These statements, based on a pre-release copy of Snow Leopard, seem accurate to me. But the implication that the story leaves readers with—that you can’t “go 64 bit” or “boot into the 64-bit version of Snow Leopard” if your Mac isn’t booting into a 64-bit kernel—is completely wrong.
64-bit games for Mac: The future of Mac gaming. The removal of 32-bit support caught many by surprise. Many saw it as an aggressive move that hurt both consumers and developers alike and were quick to call out Apple. Apple’s decision could be debated at length, but the move to 64-bit was a necessary move. Instant Client 19.8 supports macOS High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur. In Finder, double click on all desired Instant Client.dmg packages to mount them. All installations require the Basic or Basic Light package. Open a terminal window and change directory to one of the packages, for example.
If you’re using a 64 bit Kernel in Mac OS X: The x8664 at the end will let you know you are using the 64 bit kernel. You can alternate between the two by holding down “6” and “4” during system boot to load the 64 bit kernel, or holding down ‘3’ and ‘2’ during boot to use the 32 bit kernel.
When Apple talks about Snow Leopard being thoroughly 64-bit savvy, what the company means is that almost every application included in Snow Leopard has been recompiled to run in 64-bit mode. There are two reasons this is a good thing. The first is simple: 64-bit computing is necessary if you want one of the programs on your computer to have access to more than 4GB of RAM. Second, there are some speed boosts associated with running in 64-bit mode. The Intel processors that power Macs have built-in math routines that operate more efficiently in 64-bit mode, processing tasks in fewer steps. That means that certain math-intensive tasks will see a speed boost under Snow Leopard’s 64-bit applications.
If you’re running a Mac powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or an Intel Xeon processor, your Mac is 64-bit capable. And Snow Leopard runs 64-bit-capable applications in 64-bit mode regardless of whether it’s booting into a 64-bit or 32-bit kernel. In fact, the only big advantage of booting into a 64-bit kernel would be the ability to use more than 32 gigabytes of RAM. There aren’t any Macs that can do that now, anyway, due to hardware limitations.
Applications running in Snow Leopard will have access to a full 16 exabyte virtual address space, just the same as if they were running in a 64-bit kernel. As a result, there’s very little difference between booting into the 64-bit kernel and the 32-bit kernel in current Mac systems. (This is not to say that there won’t be a bigger difference in the future, as RAM sizes continue to grow. But presumably new high-end Mac systems will boot into the 64-bit kernel when the need arises.)
So, bottom line: If you’ve got a Core 2 Duo or Xeon based Mac — any Intel Mac not running a Core Duo or Core Solo processor — you’ll be able to run applications in 64-bit mode, which will in turn be able to take advantage of faster 64-bit registers and math routines as well as access massive amounts of memory.
Now all we have to do is wait for Snow Leopard to arrive so we can try out those 64-bit applications for ourselves.
I thought that my 27-Inch iMac 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 ran in 64-bit mode by default but I see that it doesn't right now. When I go into the System Profiler and select 'Software', I see:
64-bit Kernel and Extensions: No
Yet, when I look in my Activity Monitor, I see Intel (64-bit) under 'Kind' running for almost all the processes except for a couple. Is this ever royally confusing or what.
I use a couple of FireWire Interfaces for recording and would like to enable 64-bit mode for the extensions they use (for my M-Audio in particular).
How can I permanently enable 64-bit mode? I could swear that before I updated from 10.6.6 to 10.6.8 a few days ago that I was running in 64-bit mode. Also, does enabling 64-bit mode have any effect on Rosetta?
Mac Os 64 Bit Not Showing In Virtualbox
Is there any disadvantage to running in 64-bit mode (ie: will certain things not work)?
Thanks in advance.
27-Inch iMac 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 8 GB RAM
Mac Os 64 Or 32 Bit
Posted on Nov 24, 2011 2:18 PM