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Intel Chip Delivery Moving Up?

I've been dreaming for the 17" MBP since I heard about the transition to Intel. I want so badly to get it, but don't know when I should. I'm moving to California this fall and wanted to buy an Apple laptop that will last a long time if not all 4 years. With all this new motherboard/processor talk I have no clue on what I should do. I figure I will wait until the August release of the new processors, but now you guys keep talking of new motherboards and WiFi... I think I'm getting an ulcer...

I was hoping you all could help me in the right direction on what to do because I'm clueless. I've been saving up for a 17" for a year now and as time passes I find myself less and less excited to buy one...

Will this new motherboard said to be out by Christmans be truly worth it? or is waiting for the August processor my best bet? I will be using Avid on it, but all my video will be on an external HDD.
 
poppe said:
Will this new motherboard said to be out by Christmans be truly worth it? or is waiting for the August processor my best bet? I will be using Avid on it, but all my video will be on an external HDD.
Click to expand...

The answer to when to buy is simple, buy a computer when you NEED a computer, and buy the best you can afford. If you wait 6 months for rumored features, you might be disappointed. Another thing, in 6 months, there will be a whole new bunch of rumors to deal with.

Anyway, your situation is exclusive. I don't think Avid is Universal yet, so your choices are not very good on Apple hardware. If you buy a new MBP, you will have to run Avid in rosetta and that's going to suck, if it will run at all (unless you boot into Windows). Your next option is buy a G4 laptop, but that would run slow too. If you switched to Final Cut Studio, that would solve a lot of your trouble because it's Universal and should smoke on a MBP. If I was in your shoes and didn't want to run FCS, I'd probably get a stop-gap machine (used iMac G5?) and buy whatever is current when Avid goes UB.
 
Perhaps when simians are flying out of my posterior. Merom $3 less than Yonah at the same clock? To quote Thor, I say thee nay. Intel's not a charity, it's a billion dollar machine with greedy stockholders to feed - profit has to be made on both on the new chips and on the old inventory. Don't try to get people's hopes up that Merom on release will be cheap. And as for the first quad-core CPU, Intel would be Insane to charge anything less than $850 for it. That first 8-way machine will have a price point higher than your glue-sniffing cousin.
 
tristan said:
Perhaps when simians are flying out of my posterior. Merom $3 less than Yonah at the same clock? To quote Thor, I say thee nay. Intel's not a charity, it's a billion dollar machine with greedy stockholders to feed - profit has to be made on both on the new chips and on the old inventory. Don't try to get people's hopes up that Merom on release will be cheap. And as for the first quad-core CPU, Intel would be Insane to charge anything less than $850 for it. That first 8-way machine will have a price point higher than your glue-sniffing cousin.
Click to expand...

8-way?

what he said is right in someways, although we wont know how much they'll cost until they come out.
 
Why The Cynicism?

tristan said:
Perhaps when simians are flying out of my posterior. Merom $3 less than Yonah at the same clock? To quote Thor, I say thee nay. Intel's not a charity, it's a billion dollar machine with greedy stockholders to feed - profit has to be made on both on the new chips and on the old inventory. Don't try to get people's hopes up that Merom on release will be cheap. And as for the first quad-core CPU, Intel would be Insane to charge anything less than $850 for it. That first 8-way machine will have a price point higher than your glue-sniffing cousin.
Click to expand...
I don't understand the billigerent tone of this post. I think Alden makes a pretty good case for faster MBPs at the same price this summer. And what's the problem with 4 and 8 core Macs costing more than the rest. I doubt even the 8-core model will exceed $3999. So what's your beef with that? They will surely be worth every penny. :rolleyes:
 
Multimedia said:
I don't understand the billigerent tone of this post. I think Alden makes a pretty good case for faster MBPs at the same price this summer. And what's the problem with 4 and 8 core Macs costing more than the rest. I doubt even the 8-core model will exceed $3999. So what's your beef with that? They will surely be worth every penny. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

My beef? Did I get into a debate with Walter Mondale? :eek:

No belligerency, more like flippancy. But yes, I am throwing cold dasani on the aforementioned "brand new next-generation semiconductors... and they're cheap!" Not possible, and its cruel to get people's hopes up. Intel will have lots of old inventory to clear out, and if they price the new stuff low, they have to price the old stuff even lower.

