Sweet, juicy gossip from Silicon Alley Insider this morning. A “tipster” told the site that Apple is working on a dedicated hardware Quicktime encoder/decoder for future Macs. (Is that Apple’s big secret? Probably not, we guess.) Such a dedicated chip would take some of the load off the CPU. All that would mean to the average user is faster, smoother playback, especially of HD material, in things like Quicktime and iChat. People who edit video would also get a boost, as a dedicated encoder would make encoding video into XYZ Format all the more easy.

So… who’s watching the Olympics? Pretty great, right?