UK newspaper The Guardian is chiming in on the rumour mill as we close in on Macworld Expo which takes place in San Francisco from January 5th to 9th.

In the report The Guardian claims that Apple “and its partners” have been “dropping hints” to developers that Snow Leopard will ship earlier than expected. In addition the report goes onto claim that Phil Schiller who is hosting the Macworld 2009 Keynote will give a demonstration of Snow Leopard.

The Guardian also goes into some details of the new technologies that Snow Leopard will deliver, in particular Grand Central and OpenCL.

The first technology, Grand Central, is designed to make better use of the Intel processors that sit inside the current range of Macs. The other, OpenCL, could have a more dramatic effect on performance for some programs as it will tap into the power of graphics processors (GPUs) that now goes to waste.

A Q1 2009 timeframe was previously leaked by Jordan Hubbard Apple’s Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies last month.