No, the Merom & Woodcrest will start out priced high, and then over time, the price will decline. That's just how it always works in the industry. And that's fine, when the price point falls to the level that you're happy with, grab it like Gollum and keep it away from those nasty hobbitses.
 
milo said:
But wouldn't it be possible for OSX to enable 64 bit features so that apps that need 64 bit could take advantage, and apps that don't need it could continue running in 32 bit? Best of both worlds. As it is, it's pointless to have a 64 bit chip if you're not going to actually take advantage of it. It's crippling any possibility the machine has of really being a pro machine.
Click to expand...

Um, so the current quad G5 is not a pro machine according to you. And only because an app that needs the address space or numerics from 64bit and that must also be a GUI app, needs to be two communicating processes.

milo said:
Why even make the chip 64 bit if it's going to hurt performance on most apps?
Click to expand...

*sigh* No. If the chip is already pretty well architected so that the jump from 32 to 64 bit only provides address space and numerics, then all the processes that don't need the address space or numerics will take a hit if all of OS X is made 64bit. (note: this is solely in relation to the G5).

Geez. Do all the pointers in Cocoa need to be 64bit for example. Do you need a 64 bit pointer to a button, to a text field, to a radio button, to everything...

milo said:
I don't buy that argument
Click to expand...

That's because you clearly don't understand the topic.
 
AidenShaw said:
This penalizes the apps that need 64-bit - they have to be re-engineered into pieces if they need anything more than a terminal window.
Click to expand...

That's one spin on things as they were at that time. Another spin is that people with such needs were benefited by even being able to make use of that stage 1 implementation (and I'd say a bigger penalty is not being able to do it at all). It's not like this is a high percentage install base need. It still isn't today. Most of the dudes in here bleating about 64bit do so only because 64 is bigger than 32 and therefore they have to have it...
 
devman said:
That's one spin on things as they were at that time. Another spin is that people with such needs were benefited by even being able to make use of that stage 1 implementation (and I'd say a bigger penalty is not being able to do it at all). It's not like this is a high percentage install base need. It still isn't today.
Click to expand...
It also means that when a company does a 64-bit port for Windows/Linux/Solaris it's mostly a manner of checking for (and fixing) what many would consider sloppy coding practices.

But a 64-bit port for OSX means that you have to tear your application apart, and run it in multiple pieces using one of several inter-process communication protocols.


devman said:
Most of the dudes in here bleating about 64bit do so only because 64 is bigger than 32 and therefore they have to have it...
Click to expand...
I'm bleating because 64-bit on Intel is typically about 20% faster than 32-bit - so there's a real benefit for any compute-intensive app to be 64-bit. (Not just those apps that need more than 4 GiB of RAM per process.)

Do you want your new quad core to run major applications 20% slower than Windows on the same machine?

After hyping 64-bit as a killer feature since the PMG5 introduction, Apple has been virtually silent about 64-bit since last June. Now that they will be using processors where 64-bit is an advantage for most programs (not just advertising copy), it's about time for that silence to be broken.

We're less than 8 weeks away from Woodcrest systems according to many of these reports....
 
ksz said:
If you look at the surface of a computer motherboard or any other printed circuit board, you will see thin lines running from the output pin of one component (chip, resistor, capacitor, etc.) to the input pin of another component. The lines are the wires that connect components together. Although they look thin, they have a definite width and a minimum spacing between them.

Now when you look at a highly magnified view of the surface of a chip, you see a very similar thing. The "components" of a chip are the transistors and they are etched into the substrate of the wafer. All the transistors are laid out first on one and only one layer. This is called the "front end" of the manufacturing process. Next, the transistors have to be connected to each other. Because there are so many transistors and they are all on one layer, there isn't enough space on one layer to connect them all. So the "wires" are built on several layers on top of the buried transistors.

One layer of wires makes one set of connections. Another layer of wires makes another set of connections. Wires can tunnel through layers by virtue of small holes drilled between layers. These holes are called "vias". So a wire goes from one layer to another layer via the hole between the layers.

