Apple open sources multi-core tech
September 14, 2009 in News by Alastair Otter
One of the less-reported announcements around Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release last week was the open sourcing of Apple’s new multi-core technology. Released under the Apache 2.0 licence, Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware. Grand Central doesn’t solve the design issues of parallel code, that is still left to the developer, but it does make the process of spinning off threads more efficient by managing the threads execution on available processor cores.
I wonder how this software compares with Linux’s or FreeBSD’s multi-core functionality. I think it would be clearly advantageous to Apple to make it easy for developers of apps for Mac to be able to make better use of multi-core technology. This is good business sense (not altruism), IMHO.
@ Andrew
I think you’re right on the money regarding this being a good business sense move rather than altruism. But it is still interesting to see Apple release this under an open source licence. The FOSS community focuses most of its attention on Microsoft, forgetting that Apple is one of the most proprietary of companies (and most litigious) around, despite building its OS X on free software and therefore benefiting directly from FOSS.
@ Alastair
Agreed, all.