Despite the overwhelming focus on a possible 3G iPhone announcement at next week's Worldwide Developers' Conference in San Francisco next week, a new rumor has posited that Apple will already have a new version of Mac OS X available for testing at the event. An additional rumor has stated that the operating system upgrade could launch as early as Macworld 2009.

According to AppleInsider, Apple will be seeding a rough version of its Mac OS X 10.6 operating system to developers attending the conference. The upgrade may see manufacturing as early as December and ship in January of 2009.

Similar to Mac OS X 10.1,, the release would more closely resemble a maintenance release than a complete overhaul. The primary change would be a complete transition to an Intel-only, 64-bit platform that drops PowerPC support, pushing developers to code only for the x86 architecture at the heart of all Macs released from 2006 onwards.

Apple has refrained from commenting on the situation, though the company has dropped an early signs that it may be prepping for 10.6 development via a mention of the upcoming operating system appearing in the latest build of the iPhone software development kit, the most recent version of which appeared last week.

Apple has also alluded to next week's WWDC as a landmark event in "more ways than one," with bridge imagery suggesting two bridges to cross at the San Francisco gathering.

If you're still using a PowerPC-based Mac, love it dearly and wanted to wait a while longer before moving over to Intel-based hardware, let the screaming begin over in the comments or forums.