Mac Multicore Making Moves
RapidMind adds to Leopard's current multicore support.
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January 8, 2008
By Doug Barney
I’ve been digging into a lot of multicore issues, especially concerning desktops. My beef is that today’s desktop operating systems don’t do enough to exploit multicore technology. And because many multicore systems run at a slower clock speed than single cores, your apps can actually run slower. (You can help me by e-mailing your experience with dual and multicore systems to [email protected]). And Windows XP and Vista don’t do enough to exploit this extra processing.
The news on the Apple Inc. (apple.com) side isn’t perfect either. A lot of users of dual, quad, and now eight-core systems aren’t seeing the gains they expected. But unlike Microsoft with Vista, Apple does claim that Leopard has a number of features that specifically exploit multicore.
But if you are serious about using all this hardware, you may want to take a look at RapidMind, a development/middleware system that exploits whatever graphics and multiprocessing back-ends you might happen to have. Originally designed to support Linux and Windows, RapidMind, Inc. of Waterloo, ONT (rapidmind.net), yesterday announced that its platform also supports the Mac. Now you may have a reason to buy an eight-core MacPro!
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