All of the wiring is layered on top of the transistors. This is called the "back end" of the manufacturing process. Much of the development cost of a chip comes from the Number of Layers because each layer needs its own "reticle" or lithography glass plate. Reticles (or masks) have soared in price to between half-million to a million dollars each.

The wires (in the back-end layers of a chip) have a minimum width and a minimum spacing between them. If the minimum width and space are 65nm, we say that the chip is a 65nm design. If the min width and space are 45nm, we say it's a 45nm design. Going from 65nm to 45nm takes a lot more than merely scaling (demagnifying) the design! It often takes new materials and new processing techniques to deal with the increases in lithography difficulty, increases in electrical parasitics (such as heat density, leakage current, stray capacitance), and increases in the fragility of the printed pattern.

Nevertheless, the combination of new materials, new processing techniques, and smaller dimensions leads to a faster and cooler chip, one that operates on lower voltage (less power).

Finally, you might wonder how the industry picks the minimum width/space. For example, the industry went from 180nm to 130nm to 90nm to 65nm to 45nm. The answer is that the industry strives to halve the area of a chip with each successive generation. If you start with a 1 micron x 1 micron square and you want to reduce the area by one-half, you must multiply each side of the square by 0.707 (square root of 1/2). If you do this several times, you get the following (in nanometers or 1/1000th of a micron) -- this is "classical scaling":

1000.00 (1 micron square)
707.11 (.7 micron)
500.00 (half micron)
353.55
250.00 (quarter micron)
176.78 (rounded to 180nm)
125.00 (rounded to 130nm)
88.39 (rounded to 90nm) <--- currently in widespread use
62.50 (rounded to 65nm) <--- current state-of-the-art; Intel Yonah
44.19 (rounded to 45nm) <--- next generation Intel processors
31.25 (rounded to 32nm)
22.10 (rounded to 22nm)
15.63
11.05 <-- classical scaling may stop here
Click to expand...

Thank you very much!
I learned a lot!
 
Another Dumb Question

Alright so I'll buy when the new Memron (or what ever it is) chip is out, but one dumb question.

Can you replace the motherboard in a MBP?

I know you explained to buy when you needed it, but what I'm scared to do is buy a computer that next week is updated and does not have gains of only a few percentages, but has gains of double or something around that.
 
How about GPU replacement

I know we dont know if it is possible in the 17" yet, but I thought maybe you might have a better guess than I would.

Would I beable to drop a 512mb Video card in there or is that also stuck permanent in there?

Or is ATI's 512 to big to fit in?
 
Selling What You Have For Next One Probably Cost Less Than Buying New Mobo & Video

poppe said:
Another Dumb Question
Alright so I'll buy when the new Memron (or what ever it is) chip is out, but one dumb question.

Can you replace the motherboard in a MBP?

I know you explained to buy when you needed it, but what I'm scared to do is buy a computer that next week is updated and does not have gains of only a few percentages, but has gains of double or something around that.

How about GPU replacement?
I know we dont know if it is possible in the 17" yet, but I thought maybe you might have a better guess than I would.

Would I beable to drop a 512mb Video card in there or is that also stuck permanent in there?

Or is ATI's 512 to big to fit in?
Click to expand...
The giant leap has already happened Poppe. From here on it will be small increments each refresh. No you can't change the mobo nor the video in any practical way. What you do is sell the one you have and buy the next one. I doubt that will cost you more than a new mobo and a new video chipset. Now go get one and start having fun. :cool:
 
poppe said:
Alright so I'll buy when the new Memron (or what ever it is) chip is out, but one dumb question.

Can you replace the motherboard in a MBP?

I know you explained to buy when you needed it, but what I'm scared to do is buy a computer that next week is updated and does not have gains of only a few percentages, but has gains of double or something around that.
Click to expand...

The only thing that is replaceable in a MBP is the memory and hard drive.
 
poppe said:
I know we dont know if it is possible in the 17" yet, but I thought maybe you might have a better guess than I would.

Would I beable to drop a 512mb Video card in there or is that also stuck permanent in there?

Or is ATI's 512 to big to fit in?
Click to expand...

The only thing that is upgradeable in a MBP is the memory and hard drive.
 
milo said:
But wouldn't it be possible for OSX to enable 64 bit features so that apps that need 64 bit could take advantage, and apps that don't need it could continue running in 32 bit? Best of both worlds. As it is, it's pointless to have a 64 bit chip if you're not going to actually take advantage of it. It's crippling any possibility the machine has of really being a pro machine. Why even make the chip 64 bit if it's going to hurt performance on most apps?

I don't buy that argument, apple dropped the ball on 64 bit software support.
Click to expand...

First, new generations of chips may be better at running code optimized for older generations -- an example, the first 386 processors were faster than the 286 they replaced even though they were still running 16-bit code and not native 32-bit code for quite some time.

People seem to think that simply being 64-bit for the sake of being 64-bit is some kind of magical performance increase. It isn't.

I've pointed out in the past that a simple register-level add of two numbers is MORE work for no value gain in 64 bit.

00000000000000000000000000000001 +
00000000000000000000000000000010

versus

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 +
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010

both yield the same results.

Having spent some seat time with an AMD 64 at work, I decided to find out what Microsoft did with the 64-bit version of XP and how it works. This may shed some light for those seeking the same from OSX, and those of you pining for a 64-bit OSX may have second thoughts.

First, there are two versions of 64-bit XP -- one for the older Itaniums, the others for the newer Intel and AMD 64 bit processors.

On these 64-bit processors, it's still possible (thankfully) to run the 32-bit operating systems on them, as they are compatible with 32 bit instructions still.

Next, these 64-bit versions of XP are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the mainstream build of XP. They require different device drivers (in other words, EVERYBODY has to rewrite their device drivers for 64-bit, because while the OS can work with 32-bit applications, it cannot work with 32-bit drivers). This brings down hardware compatibility significantly.

It also means waiting for "64-bit native" compiles of applications, which as far as I can tell, hasn't happened at all. It also means being stuck with non-mainstream versions of things like Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. You'd better hope that Microsoft's teams get upgrades of these components day-and-date 32-bit and 64-bit, and I don't know that is true. There is no 64-bit version of Office or other MS apps. I'm sure there are other corners of incompatibility that one has to deal with on a daily basis.

The good news is the 64-bit OS can run 32-bit apps or it would be sunk. This happens with WoW-64 (Windows-on-Windows 64), which is similar to how Microsoft ran 16-bit apps on 32-bit Windows -- with a virtual machine layer and thunking.

In summary, Microsoft is already doing the 64-bit thing and it isn't quite the panacea people would think it is. It actually has a number of drawbacks and many people just run the mainstream 32-bit OS on the 64-bit hardware. I don't think it would be any better for OSX.
 
AidenShaw said:
I'm bleating because 64-bit on Intel is typically about 20% faster than 32-bit - so there's a real benefit for any compute-intensive app to be 64-bit. (Not just those apps that need more than 4 GiB of RAM per process.)
Click to expand...

On Intel I agree with what you've said. I never disagreed with it; on Intel...

It's not the same on a G5.
 
Oh yeah duh that makes alot of sense. I never thought about selling it and buying a new one... good ole newbie I suppose. Thanks Multimedia
 
janstett said:
People seem to think that simply being 64-bit for the sake of being 64-bit is some kind of magical performance increase. It isn't.
Click to expand...
A 20% performance increase just by changing one build setting is as close to "magic" as you'll find in application performance tuning! :D



janstett said:
I've pointed out in the past that a simple register-level add of two numbers is MORE work for no value gain in 64 bit.

00000000000000000000000000000001 +
00000000000000000000000000000010

versus

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 +
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010

both yield the same results.
Click to expand...
This would be of concern *IFF* running in 64-bit mode forced you to use 64-bit integers.

That's not the case - short (usually 16-bit) and int (usually 32-bit) integers don't change size unless you modify your program to use a 64-bit length datatype.




janstett said:
Next, these 64-bit versions of XP are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the mainstream build of XP. They require different device drivers (in other words, EVERYBODY has to rewrite their device drivers for 64-bit, because while the OS can work with 32-bit applications, it cannot work with 32-bit drivers). This brings down hardware compatibility significantly.
Click to expand...
A valid point - the kernel is completely 64-bit and drivers must also be 64-bit for real device drivers.

