Apple’s newest operating system was announced at the 2008 Worldwide Development Conference. Code-named Snow Leopard, the new version’s moniker implies Apple is focusing on refining the operating system more than making major changes.

Although Snow Leopard will undoubtedly come with the usual bevy of feature enhancements and interface tweaks, the stand-out features of the new OS are almost all performance related. In particular, it has a heavy emphasis on multi-core processing.

Instead of adding new features, Snow Leopard will be tooled to increase the Macintosh’s performance. For example, according to Apple’s page on Snow Leopard, Safari will run JavaScript up to 53 percent faster.

Apple is giving us a peek of what Snow Leopard has to offer:

- Native support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Exchange is the center of many businesses’ IT infrastructure, so out-of-the-box support for it in Apple’s bundled Mail, iCal and Address Book applications makes the Mac a much stronger contender for the corporate desktop. (The iPhone will also be gaining these features.)

- Better parallelization. With applications requiring ever more processing speed, Snow Leopard’s “Grand Central” optimizes the operating system so that it can use more cores, more efficiently, more of the time. It will also be easier for developers to parallelize their applications to take advantage of multiple cores. Correspondents on the front line of the OS wars will be looking to compare Snow Leopard’s ability to scale to multiple cores closely to Microsoft’s efforts.

- General-purpose GPU processing. If “Grand Central” isn’t enough, Snow Leopard will also offer OpenCL, a library written to take advantage of the graphics processor(s) in the system to offload processor-intensive and massively parallelizable operations (read: video transcoding) to the GPU. There are plenty of media applications that could greatly benefit from OpenCL.

- Support for elephantine quantities of memory. OSX has been 64-bit since Leopard, but Apple have been busy tinkering in its 64-bit innards to enable up to 16 TB--yes, that’s terabytes--of addressable memory. Since most of us are still clutching our hearts over the price of 4 GB, this is going to be more interesting to Apple’s server offerings.

- A sped-up QuickTime, code-named “QuickTime X,” evidently one of the first beneficiaries of the push for parallelization as well as technology developed for the iPhone, with support for more codecs and media formats.

- The usual round of changes and enhancements that everyone will love/hate/blog about incessantly.

None of the major features are on the surface but under the skin of the OS.

Apple has not announced a release date for Snow Leopard. But Leopard users will likely have to wait a year for the Snow to fall.