Hacker Upgrades Mac Mini w/ Core 2 Duo

[ClimbingTheLog]

Note the Core 2 has much better SSE support then Core....Note Mac OS X makes heavy use of SSE/AltiVec in various system wide services.

Does it have a better implementation or a new instruction set? I'd be surprised if Apple's shipping libraries had optimizations for a Mermon SSE instruction set such that this modder would have benefited. But if it's just better silicon, then onward.

Everyone on here is saying 'wait until merom comes out!', and the people that are listening are, im taking an educated guess here, not Pros who will actually benefit from that 20% speed increase.

I don't care about the 20% (but I'll take it) - I care about better SSE and 64 bit addressing. I'm running out of memory with my current machine with 1.5GB of RAM - when I'm running two more OS's on my new MBP 2GB just isn't going to cut it. I need a 4GB laptop and Mermon should make that practical.

Core Duo was a transition chip from the start, everybody was well aware of its positioning. And it's fine for commonplace usage.

 

[Oryan]

*Looks at Dual 2.0 G5

*Sobs

 

[johnthevulcan]

The Slowest Macs......

Are Still 10 Times Faster Than Their Pc Counter Parts, I Am A Bit Confuddled Because I Have A Dell Pc, Intel P4 Running At 2.8ghz, My Friends Ibook With Only 1.4 Ghz Is Twice As Fast Plus I Have Twice The Ram. Will My Macbook With 2 Ghz And 1 Gig Of Ram Be A Sprinter Compared To My System Or Will It Just Be Cuter, I Dont Care, My Heart Is Set On It.
And As For The Color Argument, I Think The White One Is Cuter And Glad Its Cheaper Than That Ugly Black One, If It Wasnt White, It Wouldnt Be A Mac!!!!!

 

[ChrisA]

Actually i dont own an Intel Mac.

Im trying to make people realize that Merom really wont make that much of a difference. .....

I agree. Here is a simple test you all can do to see if you would even notice a 20% faster CPU. Bring up "activity monitor" then select "CPU" now look to see if the processor is at 100% utilization. If it is not then you will not notice a 20% speed boost in the CPU.

In my experiance you need to double the CPU speed before a casual user can notice the difference. It seems to follow how our perception of sound and brightness of light is also on a log scale.

 

[YoGramMamma]

Actually....

LOL!

We talk so much about "when Photoshop goes native, blah blah" but we really dont know how much Rosetta really criples a program, do we? Is there a benchmark of a PPC app vs Universal?

Though we dont know how the universal version of photoshop will stack up against the PPC version running thru rosetta.... there is a way to find out how much rosetta actually cripples a program. anyone with an intel machine can do this....

A friend pointed out to me that you can actually make any universal program run in Rosetta, by right clicking, CTRL clicking, 2-finger clicking, whatever... the icon in your apps folder, then say "Get Info" in that box that pops up there is a checkbox that says "Run Using Rosetta". I'd imagine this would be nice for doing comparisons. I checked that box on Photobooth and it used about 100-140% of the processing power at any given moment while running.. and when running NOT in rosetta, it only took up about 30-40%. (divide those numbers in half for actual percentage. in the activity monitor it uses a 200% load to account for 2 processors running at 100% each) I dont know if Photobooth was the best thing to use to test this, but i could tell a difference no doubt. load times, effect changes etc.

The reason my friend discovered this is because he found it to be a good way to get Flip4Mac (a non-universal addon to Quicktime for playing WMV files) to run by making quicktime player run thru rosetta.

About the whole merom thing, i think this is a cool upgrade to a mini no doubt. I think Apple will be among the first to get them into everything except the PowerMac replacement and the Minis. I think they want/need to have the fastest available chips, and so we'll see them in the MB and MBP. Maybe as a CTO option in the MB, though i dont think they'd complicate the manufacturing process that much to do a CTO, so we'll see. At least i'd think they would offer the core 2's to all laptops.

I dont think they will use processor type as a separation between MB and MBP. speed yes, type no. I think the reason the computers are so close as it is, is because apple wanted to focus on getting everyhting Intel FIRST, then go back and revise them all. The MBP was their first, and a safe bet. The MB they took a bit more liberties with, cause the MBP went relatively well. Next revision we will more than likely see a ton of new features to set thm apart from the MB.

just my 2 cents

 

[Analog Kid]

I am a little excited about these Core 2 Duo chips not because of the fact that they will provide a significant speed improvement, but I am hoping they will solve some of the heat issues we have been having Apple's new Laptops...err I mean notebooks. While it is true that in the MB and MBP the CPU is not socketted, CPU swaps can still be performed. I know for a fact that there is a company out there that desolders the CPUs in the previous generation Powerbooks for 1.83GHz G4 replacements. While it might be a little expensive, I for one would be willing to do it if the service can be made available. I am sick of burning my damn hands.

