News
Next-Gen Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' Coming in 2009
- By David Nagel
- June 11, 2008
At its
Worldwide Developer
Conference (WWDC) Monday, Apple released preliminary details of "Snow
Leopard," the forthcoming successor to Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard")
and the next major revision to the Mac operating system.
The new OS will focus on performance, according to Apple, "rather than
focusing primarily on new features."
"We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven
years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more," said Bertrand
Serlet, Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering, in a statement
released today. "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience,
we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most
advanced operating system."
What does this mean? For one, Mac OS X is going through an optimization period,
refining performance on multi-core processors through a new technology code-named
"Grand Central" and taking greater advantage of GPUs through the adoption
of OpenCL ("Open Computing Language"), which, as Apple described it,
"lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power
previously available only to graphics applications." OpenCL is a proposed
open standard.
Further, now Leopard will increase the practical software limit on system memory
up to 16TB.
Other changes revealed today include:
- The introduction of QuickTime X, which will be optimized for "modern
audio and video formats";
- A new version of Safari, Apple's Web browser, which promises a 53 percent
increase in JavaScript performance to enhance the experience of Web 2.0 applications;
and
- For the enterprise, native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in Mail,
iCal, and Address Book.
Apple said Snow Leopard will ship in about a year.
About the Author
Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters.