Apple announced at WWDC that the newest major update to Mac OS X will be available in a about a year. The new update called Snow Leopard appears to geared toward performance and will be the first Mac OS since OS X was released in 2001 to actually slim itself down. According to the Apple website http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/ – “Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.”
The new OS won’t be just on slimming down, even though still a year from shipping, the website lists a few new features.
Multicore Technology –
Apple will include “Grand Central” a set of technologies to allow the whole OS (not just pieces) as well as Mac apps to better utilize the multiple cores of the processor(s).
Extended support for 64-bit technology will allow the Operating System to access “…up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk.”
OpenCL –
Open Compute Library will allow programs to better access and utilize the extra processing muscle of the GPU on modern graphics cards. The processor the modern games use to render their highly demanding images will also be utilized for ‘everyday’ computing.
Finally, items from the iphones playbook –
Microsoft Exchange 2007 Support and Quicktime X.
Exchange support thru the OS not just iPhone and Quicktime streamlined and optimized to provide great playback of modern codecs and protocols online and on your system.
