Apple initially seemed to suggest that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard would be a minor release following 2007's 10.5 Leopard, citing support for Exchange Server push messaging as the only customer-facing feature. However, Apple historically directs attention upon its currently shipping products rather than its future plans. As the Snow Leopard release grows closer (remarks at WWDC last summer indicated it would ship "in about a year," or Summer 2009), more details have been released.
New kernel features in Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard will deliver a full 64-bit kernel, requiring the same significant "all at once" upgrade in device drivers that Vista's significant kernel changes did. Apple will likely have an easier time pulling this off, as Snow Leopard is only designed to run on a relatively small number of higher end PCs, all made by Apple. Rather than trying to get lots of vendors on board as Microsoft must, Apple will be supplying the majority of kernel-level drivers for Snow Leopard.
While Microsoft has sold a 64-bit version of Windows for Intel x86 PCs since mid-2005, actual 64-bit adoption has been slow. Apple has incrementally supported 64-bit background servers and applications in Mac OS X since the release of the PowerMac G5 in 2003; all 64-bit capable Macs can already run 64-bit Mac OS X software because Apple doesn't offer two versions of its operating system; the same version of today's Leopard runs both 32-bit and 64-bit code.
In Snow Leopard, this will improve as the entire operating system, including all bundled apps, will be compiled for both 32-bit and 64-bits. This results in a roughly 15% increase in performance across the board for 64-bit Macs, such as those with Core 2 Duo processors (most models released since 2006, as the chart below depicts). It also has implication related to security hardening. Windows users also benefit from running the 64-bit version of Microsoft's operating system, but compatibility problems have made the move less attractive, leaving mainstream Windows users stuck on a 32-bit platform. Windows 7 perpetuates this problem by delaying the move to 64-bits to a future release.
In addition to bringing 64-bit processors into the mainstream of Mac computing by making 64-bit the default rather than an option, Snow Leopard also debuts the fruits of Apple's efforts in making full use of multiple cores and multiple processors. Snow Leopard's new Grand Central Dispatch is used to aggressively and efficiently schedule processes across all available processor cores in parallel, and OpenCL is being made available to allow developers to take advantage of the raw processing power that often lays idle in the system's GPU.
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