'If you look at history of information technology, things that have to happen really do happen.' But with no other alternative, the book will be written. If building mature parallel programming tools is a 10-chapter book, the industry is only at chapter two right now, he said. Overall, Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff believes, the computing industry really is only beginning now to tackle parallel programming in earnest. It's easy to modify existing software to use GCD, Apple said, and the operating system handles complicated administrative chores so programmers don't have to. This Snow Leopard component is designed to minimize many of the difficulties of parallel programming. That's great for some tasks that can be easily broken down into independent pieces, but programmers were accustomed to a more linear way of thinking where tasks execute in a series of sequential steps.Įnter Grand Central Dispatch, or GCD. Worse, the chips required extraordinary amounts of power and produced corresponding amounts of hard-to-handle waste heat.Īnd so began the mainstream multicore era, in which processors got multiple computing engines called cores that work in parallel. But earlier this decade, problems derailed the gigahertz train.įirst, chips often ended up merely twiddling their thumbs more because slower memory couldn't keep the chip fed with data. For years, chipmakers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had steadily increased the clock rate of their processors, and programmers got accustomed to a performance boost with each new generation. The moves align Apple better with changes in computing. Now the company has begun talking more publicly about it and other deeper projects to take advantage of graphics chips and Intel's 64-bit processors. 'We're trying to set a foundation for the future,' said Wiley Hodges, director of Mac OS X marketing.Īpple shed some light on its project, called Grand Central Dispatch, at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, but most real detail was shared only in with programmers sworn to secrecy. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast. That's because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a longer-term Apple attempt to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.

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