How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?
There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they’ve rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it’s making processing for today’s chips more efficient and easier for developers, and giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it’s not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*) Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the Power
