The chip that powers the latest Macs, the Intel Core Duo, is, as the name implies, a dule core processor. Two processors in one package, really. The same is true for Inte's upcoming Conroe CPU that will almost certainly find its way into the Intel-based Power Macs to come before year's end. Beyond that, out on Intel's horizon, we can see Kentsfield and Clovertown, two upcomong quad-core processors. And that's not to mention the mighty Dunnington, to sport four to thirty two cores.

For an application to take advantage of all that mult-core goodness, it needs to be well threaded. Yet, many apps out there are unthreaded or poorly threaded. It's Apple and Intel and Mac OS X v10.5 "Lepoard" to the rescue.

According to Mac OS Rumors, Leopard, which is expected to be unveiled at August's World Wide Developers Conference, is expected to contain code co-developed with Intel that helps break up tasks into multiple threads, allowing them to better utilize these new multi-core systems. At present, it's the very rare applicaion that benefits at all from more than four processor cores. Diminishing returns. According to the article, this new thread splitting code allows standard applications to take full benefit of 16 cores, each core getting an approximately equal slice of the work at hand. The effect works nearly as well for 32 cores.

All this is not to say that Mac OS X is weak at handling multiprocessing. To the contrary, Mac OS X is currently the operating system champion at handling multiple CPUs. It's had this ability since day one. The reason that this new technology will be so welcome is to do with the way developers code applications, and the degree of difficulty involved in developing a highly threaded application.