64-bit goodness coming to Leopard

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 12:48

Business IT - Technology

Apple CEO Steve Jobs used his keynote address at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to talk up Mac OS X 10.5's 64-bit capabilities.

"Leopard is 64-bit, top to bottom," Jobs told developers, adding that 32-bit and 64-bit applications can run side-by-side in Leopard. "We do not have a 32-bit version of Leopard and a separate 64-bit version of Leopard... and that's why this is going to be the first time that 64-bit goes mainstream as you can be guaranteed that 64-bit apps run on every copy of Leopard out there."

He showed 32-bit and a 64-bit versions of a demo application loading a 4G image file. The 64-bit version was able to keep all the data in memory while processing it, whereas the 32-bit version had to swap data in and out, and took nearly three times longer to apply the filters. Jobs did not mention the amount of RAM installed in the computer.

Leopard's 64-bit architecture will be useful for scientific work as well as high-end graphics, said Jobs, noting that "almost every computer we ship is 64-bit capable."

64-bit systems are also attractive for database work, as they allow more data to be held in RAM where it is accessible without having to wait for it to be fetched from disk.