Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 18th Aug 2009 18:46 UTC
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.
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2006-03-27
PowerMac G5: the first 64 bit personal computer... buy it!
The PowerMAc G5 was provided with a specific build of Tiger which had 64 bits support in the Unix layer, allowing the machine to run command line applications in 64 bits. You could also have GUI on top of that communicating with the 64 bits process via IPC.
So same advise as to Holwerda, don't talk on something that you don't understand.... you are embarrassing yourself. "
I know what I'm talking about. I was pointing on the fact that Apple was heavily avertising it as a major feature, while in fact it was mostly unused. There were people who believed that everything they were doing was in 64 bit.
Now, when you actually have the possibility to go full 64 bit, Apple itself is phasing out support for these wonderful (and pricey) machines.
Edited 2009-08-20 08:38 UTC