The next version of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard - which the company debuted at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday - appears to be a captivating one, going by the details released officially by the company.

Snow Leopard's evolution comprises various enhancements that allow the OS to tap into the processing power of multiple CPU and graphics processing cores, thereby aiming at boost software performance. With multiple programming and software tools, tasks for concurrent execution across the cores have been aptly segregated.

Though the $29-priced Snow Leopard will run only on Intel-based Macs, it boasts of new tools like the Grand Central Dispatch, and indigenous support for OpenCL. While the former tool is basically a programming environment for breaking up tasks into multiple threads, the latter is a set of programming tools for developing and managing parallel task execution.

According to Linley Gwennap - president and chief analyst at the Linley Group - Apple's Snow Leopard has laid the foundation for software providers to write multi-core applications using the OS.

In addition, Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group, said that the new OS will bring about a nearly 50 times improvement in Mac's video processing in particular. The distribution of pixel processing across multiple CPU and graphics processing units in a system will result in a much faster video decoding!