Good news for Apple fan boys. You may probably see Snow Leopard as early as Q1 2009 ! The official Mac OS X version 10.6, which I am sure most Apple fans are looking forward to, is very close. This is one reason I really like Apple. They are so fast in their releases. Soooo… ‘not like Microsoft’ !

This was recently announced by Apple’s Director of Engineering for the Unix Technology branch, Jordan Hubbard. Apple promised that Snow Leopard will emphasize both on quality and performance.

Several new features will be available, out of that few of them are:

• Support for Microsoft Exchange – Apple promises that Snow Leopard will include “out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal”.
• Support for Multicore – A new technology called “Grand Central” will support optimization of multiple tasks across multiple cores and processors.
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• Support for 64-bit computing – Here’s what Apple has to say, “Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today”. Image that !!
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• Faster Media and much faster Internet – It seems Safari will be able to execute JavaScript atleast 53% faster in Snow Leopard.
• Open CL – Another new technology in OS X 10.6 will be Open Computing Language (CL) which Apple explains, “OpenCL, makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU).” Definitely great news for game developers.

Well Steve, we are all looking forward to it.

[source: macrumors.com, apple.com]