Don't get your hopes too high for lower power, and don't send your machine to some hack shop to unsolder your CPU. There is a reason Apple replaces entire motherboards when components fail-- because replacing individual components isn't reliable. I'd guess that if you and 4 friends brought machines in to be modified, one would probably die in surgery, one would fail within weeks, and one would probably have problems with sporadic crashing for years...

Yeah, it's technically possible to do but it's an art, not a science. And most artists throw away most of their attempts...

 

[Multimedia]

And 2.33 GHz Will Be First Gen Merom Top Speed

And 2.33 GHz Will Be First Gen Merom Top Speed. So this is great news. Wow faster than dual 2.5 G5 @ 2.16GHz is amazing. This means the Fall MacBook Pros will be defacto portable supercomputers for amazing field productivity situations.

iMacs and Mac minis running faster than the 2004-2005 Fastest Macs in the world. Wow Wee!!

 

[thogs_cave]

Yeah, let's also remember that Merom will be the first Intel Portable chip to have EMT64 - way closer to true 64 bit portable computing than Core DUO is. Look, 20% is still better than what we had - I seem to remember Intel saying that best optimization one Merom would put it at 40% better than CoreDuo. So once Apple engineers finish up their work, I'm pretty sure we will see better than just 20%....but most likely not the full 40%.

From what I've been able to tell (from various sources), Apple does not do a huge amount of optimization, especially on OS X.

 

[idea_hamster]

I was really quite skeptical at first...

If others on this board hadn't linked to other examples of people getting Merom chips (where? how?) and shoe-horning them into their Macs, I think that I would have called it BS.

Does the "About this Mac" screen call current Intel chips "Genuine"? That struck me as a little too much -- like the old saw about a fake coin dated "50 B.C."

I'm voting this as positive, because any ability to keep your computer working better longer is a good thing. I'm just surprised that the only talk about Photoshop was how well it runs on Rosetta....

 

[AidenShaw]

I need a 4GB laptop and Mermon should make that practical.

Core Duo was a transition chip from the start, everybody was well aware of its positioning.

Yonah ("Core Duo") supports 4 GiB of RAM when you buy from Dell, Lenovo or HP.

No idea why Apple doesn't admit that 2 GiB SO-DIMMs exist.

 

[emaja]

No idea why Apple doesn't admit that 2 GiB SO-DIMMs exist.

Apple obviously knows they exist, but they also know that few people will ever consider them at $1791.99 a pop.

Seriously, does any consumer level user need that much RAM that badly to shell out that kind of cash for it?

 

[nagromme]

Excellent as it may be, you are still limited by the ( relatively poor ) graphics card.

Yes, if your main goal with a Mac Mini is to be a 3D gaming rig

If, on the other hand, you have processor-intensive NON-OpenGL needs, Merom is a great boost to a great Mini.

 

[dontmatter]

Wow, a little short sighted aren'tcha? There's plenty of reasons besides a hypothetical 20% speed increase to wait for Merom. True, most web surfers are not going to notice the difference, but if you're a power user stuck with a notebook out in the field, then that Merom is going to rock.

If you're a consumer, then it's not going to matter, but a pro will want the new technology. And yes... shaving seconds off renders does matter. Those seconds can add up to hours.

True, but then again, if waiting means not having that speed for 20% of the life of the computer, you're making a bad choice. (OK, OK, the math doesn't work out unless you're assuming that your current computer doesn't do anything while you have it, etc. But my point is, there's a signifigant cost to waiting, too, and for the power user, where those few seconds that add up to hours mean big dollars, the cost of not upgrading to yonah now is comprable to the savings of merom over yonah.)

 

[knackroller]

I'm very sure the new (official) intel mac minis are due anytime now...!

 

[Glassman]

the maximum memory capacity depends on chipset, not on the processor.. i945GM most likely supports only 2G, so that's it.. as for 64bit, there will be a newer spin of the Napa chipset/platform called Napa64, which may very well mean that in order to utilise 64bit, you'll need the updated chipset to go along with Merom..

those 'Pros' who like to peel the seconds of off the rendering time and so - overclock.. you'll gain much more performance than paying the price premium for the current top MHz option (which is just a stupid +166MHz nowadays).. I'm sure Merom/Conroe will fly past 3GHz easily.. Yonah can do well above 2.5GHz too..

 

[scibry]

naming schemes

i think the naming schemes and codenames have officially gone off the deep end. the numbers are meaningless. why don't we stop this stuff and just go with the standard metric. the blank per watt. whatever. just pick something that's a real number of meaning. stop with clock speeds. PERFORMANCE PER WATT.

