Leopard: Apple Releases Additional Information

Apple has released additional information regarding its new OSX version, Leopard, planned to be ready for Spring 2007. This rather long Leopard technology summary provides additional insights on the new features behind OSX 10.5. We have noticed the following interesting bits (despite Xcode 3.0 and Interface Builder 3.0):

Xray:
Xray is a brand-new, timeline-based performance visualization tool that gives you the ability to see how your application works like you’ve never been able to do before. It let’s you watch CPU, disk I/O, memory usage, garbage collection, events, and more in the form of graphs tied to time.
Resolution Independence:
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
OpenGL Improvements:
Leopard also provides a dramatic increase in OpenGL performance by offloading CPU-based processing onto another thread which can then run on a separate CPU core feeding the GPU. This can increase, or in some cases, even double the performance of OpenGL-based applications.
64-bit:
First implemented at the UNIX level in Tiger, Leopard brings complete 64-bit support to all of Mac OS X’s application frameworks. Using either the Carbon or Cocoa frameworks, you can create applications that can address extremely large data sets, up to 128TB using the current Intel-based CPUs. The 64-bit model used in Mac OS X is known as LP64 and is the same model used by other 64-bit UNIX systems from Sun and SGI as well as 64-bit Linux.
And there's more: the 64-bit support in Mac OS X maintains the ability to run current 32-bit applications. On Intel processors, 64-bit applications have an increased number of CPU registers available in 64-bit mode, and they may run faster than their 32-bit counterparts.