[Skywalkers new Hand]

From MacInTouch today:

"Having talked to a few of the Apple techs at WWDC, I am not so sure that Panther will be fully 64-bit enabled until some time after 2004 comes. From what I was told, Panther will have bare-bones 64-bit optimizations. We'll see our 8 gigs of RAM, we'll have addressing space out the wazoo. But it won't be until 10.3.1 at least that the file system and utilities have been recompiled and updated."

Also Apple never mentioned ANYTHING about Panther being 64 bit in the keynote.

[snerdini]

Sounds believable to me...

[-Q-]

But then in a follow up in that thread, the following was posted:

From Macintouch:
I would respectfully disagree with the statement that "There's no loss in waiting until the operating system can utilize the new muscle at least." Of course, you can always sit and wait for bigger and better to emerge. But with the G5 PowerMacs, you should see huge performance improvements from the get-go. The G5 systems are much more than just 64-bit. I imagine that the microprocessor and front-side bus performance improvements will deliver *significant* value to people who want such systems today and can live with up to 4 GB of RAM. I cannot imagine why people would hold off until 10.3 is released to grab such improvements. Then, when 10.3 comes out, go ahead and upgrade to 8 GB.

And if Apple shipped the G5s w/out 64-bit addressing, wouldn't they be lying if they said the G5s supported 8 GBs of memory? I imagine we'll have some rudimentary support for 64-bit addressing and will get some good fine tuning in an update.

[- - e r i k - -]

Should we care?

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
Should we care?

You don't think your porn will look better in 64 bit?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Skywalkers new Hand:
You don't think your porn will look better in 64 bit?

Damn, never thought of that....can they ship these a little quicker?!

[RooneyX]

Same with Photoshop. There will be plugins to take advantage of some of the G5s features but no 64 bit version for a while. It's like when the G4 first came out. The operating system wasn't up to it and there was nothing but a few extensions and drivers.

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
Same with Photoshop. There will be plugins to take advantage of some of the G5s features but no 64 bit version for a while. It's like when the G4 first came out. The operating system wasn't up to it and there was nothing but a few extensions and drivers.

During the keynote that 3D dude said it took 3 minutes to recompile the app to 64 bit.

So what is the problem with other apps?

[Gene Jockey]

Originally posted by Skywalkers new Hand:
During the keynote that 3D dude said it took 3 minutes to recompile the app to 64 bit.

So what is the problem with other apps?

Well, yeah, but back a few years ago didn't they have an Adobe demo of Photoshop running on an OS X pre-release, gushing about how easy it was to Carbonise? Then it took like two years for PS 7 to be released on OS X. So I take any "it's just a simple re-compile away" comments with a grain of salt.

--Josh

[::maroma::]

I don't remember where I saw it, but I remember reading something about Apple releasing the G5's before 64 bit was in place in the OS. The article said that Apple would ship the G5's with a "modified" version of Jaguar that would allow it to take some advantage of the 64 bit-ness.

But I also remember the article saying that Panther would be 64 bit, so take it as you will.

[Graymalkin]

Lacking "64-bitness" in Panther's bundled apps means very little if anything. ImageCapture, iCal, and Sherlock will get little if any advantage being compiled as 64-bit binaries. They will run faster on the G5 because the G5 is fast. When they are updated to be 64-bit binaries they might be modified to work better on the G5's architecture but being specifically 64-bit binaries won't mean much with regards to performance.

The G5 unlike the Opteron and Itanium doesn't have to switch modes to run 64-bit binaries. There's actually few differences between a 64-bit and 32-bit binary. The pointers and longs become 64 bits wide instead of 32. You get more addressable memory space and faster arithmatic on long values.

The real advantage to "recompiling to 64-bit" is to take advantage of G5 specific optimizations the compiler will perform.

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Originally posted by ::maroma:::
I don't remember where I saw it, but I remember reading something about Apple releasing the G5's before 64 bit was in place in the OS. The article said that Apple would ship the G5's with a "modified" version of Jaguar that would allow it to take some advantage of the 64 bit-ness.

But I also remember the article saying that Panther would be 64 bit, so take it as you will.

Yes the G5's are shipping with 10.2.7 not 10.3.

[clarkgoble]

Originally posted by Skywalkers new Hand:
From MacInTouch today:

"We'll see our 8 gigs of RAM, we'll have addressing space out the wazoo. But it won't be until 10.3.1 at least that the file system and utilities have been recompiled and updated."

