Tuesday, April 21, 2009

What the hell is Snow Leopard?


Unbeknownst to the mass majority of Mac users a new version of their (generally) beloved Mac OS X is coming sometime this summer.
Code named "Snow Leopard," the not-entirely-new operating system is being touted by Apple as being primarily a back end update. In other words, it's not going to look much different, but it's going to be faster, much faster. Which is why the only added a word to the previous current Leopard name.
Vastly improved performance will be achieved by making OS X run entirely in 64-bit code. To most people this doesn't mean much. In essence, it means your Mac will be able to take advantage of an almost limitless amount of RAM memory, which will make headache inducing levels of multitasking possible.
In addition, Apple is planning to employ a new technology code named:
Chemical X!!!
Thus the power puff girls were.... wait.. um... thats not right...

I meant to say, code named "Grand Central." Now, you may be saying "'Grand Central' sounds like a fancy new park in New York City," but it's not (sorry for getting your hopes up). It's actually a new technology that lets the Mac OS use multi core processors (e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo) far more efficiently, which will make most Macs bought within the last 2 years run even faster than they do now.
Finally, Apple is pioneering another new software technology called Open CL. The idea is simple: pretty much all computers have another very powerful graphics processing chip sitting around doing almost nothing (unless you're playing a computer game). Apple is going to change that. On their website apple states in very cool techie speak that it will "tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit." Which means this once useless chip (to most people anyways) is going to be helping your computer run your day to day things faster!!
So, that's a rundown of Snow Leopard, it's gonna be awesome!!

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