Predictions for Macworld Expo San Francisco 2009: Snow Leopard

It’s no secret that Apple is hard at work on the next version of OSX, Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard was announced at WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) last summer, with an expected ship date of summer 2009.

According to The Guardian, Phil Schiller will demonstrate the new OS at Macworld, and show off at least two of Snow Leopard’s new technologies: Grand Central and OpenCL.

Grand Central is a built-in service that will allow multi-core/multi-processor Macs to make all of their processing horsepower available to applications. This is significant because developers actually have a hard time making use of multiple processors. Grand Central will provide a single, unified method for developers to take advantage of multi-core/multi-processor Macs.

The second technology, OpenCL, allows applications to use the processors within a graphics chipset. The graphics cards or chipsets in current Macs can have anywhere from 16 to 64 graphics processors. Most of the time, these speed demons of processing sit idle, waiting for some thriller graphics computation to perform. With OpenCL, applications can use these idle processors for other types of computations, which should provide a very significant performance boost.

Along with the demonstration, it is believed that Apple will ship Snow Leopard earlier than expected, perhaps some time in the first quarter of 2009.

Rumor Roundup: Macworld 2009