Also Apple never mentioned ANYTHING about Panther being 64 bit in the keynote.

This is bad if true, as it implies that the new file system won't be part of Panther. That might be why the "smart folders" or "saved searches" aren't in the Finder along with more metadata. That stuff requires the new file system to work well.

Sounds like they don't think it is far enough along to make 10.3.

[dr. zoidberg]

what makes me really wonder is the fact that it apparently takes apple until "the end of the year" to get panther out to the people. i mean, if you take a look at the developer preview you will see that it is not yet perfect, but neither does it look like it would need a full half year of hard work in order to be finished...

what the hell should take them that long?? could it be that this is due to the file system and all the other under-the-hood-stuff?

[JLL]

Originally posted by dr. zoidberg:
what makes me really wonder is the fact that it apparently takes apple until "the end of the year" to get panther out to the people. i mean, if you take a look at the developer preview you will see that it is not yet perfect, but neither does it look like it would need a full half year of hard work in order to be finished...

Perhaps there are features we haven't seen yet

[lookmark]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
This is bad if true, as it implies that the new file system won't be part of Panther. That might be why the "smart folders" or "saved searches" aren't in the Finder along with more metadata. That stuff requires the new file system to work well.

I don't believe that recompiling for 64-bit has much to do with a new filesystem...

Meanwhile, *something* new is going on with the new Finder. I have no idea whether it's an improved filesytem or just a much better implementation of searching the file database, but if live searching in the Finder is so fast and works so well, I don't see why smart folders wouldn't either...

Re 64-bitness -- Yeah, these things take time. It'll be folded in bit by bit over the next year.

[Stratus Fear]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
The G5 unlike the Opteron and Itanium doesn't have to switch modes to run 64-bit binaries. There's actually few differences between a 64-bit and 32-bit binary. The pointers and longs become 64 bits wide instead of 32. You get more addressable memory space and faster arithmatic on long values.

Well, the Opteron, when running a 64-bit OS, is perfectly capable of running 32-bit programs without any "mode switching." That's the whole point of x86-64 Windows and such... With x86 though, the OS needs to be programmed to run those 32-bit programs (just like current Windows OSes can run 16-bit programs), although, the same probably stands with PPC. It really isn't mode switching so much as it is OS support.

[bewebste]

There are two different things we can be talking about when we say "the OS is 64-bit". One meaning is that the applications that run can use a 64-bit address space, address the full compliment of RAM on the system, etc. The second meaning is that the kernel itself has a 64-bit address space. The confusion comes from the fact that the kernel does not need to run in a 64-bit address space itself in order to provide the ability for applications on the system to run in 64-bit address spaces. The innards of the kernel can remaining running in a 32-bit address space (after all, it's not a good sign if your kernel requires more than 4 GB of memory to run ) while still support page tables that will map 64-bit address spaces for user space applications on the system. This sort of set up may lead to performance hits on some systems, but since the PowerPC architecture was designed for the transition to 64-bit from day one, it's designed in such a way that there is no emulation and no penalty for running 32-bit code. So, I think it definitely is possible that the first version of Panther that ships will not have a 64-bit kernel, but it certainly will support 64-bit applications. And it will be snappy.

[tooki]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
This is bad if true, as it implies that the new file system won't be part of Panther. That might be why the "smart folders" or "saved searches" aren't in the Finder along with more metadata. That stuff requires the new file system to work well.

Sounds like they don't think it is far enough along to make 10.3.

I think that all they meant is recompiling the filesystem so that the code that does disk I/O to HFS+ disks is optimized for G5. I don't think they're releasing a replacement to HFS+, not when Panther just upped HFS+ to 16TB (and uses journaling by default).

tooki

[moki]

Originally posted by Skywalkers new Hand:
During the keynote that 3D dude said it took 3 minutes to recompile the app to 64 bit.

So what is the problem with other apps?

What apps would you want to be 64 bit, and what benefits would you expect to see from them if they were?

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Originally posted by gorickey:
Damn, never thought of that....can they ship these a little quicker?!

And with 8 Gb accessable ram, we can now acces women with 4x as large breasts!!

[tikki]

Originally posted by moki:
What apps would you want to be 64 bit, and what benefits would you expect to see from them if they were?

