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32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tested the latest Win7 build against XP and Vista and came to a surprising conclusion: Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs in the vast majority of the 23 tasks tested. Even installation. 'Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I've decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests...'" This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.
, however at least there is a clear intent to redress this issue for the client OS within the next few months with the release of snow leopard and that will be the only OS Apple will distribute.
You need to check out how Snow Leopard is built a little better, as it will not be 100% 64bit. It will be 'more' of a hybrid, but still not a full 64bit OS.
Microsoft will undoubtedly have versions of Windows 7 in 32 and 64-bit and by default distribute the 32-bit version. I completely understand why they might do this, I might even be convinced it is in their interest to do that, but I think it holds back the development of the platform in general.
Because it DOESN'T matter in the Windows world. 32bit applications get performance benefits on the 64bit OS. Also if developers want to provide a full 64bit version, it is a simple recompile, you don't have to re-write the application like a lot of people (Adobe for example) find they have to do on OS X. This is why if you want a 64bit version of Adobe software, you need Vistax64, as the development APIs Apple sold Adobe never got moved to 64bit as promised.
All MS API sets(development platforms) move to 64bit, even old 16bit applications can be recompiled as 64bit applications. (You can't do this with System 9 applications, nor even the whole early 32bit transition APIs Apple provided.)
Understand?
Finally Leopard itself does support full 64-bitness, for example Apache on OS X Server is running as a proper 64-bit application. I don't mean to dispute your claims that it remains effectively a 32-bit OS, just that it's not as cut and dried as it might appear.
It isn't cut and dried, but it is a fact.
OS X enables applications to use and execute the 64bit memory addressing flags. However, the application is not running in full 64bit mode beyond the memory space the the execute flag optimizations on the CPU.
For everything the application (Apache in this example) that touches the OS, an OS API, or asks the OS to do, gets processed in 32bit mode. So if Apache asks OS X's kernel for a file from the File System, this is all happening in 32bit. Every API Apache uses that goes through the OS X kernel is processed in 32bit mode - not only in the OS, but the CPU is shifted to 32bit mode to process the call as well.
Understand?
You are defending Apple on something they don't need to be defended on and are more a problem in the industry when it comes to this subject than some 'noble' company.
Do you remember the Apple ads talking about the FIRST 64bit Personal Computer? How ironic that this many years later it still isn't even running a native 64bit OS, where Windows has been doing 64bit versions since the mid 90s. (Yes NT 4.0 versions had 64bit modes and used 48bit addressing space on hardware capable of it, like the DEC Alpha)
Apple is out of their league and making a fool of themselves in the process.