Why do you say this? Why would Intel release newer processors that don't meet their previous price points?
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Core i7 (Nehalem) Based MacBook Pros Possible in Q4 2009?
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I am just surprised that they are still capable of shrinking the dies on these CPU's as far as they have. I mean, 32 NANO-meter. That is unbelievably tiny. However, I was talking to my good friend, an electrical and computer engineering student, and he was told by an Intel rep that they are hitting a wall in terms of shrinking the die any further than 32nm (maybe it was 24nm, but something close to where we are now). Something having to do with not being able to focus the laser that etches the chips any tighter... So, the question becomes: what will Intel do to get further CPU gains? It will be interesting to see...
Sure, they are now, but by the time they are released, or a few months after that, they will fall right into line, just like EVERY OTHER PIECE OF ELECTRONICS HARDWARE!
While I totally agree that this would be awesome, there is absolutely no way Apple will do that. After all, why buy a NEW computer when you are perfectly capable of upgrading you old one so it is just as fast? That would totally kill part of Apple's business model, that is, that you should buy the newest and shiniest because the old models are obsolete and there is nothing you can do about it. "Resistance is futile"
So ya, I would LOVE to see just what you are talking about, but c'mon, this is Apple we are talking about...
Sure, they are now, but by the time they are released, or a few months after that, they will fall right into line, just like EVERY OTHER PIECE OF ELECTRONICS HARDWARE!
While I totally agree that this would be awesome, there is absolutely no way Apple will do that. After all, why buy a NEW computer when you are perfectly capable of upgrading you old one so it is just as fast? That would totally kill part of Apple's business model, that is, that you should buy the newest and shiniest because the old models are obsolete and there is nothing you can do about it. "Resistance is futile"
So ya, I would LOVE to see just what you are talking about, but c'mon, this is Apple we are talking about...
I seriously do take the Mac Pro home some nights.
And professionally speaking, I would disagree. I DRIVE to locations. I have 10's if not hundreds of pounds of gear to lug. From a van truck or whatever a few hundred feet to the shoot. I want power, and I do not give a flying *** how thin it is. For two hundred feet, the difference between 1" and 2" thick... the difference between 4 pounds and 6 pounds is negligible. I need the work done NOW, not people waiting for me.
Battery that lasts 8 hours? Nice for flying here or there, but not mission critical. No, get me the image fixed faster, and twice as fast on sundays.
Fast trumps thin every day of the week.
That said, we will see a 4 core mac book pro in 2010 (if then). As others said, two years after the PC market. Apple has shown their priority is their $$ margins, not their users.
You assume people only use ethernet at home; what about people at work? I work at an elementary school and we easily have over 100 computers on our network, plus hundreds more at the other schools in the district. While our internet speed is only 20 Mbps (talking to our ISP trying to make it 100), we have a lot of stuff that just goes in our WAN. Each school's wireless network is controlled by a device at one of our jr. highs. So all wireless traffic has to go to that school. Considering we might have dozens of laptops using Wireless-N (or even G) at the same time, 1 Gig ethernet is actually not nearly enough. Plus add in the wired network stuff
no its 10nm or lower that will fail, there are 22nm chips in the making as we speak.
But after 10 it could mean 'Probabilistic Chips' are used which use 1/30 of the energy compared to todays CPU so it greenpeace friendly and runs 7 times faster then todays CPUs too!
you can read more here: http://www.dailytech.com/Probabilistic+Chips+Could+Revolutionize+CPU+Industry/article14206.htm
hopefully they make it a bit more accurate, I don't want to enter 15+15 into a calculator app only to get 31 as the answer.
Performance wasn't that good for me. I'd rather have 2 physcial cores then one physical and one logical
While we'd all rather have more physical processors than virtual their is a performance increase in nearly all cases by enabling Nehalem's hyperthreading.
So by an Air. Don't hobble a PRO machine.
Pro's should be fast. The Air's position is to be light.
To people who like to criticize others who ask whether or not to wait:
Some updates are so significant, that they are worth waiting for. While it may have been justified to criticize someone for skipping over Merom to wait for Penryn, Nehalem is an entirely different story.
Think back to 2003, when USB 1.1 was on Macs and USB 2.0 was right around the corner. Let's say you are someone who only buys a new Mac every 5 years. Unless you absolutely needed a new Mac for what you do, you would have been foolish to "buy now" instead of waiting for USB 2.0.
Some updates are so significant, that they are worth waiting for. While it may have been justified to criticize someone for skipping over Merom to wait for Penryn, Nehalem is an entirely different story.
Think back to 2003, when USB 1.1 was on Macs and USB 2.0 was right around the corner. Let's say you are someone who only buys a new Mac every 5 years. Unless you absolutely needed a new Mac for what you do, you would have been foolish to "buy now" instead of waiting for USB 2.0.
The funny thing is that I feel that's the perfect machine. I don't know what I'd want more than that... Seriously, what comes next?
8-Core 10GHz Processor, GTX 295 Graphics, 5TB Solid State, Screen that changes from gloss to matte with the click of a button! Oh and don't forget the 64GB of RAM.