Photoshop and xCode

edit: oh yeah. and iPhoto. Maybe it can get a speed boost.

[Person Man]

Originally posted by tikki:
Photoshop and xCode

edit: oh yeah. and iPhoto. Maybe it can get a speed boost.

The speed boost will come from the processor itself, not whether or not the app is 64-bit vs 32-bit

[sniffer]

Originally posted by tikki:
Photoshop and xCode

edit: oh yeah. and iPhoto. Maybe it can get a speed boost.

How?

[moki]

Originally posted by tikki:
Photoshop and xCode

edit: oh yeah. and iPhoto. Maybe it can get a speed boost.

Photoshop might benefit slightly from 64bitness, but only because it'll be able to access > 4gb of RAM. There might be a slight speed boost if you're working with 48/64 bit images (does it even handle them now?), if Adobe made specific optimizations.

iPhoto would not benefit from 64 bitness at all; it simply needs to be rewritten to scale better (it slows down linnearly as images are added).

[pmcd]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
Should we care?

Yes.

philip

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by moki:
Photoshop might benefit slightly from 64bitness, but only because it'll be able to access > 4gb of RAM. There might be a slight speed boost if you're working with 48/64 bit images (does it even handle them now?), if Adobe made specific optimizations.

Photoshop can handle 48 bit images.

[Boondoggle]

There is no question, the cat is 32,
What else would you have Apple do?

It matters not one single whit,
If Jaguar or Panther are 64 bit.

Do your homework, check your math
And you'll find Apple is on the right path

If the apps that need it can fill all that RAM,
I can't find a reason to give a damn.

[pelorus]

Originally posted by Skywalkers new Hand:
From MacInTouch today:

"Having talked to a few of the Apple techs at WWDC, I am not so sure that Panther will be fully 64-bit enabled until some time after 2004 comes. Also Apple never mentioned ANYTHING about Panther being 64 bit in the keynote.

Well, then, people might as well never put more than about 2.5 GB of RAM in those beauties because VM will make up for the rest very quickly and a 32-bit OS can only support 4 GB of memory (physical and virtual).

Too much to ask anyone at Macintouch to actually THINK. No wonder they're going down the pan.

[chabig]

Originally posted by dr. zoidberg:
what makes me really wonder is the fact that it apparently takes apple until "the end of the year" to get panther out to the people. i mean, if you take a look at the developer preview you will see that it is not yet perfect, but neither does it look like it would need a full half year of hard work in order to be finished...

My guess is we'll have Panther before the end of September. I think Steve was reluctant to commit to a date last month because you never know--the developers might find problems. But if there are no show stoppers with the preview, we'll see it sooner rather than later.

Chris

[11011001]

Originally posted by dr. zoidberg:
what makes me really wonder is the fact that it apparently takes apple until "the end of the year" to get panther out to the people. i mean, if you take a look at the developer preview you will see that it is not yet perfect, but neither does it look like it would need a full half year of hard work in order to be finished...

what the hell should take them that long?? could it be that this is due to the file system and all the other under-the-hood-stuff?

Have you played with Panther for any great length of time?? It is still really, really, really buggy. Like random lock ups in things like ICQ, I once had it get messed up on my second monitor, anything that would be drawn to it, would bring the system to it knees. Copying files has major bugs in it, things that will cause it to unexpectedly quit a copy in progress. They changed the way permissions works on the apps folder.. I was getting stupid bugs where I couldn't copy anything to it, without have to us the super user in the terminal. Networking has some odd ghosts, a local host will appear, then suddenly dissapear, only to reappear, meaning it was very hard to connect to it. The list goes on and on...

Sure, they may have everything in place, but man.. there is a whole crap load of debugging they have to do. I don't know if you know this, but most of the time spent developing a product is debugging, very little of that time is actually programming it. (ie. for windows 2000, they spent 10% of their time programming it, and 90% of their time debugging it).


And nice poem Boondoggle!!

[chabig]

Have you played with Panther for any great length of time?? It is still really, really, really buggy.

Not at all. I was just speculating (hoping).

[clarkgoble]

Copying files has major bugs in it, things that will cause it to unexpectedly quit a copy in progress.

Which is actually good as it implies they rewrote that part of the Finder and didn't simply copy it. That means it is more apt to be threaded better.

[Avenir]

TheRegister is reporting something along these lines too

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/31600.html