Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Unparalleled innovation

On the afternoon of June 9, Apple introduced the next generation Mac OS X operating system to various developers at the annual WWDC 08 Convention (the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2008). Code-named Snow Leopard Snow Leopard, is expected to be officially released within a year.

It is reported that Snow Leopard will focus on improving performance and stability, which will optimize the core processor and introduce a new technology called "Grand Central" to simplify the process of programmer programming for multiple core processors. This version will also support GPU generic compute acceleration via OPENCL (Open Computing Language).

The +GPU accelerates the two trends, and Apple is holding on to it. Another long-awaited support for the 128bit ZFS file system is that the now open file system from Sun is very powerful, especially with the introduction of the storage pool concept and the flexibility and maintainability shown in Solaris.

In addition, Snow Leopard will be a complete 64-bit operating system with the largest 16TB memory support. Built-in new generation QuickTime X Media Player, and natively support Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise Services.

Known as the world's most easy-to-use server operating system, MAC OS X server, in the upcoming new edition, is optimized for multiple core processors to help developers write programs in addition to the same grand-central technology as the desktop version of Snow Leopard; OpenCL (Open Computing Language supports GPU universal compute acceleration as well as a complete 64-bit operating system that supports 16TB of memory and adds a number of new features.

New features include formal support for 128-bit high-performance file system ZFS, read and write, and various other advanced operations, although it does not indicate whether it can be used as a boot partition. Earlier this year, Linus also devalued the file system in Mac OS X, and now he may begin to envy it; ICal Server 2, with group and shared calendars, push services, browser-based applications, new or enhanced services such as Mail Service mail Server, Podcast Producer 2, Collaboration services, collaboration, remote Access and Address book server.

According to AppleInsider, Apple has progressively released a series of latest preview software to developers, including the first Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Safari 4, plus the latest iphone software v2.0 (build 5a331).

The release of the Mac OS X 10.6 version is build 10a96, and WWDC 2008 developers can get the Snow Leopard CD-ROM like the one shown below.

In addition, Apple yesterday provided developers with the latest preview version of Safari 4.0 (5526.11.2), including leopard, Tiger, and several versions of Windows. According to the leopard developer, the Safari installation file is 40.2MB, and Safari 4.0 reacts much faster than 3.1.1 in the course of use, and there are minor improvements, such as saving a Web page as a standalone executable OS X program.

On the official website of the newly-opened Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple summed up the next-generation operating system with a concise title: a qualitative leap! (A Quantum Leap).

A few additions:

1. OpenCL is based on the C language, the so-called "Extended support for hardware" said too general. According to Apple's official document, OpenCL is actually allowing the GPU to participate in the operation of the graphics program, and to fully play the idle GPU computing. This should be the most important improvement for the snow leopard, and future Mac OS will provide support for this language program.

2. Apple emphasizes that Snow leopard provides "native support" to Exchange2007, the key word "out-of-the-box", "native". Mail, ICal, and address three piece are seamlessly integrated directly with Exchange.

3. Quick time x technology has been used on the iphone, and the performance of media playback will be greatly enhanced.

4. New Safari's support for JavaScript is better, and officials say the performance has increased by 53%.