fullest. You can't run something compiled for 64bit in a 32bit space though, because there isn't enough room.
32bit support getting dropped from the kernel means that you will only be able to install it on 64bit machines, it has nothing to do with what apps you can run.
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Member since:
2005-11-07
If an OS only runs on 64-bit hardware that does not mean that it can only run 64-bit software. It can still run 32-bit code. It could even run PPC code in Rosetta.
Dropping support for old hardware platforms wouldn't necessarily hurt the software environment at all.
Your post makes a lot of sense but what work does Apple need to do to make 10.6, 10.6?
My understanding is that the frameworks used by OS X are available for developers. If I am correct, does that mean Apple will leave all the frameworks as they are so developers can use them, but they will rip out the code in the OS that is needed to run on 32-bit and PPC hardware?