From the Intel Press Release
"The combination of Intel's compilers, Leopard and Xcode 3.0 provides unprecedented support for Mac developers to take full advantage of Intel multicore processors. Intel's compilers contain auto-parallelizing capabilities, libraries and Threading Building Blocks for Mac OS X, and Leopard is fully optimized for multicore environments with new developer APIs and tools for developing multithreaded applications."

"Several Mac developers, including Apple's own Leopard development team, Adobe and Autodesk, have used Intel's compilers since the Mac OS X tools suite was introduced in January 2006."

Comments from Apple VP
Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering states, "Leopard, Xcode and Intel's compilers give developers powerful new tools to squeeze even more performance out of the latest Intel processors,"  He goes on to state that "Intel's software works well in our Xcode environment, and the Intel engineering team does a great job supporting our Apple engineers and Mac OS X developers."

Penryn Processors and Macs
The updated Intel tools will optimize Mac applications and allow them to take advantage of features like SSE4, a set of instructions to boost multimedia performance in systems on Intel's new Penryn processors.  Apple is expected to debut new Mac systems with Penryn processors in the future.  It's widely anticipated that Apple Mac Pro workstations will be the first Macs to use Penryn processors.  See our related story.

Apple and Intel first introduced Intel processor-based Macs in 2006 and since that time, Intel has offered the Intel C++ Compiler, Intel Fortran Compiler, Intel Math Kernel Library and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Mac OS X.  Intel added the Intel Threading Building Blocks for Mac OS X in 2007.

You can read Intel's full press release here.  The tools are available for download from Intel's web site.