For point of reference, 1GB Ethernet is rated at 125MB/sec ... and recall that SATA-I (which a single-spindle HD today just is still working to fill) is 150MB/sec ... and that FW3200 will be 393.216 MB/s ... so while all of these numbers are before consideration of protocol overhead and bandwidth sharing, I/O across a home 1GB Ethernet should be pragmatically "equivalent" to a normal HD's performance.
Kind of sounds like your topology has two bottlenecks. The first is in your WiFi (lots of competition there) and the second one is the bandwidth for your connection to the outside world.
Locally, our business is "100% wired" with no internal WiFi; nearly each individual PC is tied back to its concentrator with its own 100bT (12.5MB/sec) snap, with the occasional Gigabit ethernet snap for very special applications. The key is in the interconnects between the concentrators and local WAN backbone: IIRC, these were upgraded a couple of years ago to run at 10GB. I want to say that they upgraded the main backbone on campus to 100GB? I do recall that they relocated the file servers to reduce the overnight campus backbone traffic (data backups). In any event, the net result of this is that our internal WAN data transfers are adequately served.
For connecting to the outside world, I no longer recall how fat our pipe is, but its generally not bad.
-hh
Maybe it was for mass production he was talking about then? It is one thing to have them "in the making", it is another monster to spit out 1000's of them a day... I would have to talk to him again, I am probably recalling just bits and pieces here...
Huh?
Four threads are a lot weaker than four cores.
I'd rephrase your statement:
8 threads ... yet another excuse to go to quad core.
How about a desktop processor in an actual desktop, not an all-in-one!
A desktop processor should be in the iMac, and not a notebook processor with less power consumption because the iMac isn't portable and isn't meant to be, it's meant to be the entertainment center or a more powerful computer than a MacBook. All-In-One or tower, it shouldn't have a notebook processor because it's not portable.
If I understand correctly, this article is saying there will be one more update between last October and when the new i7 MBPs are released. Is that right?
It all has to do with Apple's thin-fetish. The iMac simply cannot dump all the heat of the current desktop class processors. God forbid they add a half-inch of thickness to a NON-PORTABLe machine to allow it to breath a little.
However, with these 32nm chips, they might be able to use desktop-class processors due to the decreased heat output. My guess is that they will use that to their advantage to make the iMac even slimmer and even sexier, rather than to use higher-performance chips in the same size case...
Yep.
But take into account that it is only a rumor, so there will be at least one more update...possibly more than that.
Some HP All-In-Ones are like barely an inch thicker than the iMac and have a Quad Core CPU. Do you think that half an inch thickness is more important that a Quad Core CPU? If it were a laptop, it's debatable but for a computer that's not portable I don't know anyone who wouldn't rather half an inch thinner than a Quad Core CPU, which would technically be twice as fast.
Exactly my point. Apple is too obsessed with thin. They could have better components, but they want "sexy" instead...
You're right, wireless & access to the internet are 2 major bottlenecks in our district. Our WAN is basically a star topology: one of out jr. high's is the center & the schools/admin building & internet are connected to that. The controller we have for our wireless network is, of course, at the central jr. high. On one hand, this helps in that if someone goes from one school to another, they don't have to keep selecting a different wireless network; it's all the same. On the downside, all wireless traffic has to go from the laptop/wireless device to the jr. high then to the destination which sucks up a lot of bandwidth. Also, since we only have one controller in the entire district, if the network there goes down, the entire wireless network goes down throughout the district. Plus, the wireless controllers are like $40,000 I guess so we can't really afford one at each school.
As for our internet bandwidth, currently we're at 20 Mbps. For 10 buildings w/ 4000+ people, that's terrible. But we're trying to get up to 100 Mbps. What was really awful was last year & previous years, we had only a 1.5 Mbps T1 connecting each school to the central Jr. high. Last summer/fall, we upgraded that to 1 Gbps fiber. Faster, yes, but considering all the wireless traffic along w/ the wired traffic, that's still not enough. I' very much prefer 100 Gbps between the buildings.
As for Nehalem, can't wait. My current MBP works fine for me, I'd still like to see what Nehalem will bring. Along with many people, I'd like Blu-Ray, be able to have more RAM, Firewire 3200, USB3, and so forth, but I'm not holding my breath.
Exactly, and it's not as if half an inch thicker is going to make the machine look ugly. In my opinion it would still be sexy.
The importance of sexiness for Apple is over-rated and is what's keeping me from paying double the price (for a desktop / all-in-one) for their computer instead of a PC with better specs.
Ok we need to approach this from diferent perspectives: One is maintain 2 cores and add hyper threading, which will increase performance but not in the same way as a true 4 core processor, but giving the same power output which will maintain same battery performance. On the other hand have a true 4 core processor which will give a significant performance boost but will have a higher power output and decrease significantly the battery performance.
One thing you'll have to realise: there is never going to be a perfect computer. Unfourtunately a balance between cost and efficency never equals a perfect computer.
One thing you'll have to realise: there is never going to be a perfect computer. Unfourtunately a balance between cost and efficency never equals a perfect computer.