Among the big announcements at WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) 2008 being held in San Francisco, Apple has previewed its next major operating system Mac OS X Snow Leopard, expected to ship in about a year's time.

Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Apple claims Snow Leopard enhances the performance of OS X, sets a new standard for quality, and lays the foundation for future OS X innovation.

As Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president (Software Engineering) of Apple, said, "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. 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."

Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM, and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. For the first time, the OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size.

According to Apple, Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named "Grand Central" making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.