Steve Jobs introduced the next iteration of Mac OS X which will be called "Snow Leopard" during his keynot address at WWDC 2008. Features highlighted so far are:

- Takes advantage of multi-core processors and parallel programming and are calling it "Grand Central". Nvidia's CEO recently commented on usage of thier CUDA technology for GPU acceleration by Apple. Grand Central however, would probably include CPU and GPU.

- Support modern hardware with OpenCL (Open Computing Language)

- Supports both Server and Client

- Supports ZFS

- Expected to ship some time next year

- no support for PowerPC

Click here for more details on Snow Leopard server. It is very interesting that Apple has taken the decision to tightly integrate these acceleration technologies with the operating system. Multi-core CPUs would help in parallelizing computation and handle more peripherals as each core can support multiple threads. The GPU contains stream processors which are not full blown processors like Intel or AMD processors but are cores that are very effective for small specific tasks. One won't be able to run an entire OS like they could on a multi-core CPU but these cores can produce tremendous performance for specific tasks, especially pixel "pushing". For a programming model perspective, the GPU can be viewed as hundreds of small cores that can run thousands of threads in parallel. This external core acceleration so far has been the domain of specific scientific applications and is not utilized in home or office PCs. Now, we can generally agree that acceleration is "good", it's time to speculate in which areas would CPU/GPU acceleration actually help. It is pretty clear that almost every area would benefit but there are some in which we would be able to notice a huge performance increase.

- Applications like Microsoft Office/OpenOffice would get a huge bump in areas such as diction/grammar intellisense, editing graphs, etc. with the processing offloaded to the extra cores.

- Obviously graphics intensive applications like Photoshop, Gimp, etc would see a decent bump in speed. The extra CPU cores will help in managing and feeding data effectively to the GPU threads.

- Video and audio editing. HD video playback.

- Video conferencing although it will probably be limited by network speeds.

- Web browsing. If you believe it wouldn't require a lot of processing power then you just have to open multiple tabs in your browser with flash.

The best possible thing they can do is to support old systems. By "old", i mean systems that are a year or two years old which are very capable of acceleration and contain the hardware that is necessary. For example, a person who bought a Macbook pro last year which has Intel Core 2 Duo, a multi-core processor and a 8600M video card which supports GPU acceleration. Let's also remember that external acceleration does not end with just the CPU and GPU; anything in the system with a processing core is game! (More uses for PhysX cards maybe?). What are your thoughts about this?

Links:

Screenshots of Snow Leopard

GPGPU