Wrong, Apple
June 11th, 2009, at 4:41 p.m.
In its notes on Snow Leopard, Apple claims:
64-bit computing shatters [the 4GB memory] barrier by enabling applications to address a theoretical 16 billion gigabytes of memory, or 16 exabytes. It also enables computers to process twice the number of instructions per clock cycle, which can dramatically speed up numeric calculations and other tasks.
Wrong, Apple. Ridiculously wrong. It might enable you to process twice as much data per clock cycle, depending on what you’re doing and how the chip is architected, but even that’s best-case. This reads like the fanboy arguments of PowerPC versus x86 from the late 90s—but with less intelligence.
Hopefully Apple will fix its wording before they ship Snow Leopard, or I’m sure some lawyer somewhere will have a wonderful time filing a lawsuit for false marketing.