



Infoworld notes that very little PC software is designed to take advantage of multiple cores and that "it's unclear what performance benefits a quad-core chip would offer over a dual-core chip, such as the 3.06GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9100." However, with the upcoming [url=http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/wwdc_apple_previews_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_to_developers]Snow Leopard[/url], having a quad-core laptop will make even more sense. One of the additional benefits is that increases in performance from better use of multi-core chips will extend the usable life of the hardware further. Virtualization is another big place where multi-core chips will play a big part.
"Grand Central,†a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings "unrivaled support" for multicore systems to Mac OS X, according to Apple, who says that "more cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors." Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Apple says that Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
So the combination of Snow Leopard/Grand Central with Intel's quad-core laptop processors should result in some really fast Mac laptops (and probably iMacs, as well).
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