Apple Patent Applications Support Snow Leopard's Promise Of Speed
Apple has said its forthcoming Mac OS X 10.6 operating system, known as "Snow Leopard," will focus on performance, stability, and resource efficiency, rather than features.
Three patent applications published Thursday support that promise by describing improved techniques for executing computer code on multiple multicore central processing units and graphics processing units.
The software industry hadn't yet caught up to the chip industry's move to multicore processors, which began in earnest in 2005. Many software developers haven't been trained to write code that's optimized for multicore processors. As a consequence, a lot of commercial software doesn't take full advantage of multicore device hardware. In short, it could run much faster.
