Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" early developer-release build reports are in

Mac OS Rumors site has a three page report on some of the features in Leopard, allegedly from some early developer-release builds. On the whole it looks fairly plausible and may give a good indication of what's to come!

On the average multicore Intel Mac, you can expect Leopard to simply feel -- as Steve Jobs has often said -- an "All New Mac". We're talking about 100%+ performance boosts in many benchmarks that are dependent on compiler optimization, GPU acceleration, efficient use of multiple CPUs and high-bandwidth motherboards, etc.....and 40, 50, 70, 80% boosts in many others.

Mac OS Rumors :: The Original Mac Rumor Site.

Looks like even PowerPC users might be OK!

For one thing, we can say right up front that Leopard is noticeably snappier across the board than Tiger....even on the oldest system that supports it, a PowerMac G3 Blue and White or Powerbook G3 "Pismo" (both with built-in FireWire which will still be Leopard's basic requirement, essentially the same as Tiger). And on typical systems owned by Mac users today, in between the G3 and the Core Duo, the advantage is very substantial. On single-processor/single-core systems, you can expect to see a gain of about 25% overall when working with the user interface, and 12-20% performance boosts on many common system functions which nearly all applications access, like Core Graphics, Quartz Extreme, Aqua, AudioAL, et cetera. Significant changes to the Carbon libraries will help those applications take advantage of most of these advances but Cocoa apps are much more likely to get the full boost.

Mac OS Rumors :: The Original Mac Rumor Site.

The bit (!) about Bittorrent support looks a little flaky though

When it comes to the system-level "BitTorrent"-style bandwidth sharing system, we know it is indeed a very real project at Apple and will eventually be part of a package that comes with Mac OS X Server in the Leopard or post-Leopard era. It will allow large organizations to pool bandwidth at multiple locations for single purposes, like high-demand global media downloads or popular files, distributing Software Updates across their enterprise or to external customers/employees/partners and so forth.

Mac OS Rumors :: The Original Mac Rumor Site.

We shall soon see!

technorati tags:leopard, osx, mac, wwdc

Comments

[Gerald Buckley]

That Bittorrent news bites! BITES DANGIT!!! BITES, BITES, BITES!

I have three XServes all humming along nicely on 10.4.7. The news about it being an XServe only deal is kinda cool. Otherwise, I'd really have preferred a desktop deployment.

See what you can do about that. OK?