The next version of Apple’s OS X operating system will include breakthroughs in programming parallel processors, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told The New York Times in an interview after that week’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” Jobs said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

The new OS, code-named Snow Leopard, will plus focus on shield and reducing its footprint, but have fewer features. “We’ve added by a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” Jobs said. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”

Open CL

Jobs said Apple is proposing a new processing standard called Open CL (Open Computing Language) that allows programmers to take advantage of graphics processors. “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.”

P.A. Semi, the small chip-design firm Apple acquired in April, will not be involved in that effort. P.A. Semi will focus on custom-designing chips for the iPod and iPhone, Jobs said.

That’s no surprise, said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies. “The logical impact of the P.A. Semi acquisition was that Apple would create their own custom chips for use in the iPhone and the iPod’s of the future,” Bajarin said.

Future Role for Intel Chips

But Apple’s effort in parallel-processing tools is potentially a “real breakthrough,” Bajarin said. “As Jobs has said, the real issue impacting the future of personal computing has to deal with programming applications that work with many processors.”

Intel and Nvidia have both developed tools for addressing parallel processing — Intel with Terrascale and Nvidia with Cuda, Bajarin noted, “but Apple’s Open CL appears to represent real…

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