 

[BakedBeans]

*chuckles at the PowerPC fanboys*

How well does it run photoshop

 

[dextertangocci]

This is old news, I saw this about 2 weeks ago already.

 

[unfaded]

Yeah, it feels good to laugh doesn't it? Nothing like outpacing a 3 year old chip to really get out the giggles though...

A three-year old chip that didn't fit in a laptop versus one that is designed specifically for mobile use, that is. Which does make a very, very big difference.

 

[dongmin]

Yeah, because you know that no one else sells notebooks with Core Solo, Pentium/Celeron M, or Pentium 4 Mobile processors these days...

True, but those budget PCs cost far less than $1100 which is the cheapest Mac portable available. So if Apple is gonna be competitive with other PC manufacturers at the $1000-$1500 price point, they need to put in a Core 2 Duo.

 

[odedia]

I don't care about the 20% (but I'll take it) - I care about better SSE and 64 bit addressing. I'm running out of memory with my current machine with 1.5GB of RAM - when I'm running two more OS's on my new MBP 2GB just isn't going to cut it. I need a 4GB laptop and Mermon should make that practical.

Core Duo was a transition chip from the start, everybody was well aware of its positioning. And it's fine for commonplace usage.

The Core Duo can support up to 4GB as well. It's just that 2GB SO-DIMM memory modules are VERY expensive these days - about 2000$ a piece I think.

Any 32Bit processor can support up to 4GB. that's the max limit.

 

[Moe]

Personally, my plan is to get through the rest of Tiger and all of Leopard (about 2 years or so) with the 1.66GHz Core-Duo and 2GB and then go to a 2.16 or better Core 2 Duo--a 50% or better increase from what I have. About halfway through that, sometime in the first half of 2007, these interim NAPA Meroms will be superceded by the 800MHz FSB Santa Rosa version, so by the time we're looking at OS-X 10.6, the NAPAs should be about as cheap as they're gonna get. 2GB SO-DIMMs should be a lot cheaper by then too (and the Mini's Northbridge DOES support 4GB total from the datasheet I looked at). At that point, I'll hunker down for another 3-4 years before the next new computer.

This time next year, we'll also be looking at the Crestline integrated video, with twice the pipelines, better shader support and DirectX 10 support. IMHO, the waiters need to wait another year for this and the faster Santa Rosa Meroms, and they'll save the cost of upgrading to Leopard too. ;-) But by then there will be another excuse to wait.

 

[macidiot]

Wow, a little short sighted aren'tcha? There's plenty of reasons besides a hypothetical 20% speed increase to wait for Merom. True, most web surfers are not going to notice the difference, but if you're a power user stuck with a notebook out in the field, then that Merom is going to rock. My guess is that you own a device that uses Yonah and you are just pissed that you'll miss out.

I suggest you do a bit of research on Merom vs Yonah before you do any further bashing of the upgrade. There's one good post upthread concerning SSE support that is far superior to Yonah, not to mention support for 64bit in pro applications. There are plenty of other resources, but I'll leave that for you to find on your own. It should keep you busy for awhile. If you're a consumer, then it's not going to matter, but a pro will want the new technology. And yes... shaving seconds off renders does matter. Those seconds can add up to hours.

Merom is a quality upgrade from the Yonah. But installing one in a Mac mini seems really stupid. Spending 3-500 to upgrade a $800 computer to get a ~20% speed boost is a waste of money imo. I know it's what cheapass pc users do all the time, but it's still stupid. I see plenty of Honda Civics with 10k in rims/body kits/exhausts, but in the end it's still a 20k car with 10k of crap stuck on it. I'd rather save my money and buy a better car in the first place.

Your talking about the cheapest mac to begin with. If your buying a mini, you can't realistically expect any sort of serious "I need to get this work done for a deadline, and I really need to save 2 minutes of time" kind of stuff. And again, your still limited by RAM and GPU. Now if your talking about a "power user" with a MacBook Pro, using it to make real money and time is critical, that person is probably going to upgrade to a new Merom laptop anyway. Also, afaik, the really good performance won't come from Merom until the next chipset comes out, which will have higher bandwith and better take advantage of Merom. And it will have a different cpu socket.

Still, it's a cool that the guy did the upgrade. It's good to know that it can be done. 1.5 years from now, when Meroms will cost $150, it won't be such a bad deal.

 

[stephenli]

o really..its a nightmare for me..
i bought a Quad G5 a month ago........
when will apple drop support on PowerPC.........afraid........

 

[BakedBeans]

o really..its a nightmare for me..
i bought a Quad G5 a month ago........
when will apple drop support on PowerPC.........afraid........

Your quad is still one of the fastest mahines around (faster than the memron) and apple will support them for years and years