Snow Leopard - what we know about Apple's OS X 10.6
Snow Leopard is due for release next year, with a beta due as early as the MacWorld Expo in January and the final product expected to be revealed at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Building on the huge successes of Leopard (client and server), the moniker Apple has given to their next major release reflects the content. Snow Leopard will be evolution, not revolution; an iterative approach to OS design. And why not? Leopard has been very successful, selling more than two million copies in its first weekend on sale. Indeed, Apple's latest financial results report the best June quarter for both revenue and earnings in Apple's history - thanks in part, no doubt, to their desktop and server OS.
So, with Snow Leopard building on the successes of Leopard, what can we expect from it? Performance increases, for sure, including optimisations for multi-core architecture and some truly exciting new ways of managing data, as we will discover. But much of the innovation will be under the hood – the iterative approach means that many may initially be disappointed by the apparent lack of Apple magic.
So, to these hidden enhancements. First and foremost, Snow Leopard is due to expand the Cocoa codebase in OSX. Cocoa, for those who don't know, is Apple's object-oriented development language. The iPhone makes extensive use of it, and Apple have been motivating developers to switch over to it for some time now. Some fairly crucial parts of OSX are being ported across, such as Finder. Finder reportedly pares down the code, which means (theoretically) fewer bugs. Of course, the abandonment of their previous codebase, Carbon, is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers. Adobe's CS suite is built on Carbon, and porting such a large codebase across will likely be creating headaches for years to come. Still, no gain without pain, as the old adage goes, and if Apple are to be believed then a leaner, more compact operating system running on Cocoa should deliver some significant gain.
This leads us onto the next huge change under the hood: Apple is due to be adopting Sun's ZFS file system, replacing the current HFS+ journaled system. Apple has long acknowledged the value of working with other companies' tech – OSX itself is based on UNIX, the granddaddy of OSes. ZFS positions itself as a 'next-generation' file system, with near-unlimited capacity. That's no shallow claim, either - ZFS will theoretically support up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes. A zettabyte, for reference, is equal to one billion terabytes. Jeff Bonwick, Sun's chief architect of ZFS, seems to think that'll be sufficient for some time to come, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.” Good – that'll probably do for now, then!
Also of note is the pooled storage system that will automatically add drives to your existing storage. Running out of space on your system disk? Pop another disk in - it'll merge with the existing disk with no configuration required. Never lose another file thanks to automatic error-checking and correction and, should you misplace or accidentally delete one, ZFS also supports snapshots; similar to Time Machine but better integrated with the system.
The other major advancements in Snow Leopard are Apple's improvements to multi-core support. These take two forms: Grand Central, and OpenCL. Multi-core processors have been on the market for several years now – the Dual-Core G5s were released in October 2005, for example. Unfortunately, proper multi-core support requires efficient programming and an understanding of how best to manage the workload between cores. All too often, poorly coded multi-core applications will perform the same, or worse, than their single-core counterparts. Apple are introducing Grand Central as a means of alleviating this. It is designed to be much simpler for developers to harness multiple cores. Grand Central will handle much of the allocation work, while developers will simply have to write the correct hooks in their applications (so that apps know to pass off data to Grand Central).
The other part of the puzzle is OpenCL. Grand Central is very much an ease-of-use instrument, useful for developers and nice for the end user. OpenCL, by contrast, has the potential to force a real sea change in the way computers work. According to Apple, “OpenCL makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.” That's pretty much it in a nutshell but, to expand on that: GPUs have advanced way beyond CPUs (processors) in the last ten years. Their raw power, speed and sheer number of cores beat traditional processors hands-down, on paper. Until now, the GPU has been locked down, limited to calculating vectors, rendering graphics and otherwise not tackling any raw mathematical processes. Thanks to this approach (also being investigated by Nvidia with their CUDA technology and ATI with their Close to Metal) GPUs can be employed to supplement CPU processes. Imagine drastic improvements to genomics, video encoding, signal processing, financial and physical simulations and more, and you'll be nearly there...
These are probably the biggest changes in Snow Leopard. There are others, such as full 64-bit support that allows for up to 16TB RAM, and built-in Exchange support in Mail, Address Book and iCal. Other changes, too, are immediately visible to users. Quicktime X is the latest version of Apple's multimedia technology, with more codecs and better media playback, thanks to Grand Central and OpenCL. On Snow Leopard Server, you have collaboration tools – wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and more. Remote Access has been augmented, iCal Server 2 is the next iteration of Apple's scheduling service, and Podcast Producer 2 has been announced, to fall in line with the explosion of Web 2.0 media.
To sum up then, what can we expect? As long as none of these features are pulled (ZFS was originally to debut in Leopard Server), Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server should further cement Apple as the biggest innovator in the industry. Thanks to these innovations, your next Mac should be quicker, more powerful and able to withstand the test of time – much like previous Macs have. Funny, that...
Page created on 11 December 2008 by Phil.