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T3 reviews Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: ‘Extremely quick’

“The clue’s in the name; Snow Leopard is not as big an upgrade as past versions of Mac OS X – in fact at first glance it’s not that dissimilar to Leopard. But under the hood it’s been completely rewritten with a host of subtle, but powerful changes that vastly enhance user experience and productivity,” Hannah Bouckley reports for T3.

“Among the new technologies 64-bit support enables applications to access more RAM, so they run faster and more efficiently,” Bouckley reports. “Crucially it also means third-party software developers can start producing compatible 64-bit programs too.”

“Snow Leopard also support Open CL. Open CL utilizes the power in the computers graphics processor, so instead of just being uses for graphic intensive tasks, it’s idle power can also be allocated to every day tasks,” Bouckley reports. “The final technology, Grand Central Dispatch makes use of multiple cores simultaneously, so they run more efficiently.”

“The result of these developments is that Snow Leopard is extremely quick to use,” Bouckley reports. “At £25 [US$29] for a single license, Snow Leopard is an essential upgrade for any Leopard user. It’s almost cheap for the increase in speed in everyday use – and perhaps more importantly for the potential for future improvement. And coming in a whopping 7GB lighter than Leopard, it will actually free up disc space. How many upgrades do that?”

Full review here.

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