Apple M9020LL/A Technology Overview - Page 9

Technology Overview 9 Power Mac G5 The Power Mac G5 comes with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple's UNIX-based operating system, including powerful new features such as Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator. Multiple Cores and Mac OS X Mac OS X is ideally suited to leverage the power of quad-core systems, since it was designed from day one for multiple processors. With symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking, and multithreading capabilities in Mac OS X, a Power Mac G5 Quad delivers groundbreaking performance. Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in Mac OS X dynamically manages tasks across multiple processors-and multiple processor cores-without requiring any special optimization of the application or any special action on the user's part. With SMP, you can run a processor-intensive task in the background while you work with another application. Mac OS X assigns each of these tasks to a di∂erent processor or core, allowing the tasks to execute simultaneously, and automatically balances the load between processors. Preemptive multitasking further optimizes performance by allowing Mac OS X to prioritize tasks on each processor or core. Applications can take even greater advantage of multiple cores when they are written to generate multiple threads (or self-contained tasks), known as multithreading. Many of today's applications are multithreaded, achieving up to 69 percent faster performance on a Power Mac G5 Quad right out of the box.1 As a user, you don't need to worry about symmetric multiprocessing or application threading-you'll just enjoy the enhanced performance.