Note that almost all of the "Vista Ready" systems that will be sold this fall will have 64-bit CPUs, and a current generation of hardware. You won't have much trouble finding 64-bit drivers for any of these systems.

(I expect most of the holiday PCs to have a free "Vista Upgrade" coupon, redeemable in January.)



janstett said:
It also means waiting for "64-bit native" compiles of applications, which as far as I can tell, hasn't happened at all.
Click to expand...
POVray, Mathematica, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, ....

Quite a few high end applications in content creation, science, and business support are available for x64 systems.


janstett said:
It also means being stuck with non-mainstream versions of things like Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. You'd better hope that Microsoft's teams get upgrades of these components day-and-date 32-bit and 64-bit, and I don't know that is true.
Click to expand...
Actually, if you look closely I believe you'll see that both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those apps are included in XP x64.

Microsoft uses a single source tree for 32-bit and 64-bit versions - no need to worry about version skew. Even the operating systems are built from the same source for Vista (32/64/XP/Server...). (XP x64 is built from the Server 2003 sources.)


janstett said:
The good news is the 64-bit OS can run 32-bit apps or it would be sunk. This happens with WoW-64 (Windows-on-Windows 64), which is similar to how Microsoft ran 16-bit apps on 32-bit Windows -- with a virtual machine layer and thunking.
Click to expand...
True, although the "virtual machine layer" is very lightweight - it's nothing like VMware or Virtual PC. It mainly has to deal with the transition and mapping between 32-bit mode and 64-bit mode.



janstett said:
There is no 64-bit version of Office or other MS apps.
Click to expand...
See "good news" above. Actually, several MS server apps are available, but it's not clear that Office really needs the extra CPU boost or added memory of 64-bit.

As new versions appear, however, you'll see 64-bit apps. It's just not urgent for most applications.



janstett said:
I'm sure there are other corners of incompatibility that one has to deal with on a daily basis.
Click to expand...
LOL - pure FUD. :D

Actually, there's surprisingly little incompatibility. If you have 64-bit drivers for your hardware, you can run 64-bit Windows every day and not see anything unusual.

Oh wait, let me take that back. When I first switched a couple of my systems to 64-bit - I realized that I had a couple of tools that were 16-bit DOS or Windows 3.1 applications. I needed to get the 32-bit versions of those (Windows x64 doesn't have WOW). There's also an issue with 32-bit browser plugins not running with 64-bit IE.




janstett said:
In summary, Microsoft is already doing the 64-bit thing and it isn't quite the panacea people would think it is. It actually has a number of drawbacks and many people just run the mainstream 32-bit OS on the 64-bit hardware. I don't think it would be any better for OSX.
Click to expand...
Yes, we're in the middle of the transition to 64-bit for everyday use. The only real drawback is driver support for legacy or special purpose hardware - and that's getting better every day (especially if you're using Vista x64).

Vista's arrival will mark the beginning of the end of 32-bit computing on the desktop.
 
Thank you!

DavidCar said:
For anyone interested in comparative chip architecture, I just spotted this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2748&p=1

AnandTech: Intel Core versus AMD's K8 architecture
Click to expand...
A very good article, thank you for the link.

I hadn't noticed before that Core will have 3 SSE vector arithmetic units (P4 has 1) - and will be able to do 8 32-bit floating point operations per cycle, or 4 64-bit floating ops per cycle!

The anandtech article concludes that Core has "massive SIMD/FP power".

Maybe this is why Jobs' was willing to abandon AltiVec - an SSE implementation was on the way that will scream.
 
I, like one previous poster, am getting an ulcer here following all of this information.

I need a new high end mac laptop, and it is a substancial several year investment for me, so I can't afford to purchase wrong.

Many of my apps won't operate for some time under universal, or even rosetta, but I am planning on setting up Windows on the machine for those applications in the meantime. This doesn't bother me too much.

I could wait the 4 months for Merom, but this ulcer will grow, and I will be losing some productivity working on my fairly old G4 laptop.

I'm also hesitant to buy a Rev A premium machine when problems have been spotted in models and software is still catching up. I'll be buying 17 inch top end when I do purchase.

Any advice, or do we just sit in this purgatory until we can't take it anymore and jump at a purchase?!
 
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