As we reported last week, the next major release of Mac OS X will be called Snow Leopard. While developers attending WWDC will get details from Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, during the State of Mac OS X session today, we do have some details to share with you now.

The update is scheduled to ship in about a year, and will focus mainly on under-the-hood changes aimed at future-proofing and bettering the performance of Mac OS X. "We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more," Serlet said in a statement released today. "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system."

Snow Leopard will add a technology called Grand Central that will allows developers to more easily take advantage of the processing resources in multicore Macs. It will also include support for Open Computing Language (OpenCL—not to be confused with OpenCL the cryptography library) which is designed to harness the processing power of GPUs for nongraphics tasks. And, Snow Leopard will be capable of addressing a theoretical limit of 16TB of system RAM.

In addition, Snow Leopard will include QuickTime X, a new version of the multimedia framework optimized for extremely efficient playback, a result of engineering work done for the iPhone. Also, we'll finally see full, native support of Microsoft Exchange in Mail, Address Book, and iChat. It's also hinted that Safari will be included with the super-fast SquirrelFish JavaScript engine.

Though it may not include any whiz-bang features like Time Machine or Exposé that previous version had, these underlying improvements should enable some serious performance out of current and future hardware.