ZDNet reports on the shipping PowerMac G5s.
As was long rumored, the article reports that the PowerMac G5s ship with Mac OS X 10.2.7 (codename: Smeagol). 10.2.7 provides PowerMac G5 hardware support, as well as 64-bit support.
- In particular, version 10.2.7 of Mac OS X has math and vector libraries that are optimized for the 64-bit chip, as well as the ability to address more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, breaking through a limitation of 32-bit chips.
Readers are reminded that the speed advantages of the PowerMac G5 computers lie primarily in the increased performance of the processor and subsystems rather than the "64-bit"-ness of the computer.