It will be a total continuity of Leopard, all at least at the interface, the changes being done deep in the system:
- Support of Microsoft Exchange: Apple made it clear that without being compatible with MS Exchange, there is no way for entering corporate market and make enterprise switching to Mac. The best strategy will be to have Mac inside corporate to induce the transition to Mac and its OS.
- A management of the multi-core CPUs optimized with a handful of new technologies called " Grand Central" which will be able to take full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. It will also ease the work of developers as they will not really have to think their application as multicore directly from the code.
- Improvement of the management of the 64 bits instructions
- QuickTime X which will support more codecs, and will be faster.
- Open CL is Apple's name for NVidia CUDA (we were talking about yesterday ), aiming to take unlock the computing power of GPU to redirect it for general-purpose computing (other than 3D rendering).
In short, Mac OS X finally became mature, or will be, with Snow Leopard which resembles its ultimate variation. It would not be surprising if Apple prefers to start out with the design of Mac OS 11 so that can be launched at the same time as Windows 7. Let us hope that Snow Leopard be sold at a cheaper price than the preceding updates.
