Apple CEO Macworld Notebook
January 7, 2009 | Electronics, Gadgets, Notebook | 1 CommentMacWorld 2009 opens on January 5 in the vast Moscone Center in San Francisco, which drew thousands of faithful every Macintosh since January 1985. But this year, will not be the same. For the first time since he launched the rebirth of Apple 12 years ago, Steve Jobs will not deliver the speech of Macworld. Instead, Phil Schiller, Apple’s long-head of marketing, will lead the show, moreover, on the eve of the Mac’s 25th birthday.
Mr. Schiller is an intelligent and kind person who, for many years, has skillfully MrJobs supported and promoted the image of Apple, its brilliance and its products. But it is not Steve Jobs. That said, Apple, of course, Apple still leads the innovation of electronics by several country miles. So what will Mr. Schiller? The big question will be Snow Leopard, the new Mac OS X operating system. We got some details of it at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, suggesting it will significantly accelerate computer performance, without asking for more equipment.
Clock speeds of microprocessors May have not yet reached their ceiling, but the physics involved impose a limit on the speed of calculation can be done. The idea now is to increase the number of cores in a chip rather than trying to further boost the clock speed of the chip. Snow Leopard is designed to use the Mac’s dual-processor heart of central (CPU) more efficiently with a technology called Grand Central and, with a revolutionary technology called OpenCL (CL = language), allocate tasks general computer graphics processor (GPU). With Snow Leopard, GPUs are no longer just draw pictures on the screen, they are multitasking.
Apple recently dumped elderly graphics Intel has been using for the most powerful nVidia chipsets, and it seems that snow leopard is one of the reasons for this change. Graphics chips have multiple processors. The entry level MacBook GPU has 16; the high level of Mac Pro as many laps 64. GPU future will have hundreds of processors and few will be able to process millions, perhaps a billion, operations per second.
Previously, software that ran on one brand of GPU could not work on another. OpenCL, it is possible to write an application once and convert it on the fly to use any graphics processor. Software developers at Apple and others are already working on applications and software updates current take advantage of this jump in performance. [ via theage ]
