Macintosh multi-core

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

One hell of a nice computer.

There’s nothing special in the 2010 Mac Pro hardware vs. the 2009 with regard to 64-bit. Apple was just giving driver developers some time to polish their 64-bit ports, so they could flick the switch without tossing end users into an unsupported printer hell. I have switched between 32-bit and 64-bit kernel modes since 10.6 came out, and I haven’t noticed any difference in performance. What benchmarks I’ve tried showed speed to be the same.

But there are some growing pains that I noticed with the graphics drivers. The machine started up once and the main screen was black. Sleeping it and waking it fixed the problem. I’ve seen some bugs like this in the past with the 2009 Mac Pro, and the 64-bit kernel is more prone to these quirks. The Wacom Intuos3 driver sometimes fails to load on boot, forcing me to use the keyboard to open the Wacom System Preferences to kick it into loading.

On the 2009 Mac Pro, 64-bit mode would sometimes cause the computer to wake without network access. Sleeping it again and waking it usually fixed it. This is to be expected and, fortunately, kernel panics are extremely rare as of 10.6.3 (I’ve had one in the past two months, and it was caused by VMWare trying to run Batman in a virtual machine, not casual use). I haven’t seen any on the 2010 machine. Otherwise, I have a few custom devices that run fine in 64-bit—I have a Microsoft Natural 4000 USB keyboard, a USB dongle for V-Ray, an Epson R1800 printer, USB Overdrive for my Logitech G5, and the iPad and iPhone syncing fine with iTunes. Unless you have an aging printer with no 64-bit driver, you’re not going to have any problems with the 64-bit kernel.

Post external references

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    http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/10/tri-screen-cpu-monitor-ars-reviews-the-12-core-2010-mac-pro.ars/3
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