I've got a Mac Pro I think was bought roughly a year ago - Single CPU quad core 2.8GHz - and it's running 64Bit EFI.


Jon

October 2007 15" MacBook Pro:

"firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">

So, all sweet here if I was interested in being 64-bit.

Edited to correct age of Mac.

2006 MacBook White EFI32 well not surprising

Same here

Is it worth upgrading to Snow Leopard?

well my Unibody Pro will take it so I'll see what it's like before I suggest the mrs get's it on her MB

*Scratches head*

The article only seems to refer to the fully 64-bit kernel. The rest of Snow Leopards 64-bit features should be available in the default configuration on machines with 64-bit processors. I don't see what difference the EFI type would make - my PC boots to a 64-bit kernel from a 16-bit real mode BIOS without any problems.

The problem with fully 64-bit kernels is that you need all your kernel mode drivers to be 64-bit as well. This, I imagine, is real reason for the restriction. The article has a list of machines that can boot the 64-bit kernel:



I expect that these are only machines that Apple has got a full set of 64-bit drivers for. The fact that only the Xserves use the 64-bit kernel by default, suggests that suitable 3rd party OS X drivers (which are much more commonly used on desktop machines) are likely to be rarer than hens teeth in the immediate future.

Snow Leopard is an improvement over Leopard, it should be faster.

The early (pre-October 2006) MacBooks only had a 32-bit processor anyway, so no way they could run 64-bit software anyway.

Snow Leopard does bring a lot of benefits, even if you stay with 32-bit, mainly performance increase according to Apple.

It just seemed crazy that, apart from the first MacBooks and minis, all of the Intel Macs have a 64-bit processor, yet it looks like a lot of them won't be able to use 64-bit mode - and even then won't boot automatically into 64-bit mode - even though Apple hailed 64-bit end-to-end as one of the big features of Snow Leopard...

It could be drivers - but considering Apple control the hardware, it seems strange, although I suppose there could be problems with things like Elgato drivers etc.

Running 64-bit emulation in a 32-bit environment has got to cost clock cycles, compared to running 64-bit in 64-bits...

The list just seems to cover machines post 2008, the 64-bit machines from 2006 and 2007 aren't listed at all as being capable of running 64-bit end-to-end.

That can't have been a surprise though, right? Your MacBook is a Core Duo, like mine isn't it???

Aye, I knew that I had a 32-bit CPU, but I did only find out sixth months or so after I had it that it was 32-bit and I was told I wouldn't be able to run a 64-bit system on it...I wish I could upgrade the CPU

Oh for pity's sake.

You absolutely WILL be able to run snow leopard on it and there are a bundle of things about snow leopard that are well worth the pretty nominal price regardless of the width of the CPU's registers on your computer. Unless you're in the habit of editing hours of HD video or doing jet engine simulations on your laptop, it's not as if it being 32 or 64 bit is going to make that much difference to you anyway.

How about the fact you get 6GB of disk back? Or that's it's faster booting and, apparently, much faster coming back from sleep? Or that it's apparently twice as fast to connect or reconnect to wireless networks? I'd say those things are all much much more important to a laptop owner than whether their CPU will be able to cope with astronomically large datasets or not.

Stop getting you knickers in a twist over something that actually won't affect 99% of the things we do with our computers anyway.

Jon

I don't think he said he couldn't... He just said he couldn't run 64-bit software on a 32-bit CPU, which he was first made aware of 6 months after he bought his MacBook. He just won't be able to take advantage of the 64-bit end-to-end extensions of SL.


Exactly, and I don't think anybody has said this isn't so.

Well, it's not really emulation, x86-64 processors running in long mode (64-bit) can switch to compatibility mode (32-bit) and back again with comparatively little overhead. I would expect that most of the performance gain from 64-bit kernel would come from being able to use the extra registers available in long mode. Then again, in typical Mac desktop usage, how much processor time is devoted to running kernel code? I wouldn't have thought it's much at all compared to application code (which if the applications are 64-bit , will be able to take advantage of the extra registers).

Assuming that the same list does apply to the released version of Snow Leopard, it does seem that Apple doesn't see the need to develop 64-bit drivers for their older 64-bit machines. It is slightly disappointing that of the three O/S installed on my 64-bit Mac, the only one that's not 64-bit from top to bottom is the one from Apple themselves, and that this will likely remain the case in perpetuity.