Mac Pro and Xserve overclocking tool

This has been going around the internet for the past couple of days. The German division of ZDNet has released an overclocking tool for Mac Pro and Xserve machines running Leopard.

Overclocking is the process of artificially increasing the clock speed of your processor and memory in order to make it operate at a faster rate. For example, you could make a 2.8 GHz processor operate at 3.0 GHz without the expense of purchasing a faster CPU. This is very popular in the Windows world, particularly with hardcore video gamers, who have managed to push CPUs beyond 4 GHz.

However, increasing the clock rate also increases the power consumption and heat output of the CPU. Upgrading the power supply and increasing the CPU cooling may be necessary - areas that may be tricky with tightly-designed Apple products.

I wouldn't advise doing this on a machine that you depend upon every day but it might be useful for a render farm machine where speed is important and the task will be taken up by another machine if there are any crashes or failures.

Another final thing to note is that your system performance will only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you overclock your CPU but have a really slow hard disk or not very much RAM, the performance increase will be limited.

All in all though, this is a very useful tool for Mac users as long as they are aware of the dangers and potential issues. It could also encourage more video gamers to switch to the Mac.

Final Cut Server 1.1 update

Apple just released Final Cut Server 1.1. Here are the fixes:

QuickTime 7.5 and FCP 6.0.4 support - QT 7.5 is REQUIRED for this update. With Final Cut Pro 6.0.4, FCServer can now access the project file directly. It does not need to create a separate XML file in order to access the data. Remember to keep versions on your network synchronized - if you upgrade one machine to FCP 6.0.4 and FCServer 1.1, it is best to upgrade them all.

Updating Checked Out assets - You can now manually update Checked Out assets when not using Final Cut Pro (i.e. DVD Studio Pro, Motion, etc).

Edit Proxy Files - You must reanalyze your 1.0 proxies after installing 1.1.

Final Cut Pro file preferences - These are now respected when opening FCP projects.

Multi-byte character sets - Multi-byte languages such as Greek and Russian now display correctly.

See the Release Notes for more information.

I probably don't need to say this any more but it's always best to - NEVER update in the middle of a project, don't update if you don't need these fixes and always keep a clone for safety.

Pro Applications Update 2008-02 aka FCP 6.0.4

Yesterday Apple released Pro Applications Update 2008-02 which contains Final Cut Pro 6.0.4 and Compressor 3.0.3. It is important to note that this is not a new version of Compressor. It was included in Pro Applications Update 2008-01 earlier this year but I guess it is compulsory for this update so they included it again.

Not a great deal of fixes:
Enhanced Final Cut Server support - If you have Final Cut Server 1.1, you can now access projects directly without converting them to XML first. It would be interesting to see if other applications can use this as well.

XDCAM 422 preset - Changed to include 24-bit audio as default

Capturing HDV clips - With QuickTime 7.5, HDV clips in Capture Now mode can capture beyond the end of the tape. This update now allows you to press Escape to stop it. I'd advise going to Final Cut Pro > System Settings and setting the Capture Now limit to the length of your tape. This stops your disk space being eaten up with blank data.

Usual warnings apply - NEVER update in the middle of the project, don't update if you don't need any of the features provided in this patch and always have a clone of your drive as a backup.

Release Notes

In a future patch I'd really like to see stability fixes for Compressor, Soundtrack Pro and working with Motion clips in an FCP timeline.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Intel-only

MacNN has listed the minimum specifications of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, due to be released in "about a year". The biggest change is that it is Intel-only - PowerPC users are left out in the cold.

Or to be precise, the Developer Preview is Intel-only but I think this will extend to the final release as well. Why? Because Snow Leopard is about speed and optimization of the operating system and what better way to optimize the OS than to remove code for systems that haven't shipped in 3 years (by the time it is released next year)? There are very few applications out now that aren't Universal Binary or Intel-optimized, and three years is pretty generous I must admit.

However, before you throw out your old PowerBook or PowerMac, remember that Snow Leopard has very little in the way of features and is purely an optimization release. As you're not running cutting-edge hardware anyway, the extra performance probably doesn't make much difference to you. But I'm sure the frantic selling will begin regardless.

QuickTime 7.5 released

"QuickTime 7.5 improves application compatibility and addresses security issues."

The timing suggests it is related to the recent iPhone announcements so I doubt this patch does much for ProApp users.

I have heard reports of crashes, choppiness and missing audio although of course your mileage may vary. It is always better to sit on updates for a while to check for problems before installing. I would not advise installing this one though because it probably won't offer ProApp users anything new.

And remember the Golden Rules - never update in the middle of a project and always have a clone.

Edit: This update points directly to the QuickTime site rather than a specific file on the server. This makes me think that Apple will no longer be keeping old versions around so make sure to back this up.

More WWDC 2008 Day 1 news

Since my previous post some more things have cropped up:

3G iPhone
* Not 3G but is actually 3.5G
* Thinner at the edges but actually thicker in the middle than its predecessor by 0.7mm and slightly taller (people are making way too big a deal about this)

AT&T
* Apple no longer gets a cut of the subscription fee from AT&T
* No more prescribed service plans - mix and match data and voice
* Starting price: $30 a month for unlimited 3G data plus $39.99 a month for voice. Text messages are no longer included so add $5. This means the price increases from $59.99 a month to $74.99 a month. And that is the base plan.

As someone who was put off more by the monthly price than the initial cost of the phone, this doesn't make me happy. And this is entirely an AT&T thing because Apple no longer receive money from them.

