Seems “Snow Leopard”, Apple’s sixth version of OS X, is going to be light on user-facing features and heavy on fundamental technologies, like solving the massive cluster-fuck that is developing for a multi-core machine:
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
If you’re not a developer (and thank god if you aren’t), this might be a bit much for you, but the gist of it is that future computers are going to have more chips instead of just faster ones. And it makes life hard on the geeks.
Imagine if tomorrow, the most senior, most experienced member of your company quit, and instead of hiring a new one, your company hired 8 interns to replace him. Your task is to delegate work to these 8 fools, while managing to get the old guy’s work done faster. It’s a management nightmare. That’s multi-core development. Handing out lots of small tasks to lots of less than great workers, keeping everyone in sync, and making sure no one is doing extra work. Hell, if you’ve ever had to manage one intern with actual work to do, you should be able to sympathize with our plight.
A few things make this important. It’s a clear signal Apple is going to be moving towards consumer-level products with more than just two cores (the geek and rich-designer targeted Mac Pro and the closet-targeted Xserve are the only shipping Apple product with more than that). And I’m betting it won’t be just be iMacs.
The reason Apple isn’t currently tossing quad-core processors into iMacs is probably double-fold. First, price. A quad-core processor is expensive. Second, value. Right now, very few applications are optimized to use anything above two cores. Hell, you could probably count the number on one hand. Since application’s aren’t gaining any performance benefit from having another six cores to play with, the common case is to just give each running application one core in it’s entirety. Your email is using one core, your web browser another. This helps with multi-tasking, but it is does nothing for most users who have a handful of applications running at once.
However, if Apple can abstract away, or otherwise solve the delegation problem, more applications will play well in a multi-core environment, actually getting faster at their tasks. And that means multi-core chips are of actual value to your email and web surfing mother.
And as the price of those quad-octo-core chips comes down, we’ll start seeing them creep into cheaper machines. And user’s will actually notice the difference.
Trust me, it’s exciting stuff.