Originally posted by NavyIntel007
Dual processors would be possible but you wouldn't get dual 1.5 Ghz. Instead you'd get dual 800 Mhz that has similar performance as a single 1.5 Ghz. at least half of the power usage. Of course that wouldn't immediately equate to double the battery life because Apple would give you less battery. But having less battery would allow for a lower weight.
It'd be a harder sell because it seems like the industry thinks that people only glance at the numbers and not the word "DUAL" in front of it. 8 hour battery life or more would be a super selling point however.
People need to just realize here that if Apple creates a dual processor laptop, it will be for different reasons than them making a dual processor desktop.
where did you get that running two processors at half the clock rate would use half the power as one at double the dual clocks? is that proven?
...or did you mean that it would use half the power when one was turned off? that's a huge price to pay for portability, i like my battery life on mt TiBook
without scaling the clock down or anything.
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what makes this all so laughable to me is that people come in and say, oh, let's make out laptops like desktops! i want an alienware apple laptop! dual 2Ghz G5s @ 90nm, with a 2 inch radiator on the back! word!
what would be impressive in the laptop world, in lieu of dual processors, which takes up much more space given the cooling logistics requirements as well as the pin requirements, is processors with powersaving features that were actually implemented at the most basic levels. instead of 2 processors, 2 cores on one CPU. one shuts down when usage is low, as does one of the FPUs on the other, and one of the altivec processors, and so on. the savings on power would be real, but the second processor demand went up it would come back on full, the clock would scale up to max, and you wouldn't notice a performance hit like running a single CPU at half the clock rate. this is the kind of thing intel in playing with in Centrino. Apple really needs it.