However, if you want to use your phone as an iPod Touch with internet access even when you're not near a WiFi point, this is a good thing. Or if you only use voice, for example.

* In-store activation only, no more activating via iTunes
* GoPhone service no longer available

[via TUAW]

So Apple adds features, AT&T takes features away. Great.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard announced

Apple just released a few preliminary details about Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I think they're running out of cat names...). The interesting thing to note is that NOWHERE does it say that this is OS X 10.6. It could be a major point update for 10.5. I think it probably is 10.6 but it's worth bearing that in mind though.

Apple has stated that the focus will not primarily be new features but improving the quality of the OS. I think a lot of people will be disappointed by the lack of features but this is great for people who demand high performance (a lot of people reading this blog I'd imagine).

Here are the improvements:
* Multi-core optimizations with a new technology called Grand Central. This makes it much easier for developers to create multi-core optimized applications (FCP dev team, I'm looking at you...)
* OpenCL support - Enables developers to use the processing power of the GPU to perform tasks. It will be interesting to see how developers take advantage of this but it could use your graphics card as an extra processing core when rendering and encoding for example.
* Theoretical support for 16 TB of RAM. But how much can each application address?
* QuickTime X - "optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback". That's a little vague so I'm wondering if there is some kind of GPU acceleration involved. And the "modern audio and video formats" bit makes me wonder if Windows formats such as WMV are supported out of the box, without requiring something like Flip4Mac.
* Support for Exchange 2007
* Safari speed improvements
* Takes up less space on disk
* Released in "about a year"

There have been rumors that 10.6 will be Intel-only but this report neither confirms nor denies this.

Also, there is no word on price. Consumers might be hard to win over if there are no new features so Apple may adopt lower pricing. I have heard some people say that performance and stability should be in Leopard anyway so the update should be free (which I disagree with). I personally would pay full price for an update that "unlocked" my graphics card for use as an extra core though. To me, that is worth paying for. And it'd probably result in a bigger performance boost than buying $130-worth of hardware.

WWDC 2008

It's Apple's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) today and Steve's keynote just finished.

Here are the important announcements:

iPhone firmware update 2.0
* Released in "early July"
* Free for iPhone users, $9.95 for iPod Touch users (it's an accounting thing)
* Enables applications and the iTunes App Store as previously announced
* Enterprise features - Push email, push contacts, push calendar, autodiscovery, global address lookup, remote wipe.
* Positional audio (openAL) and fast graphics with OpenGLES.
* Word, Excel, PowerPoint and iWork document support
* Apps that are 10 MB or less can be downloaded over the cellular network - all others must be downloaded over WiFi or synced from iTunes.
* Enterprise users can set up private storefronts and distribute over their intranet.
* Push notification for applications - Instead of running in the background and wasting battery, the iPhone can receive messages and give you notification (alerts, sounds, badges) without needing to have the application running.

MobileMe
* The new .Mac
* Push email to all devices including iPhones, Macs and Windows PCs
* Online calendar and photo album - syncs with iCal and iPhoto. Drag and drop support.
* $99 per year, 60 day pre-trial available
* Available "early July"
* .Mac users get to keep their existing email addresses which will forward to a MobileMe address

3G iPhone
* Metal back replaced with glossy plastic
* Thinner at the edges
* Solid metal buttons
* 3.5" screen (same as original)
* Flush headphone jack
* "Dramatically improved" audio
* 10 hours of 2G talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk time, 300 hours standby, 5-6 hours web browsing, 7 hours video, 24 hours audio
* Built-in GPS - updates Google Maps live
* A LOT of extra countries - 70 new countries this year
* Price drop - Was: originally $599 for 8 GB. Now: $199 for 8 GB, $299 for 16 GB, $399 for 32 GB. These are the maximum prices for every country.
* Launches on July 11th (22 countries)
* Special edition white version

Steve went through the list of (almost) everything that was bad about the original iPhone and improved upon it dramatically. This is a great update.

As always, Engadget has the scoop + pictures.

P.S. I've disabled comments because whenever I post anything about the iPhone I get a TON of spam comments.

8800GT performance improvements with 10.5.3

With the recent OS X Leopard 10.5.3 upgrade, several users are reporting performance improvements with the Nvidia 8800GT, which has received bad publicity over its poor ProApp performance.

As always, Barefeats have benchmarks comparing the card with and without 10.5.3 and against the stock Radeon graphics card. At Apple Discussions, users have also posted their comparisons.

Performance improved significantly with the update but unfortunately not by enough to warrant purchasing it over the stock card. In some cases it was still slightly behind the stock Radeon. But progress is a good thing I suppose.

One poster says:


It looks like that could be the case. I hope that if it comes to that, Apple will do the decent thing and offer an exchange program.

Update: Some users are reporting graphical anomalies and Adobe CS3 suite problems with this patch

Mac OS X 10.5.3 released

Apple just released Leopard 10.5.3 via Software Update.

Apple's change list page is quite sparse while other sites have posted a much larger list of fixes based on beta versions of the patch. What is unclear is whether or not these changes made it to the final patch release or not (although the answer is probably yes as the final patch is 536 MB).

As always, NEVER upgrade in the middle of the project and if your system ain't broke, don't fix it. However, if you are suffering from a major issue fixed by this patch, wait several days to see if there are any major problems with it (I have heard of Airport issues already) and then only install it after performing a full system clone.

If you are considering upgrading, you are advised to download the full combo updater rather than relying on Software Update:
Mac OS X 10.5.3 Combo Updater