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Jobs told the New York Times that with this upgrade Apple had decided to focus on "foundational features" that will underpin future developments of the company's operating system. And key to that, is a mechanism for programming multicore processors.

"The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things," he <

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said. "I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it."

But with Grand Central, Apple has made a parallel programming breakthrough, Jobs said, and will be at the heart of Snow Leopard.

Jobs then touched on OpenCL, which Apple is proposing as a standard for programming graphics processors to share the burden of general computing tasks.

"Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation," he said. "It's way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it's really simple."

PA Semi

Jobs also confirmed what we already knew, that Apple's recent acquisition of chip designer PA Semiconductor posed no threat to Intel, supplier of processors for Apple's Mac range.

Instead PA Semi's engineers will develop new system-on-chip technology for the iPhone and iPods.