Swarmlord said:
Re: your signature. Thank you. I thought I was the only person that thinks that these codewords like Merom, Whitefield, Conroe, and Woodcrest convey little or no useful information about the actual chip. I can't even find a useable decoder ring table with all the codenames used internally at either Intel or AMD for all their various chips. Funny how when you actually purchase chips the designations are Pentium M, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo, etc. and then followed by either 9xx series or E6xxx numbers and the clock speed and socket type. I have yet to purchase one processor chip with the name of a city or whatever printed prominently on the top so evidently the manufacturer doesn't even think that it's important enough to preserve on the chip.
The names don't refer to chips. They refer to chip architectures. This is important to the CPU geeks as they can vary a great deal.
There are generally arch variants within a range. Take the Pentium 4, for instance. Wilamette, Northwood, and Prescott (and the cancelled Tejas).
All were sold as "Pentium 4" but there's some fairly major variation (for example, Prescott P4's were often slower than Northwood P4's at the same clockspeed, despite Prescott being the newer design).
The arch name is on the chip -- it's part of that long string of numbers/characters which denotes all sorts of other stuff including clock speed, location and week/year of manufacture, etc.
Swarmlord said:
So, to clarify for us processor secret codename ignorant people could someone list the model number of the current evidently undesireable MPB chip and the model number of the highly desireable so called Merom chip?
The Merom range is called "Core 2 Duo Mobile" and the models currently are T5500, T5600, T7200, T7400 and T7600, varying by clockspeed and L2 cache size.
Yonah - the previous generation processor - is called "Core Duo" and the models are T2300, T2400, T2500, T2600 and T2700.
There's a few I didn't add of both (ULV versions, single core versions, etc.)
Merom is the better chip.
Swarmlord said:
BTW, just to see how extensive the ignorance of this chip is among other computer professionals I went to my local hardware outlet and asked to see a Merom chip and a motherboard with a Merom compatible socket and every tech there had heard the codeword but had no idea which of the specific chips in the case actually were Merom because they refer to them by socket type and speed.
I and the other codeword ignorant would appreciate a little enlightenment here. I want to know whether I need to start screaming for a Merom based Mac Mini or not.
Merom uses Socket M, same as Core Duo/Pentium M for now, but will change to Socket P next year when Intel updates the platform from Napa to Santa Rosa (sorry... from "Centrino Duo" to ... whatever they brand Santa Rosa -- which could well be "Centrino Duo" -- they stuck with "Centrino" through Carmel, Sonoma and the Pentium-M version of Napa...)
That's why we use the code-names. It's to differentiate product in a way that is essentially hidden from consumers to avoid confusion in the marketplace.
