Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Core Duo 2.0 Ghz Versus C2D 2.6 Penyrn... difference?

S

StevieMooey

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 9, 2008
51
0
Im currently have a 1st gen core duo 2.0 Ghz with 2 gig ram.

I was just wondering what sort of performance gains I could expect if I update to a either a

2.6 Penryn

Or

2.6 & Montevina


What do you think?


Cheers!

Mooey
 
You won't notice much in performance differences unless you're constantly pushing both cores in your CD right now. Think of it as the difference between a car with a top speed of 80mph and one with a top speed of 120mph. If you spend most of your time at the speed limit, the faster car make a difference except in your head. That said, the 2.6 should have a cooler processor per given clock speed, and equivalent battery life. As always, upgrade if you *need* to, don't if you don't. It won't make your Firefox/iTunes/etc much faster, at any rate.
 
heatmiser said:
You won't notice much in performance differences unless you're constantly pushing both cores in your CD right now. Think of it as the difference between a car with a top speed of 80mph and one with a top speed of 120mph. If you spend most of your time at the speed limit, the faster car make a difference except in your head. That said, the 2.6 should have a cooler processor per given clock speed, and equivalent battery life. As always, upgrade if you *need* to, don't if you don't. It won't make your Firefox/iTunes/etc much faster, at any rate.
Click to expand...

Hi, thanks for that really useful imagery!

I use Logic Pro 8 and do max out the cores quite alot. Is it possible to estimate a percentage performance increase?

Would my new Office 2008 be any snappier?

Mooey
 
Office 2008's snappiness may be more related to your graphics card (for screen rendering) and your hard drive speed (time to load).

I would think for logic you are going to see at least a 30% improvement on straight Ghz speedup. pair that with the 50% increase in L2 cache on each core, and I would guess you may see a 40-50% speedup for highly intense tasks. Again, I'm just saying for when you're running logic on a task that's just hitting it hard and you're not able to do anything but wait, I would expect that you'd see a 40-50% dropoff in wait time. But the difference in every-day tasks is going to be more or less intangible. All in your head.
 
shadowfax said:
Office 2008's snappiness may be more related to your graphics card (for screen rendering) and your hard drive speed (time to load).

I would think for logic you are going to see at least a 30% improvement on straight Ghz speedup. pair that with the 50% increase in L2 cache on each core, and I would guess you may see a 40-50% speedup for highly intense tasks. Again, I'm just saying for when you're running logic on a task that's just hitting it hard and you're not able to do anything but wait, I would expect that you'd see a 40-50% dropoff in wait time. But the difference in every-day tasks is going to be more or less intangible. All in your head.
Click to expand...

Hi there. Many thanks: that's useful information!

Cheers,

Mooey
 
Penryn's focus (at least from a Press Release standpoint) is energy efficiency, so you may notice increased battery life and possibly reduced heat. And it supports SSE4, which could be useful.
 
when montevina is released new procs will be out also.. these new procs will have a faster 1066mhz FSB compared to the current 800mhz on the latest penryn procs.. also it seems that DDR3 will be used in montevina :D
 
theres also the fact that the CD chip is 32-bit and the C2D chip is 64-bit. this is only an advantage when using 64-bit apps.

some of Apples apps are 64-bit in Leopard so they are a bit faster when used on a 64-bit cpu. but some apps such as smaller third party apps are better at 32-bit and the huge cpu and graphics demanding apps are better at 64-bit.

also Mac OS X's future technology will be based on 64-bit (while still being backwards compatible with 32-bit cpus) so having a C2D will be a safe guard for the future.
 
I would expect a 20 to 30 percent increase in real life performance in the most ideal case possible. I would be very impressed if it got anywhere close to 40%.
 
Thanks people.

Hmm.... is Nehalem being released at same time as Montevina?

If so, its a no-brainer.... wait!

Do you think Intel will delay Montevina/ Nehalem to account for the delays with Penryn? Does that make business sense? (I am not a business man, daaaarlings!)

However, I was under the impression that Montevina would ship with Penryn initially. Have I dreamt this or is it a fact?

-Mooey
 
StevieMooey said:
Thanks people.

Hmm.... is Nehalem being released at same time as Montevina?

If so, its a no-brainer.... wait!

Do you think Intel will delay Montevina/ Nehalem to account for the delays with Penryn? Does that make business sense? (I am not a business man, daaaarlings!)

However, I was under the impression that Montevina would ship with Penryn initially. Have I dreamt this or is it a fact?

-Mooey
Click to expand...

Montevina is the platform on which Penryn will run. Nehalem is the new Core 3 processors. They won't be out at the same time at all. Reference here please.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back