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Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

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Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

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The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset [...]

In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

Snow Leopard Gives 50% Performance Boost When Running Optimized Software

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Snow Leopard can give your Mac a 50% performance improvement when running optimized software, a developer has found.

Running a Mac Pro from 2007, programmer Christophe Ducommun compared Snow Leopard to Leopard while encoding and decoding video with his MovieGate software.

Ducommun is optimizing MovieGate to take advantage of two important new technologies in Snow Leopard: Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. While OpenCL allows powerful graphics processors to perform work for applications, Grand Central Dispatch takes advantage of multiple cores, distributing work among all the available cores.

Together, they apps a pretty big speed bump, according to MacBidouille, which published Ducommun’s results:

Snow Leopard
150 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
70% CPU load for decoding
130% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

Leopard
104 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
165% CPU load for decoding
100% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

Overall, the optimizations give an overall performance increase of about 50%. Ducommun’s Mac Pro is a 2.66 GHz Quad Core machine with a GeForce 8800 GT video card.

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

One comment

    This looks and sounds pretty impressive. It would be interesting to see the same tests done on a present day Mac Pro.

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