A reader has reported us some interesting hints which suggest Apple is planning to use multi-core processors in its future PowerMacs and has already adapted its developer tools' utilities to this new architecture. We tested the hints and we provide two screenshots in this article.

The first hint is a mention of the PowerPC 970MP processor into the MONster utility, which can be found into the Developer/Performance Tools/CHUD folder. As we could verify by ourselves, opening the MONster utility's executable file in any text processing application and searching for "970MP" surprisingly returns a result.

If you're still sceptic, make sure that your CHUD Tools are updated to version 4.1 then launch MONster utility and open the results display options, you will get a tray that shows, among other settings, 4 checkboxes which correspond to columns for 1, 2, 3 or 4 processors that should be displayed in the results page.

These hints, either suggest the forthcoming release of quadri-processor Macs as hinted earlier this week, or the use of multi-core CPUs into future Macs. The second option is getting more and more obvious though.

UPDATE: The CHUD Tools have been updated to version 4.1.1 but references of the PowerPC 970MP and support for four CPUs are both still present in this version.