Apple: Next Mac OS X unlocks chip power

Apple wants Mac OS X to do a better job dealing with the new directions that Moore's Law has taken computer chips.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (cnet) At its Apple Worldwide Developer Conference here, Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of software engineering, shed light on technology called Grand Central Dispatch that's designed to make Mac OS X 10.6, called Snow Leopard, take better advantage of multicore processors and graphics processors.

Computer chips for years improved in performance through faster clock speeds, but processor engineers ran into problems with chips consuming inordinate amounts of power and producing inordinate amounts of heat. In addition, the faster clock speeds sometimes meant chips just idled faster because memory access speeds couldn't keep up.

The new direction: multicore processors that put multiple processing engines on the same chip. The problem with the approach, though, is that PC software typically had been written to run with one thread of instructions at a time. Multicore processors work best when software does many things at the same time, which is much harder to program. ...Go to source