DO I BUY A MAC BOOK PRO NOW IN THE MID OF SEPT OR NO ALSO I HEARD THAT IN CANADA VPS FROM MAC ARE HOLDING ON THEIR childrens purchase until mid sept as they will expect macbook updates not pro tho
Thoughts??
Unless you absolutely need it now, wait. Apple (and Dell, bizarrely) are way behind on updating their notebooks. It's virtually guaranteed we'll see at least minor bumps within the next month or two.
Supposedly the MacBook Pro is being updated within 60 days.
However, supposedly it is also going to a new chipset platform (nVidia). While this will likely bring more performance, it could also bring more problems (since the current MBP platform has had plenty of time to get the bugs worked out).
Where is that Nvidia chipset rumor from? I'd be really surprised if they did that. Don't really see the point. Apple's not going to use SLI, and Nvidia actually lets people do SLI on an Intel chipset in notebooks (Dell has a system that does this, and there are a handful of others).
I could maybe see for the Macbook, just so they could get better integrated video.
my issue is the (667MHz) DDR2 memory
they are so out of date on this one
No, they're not. It's only with Intel's new chipset that was just launched that notebooks can support DDR3 and somewhat faster clocked RAM (I think some systems with the new chipset have DDR3 running at 1066MHz, though I may be off on the exact numbers). At any rate, until now, 667MHz RAM was state of the art for notebooks.
and i heard the 512 Graphics card had issues if this is not that out of date and all tech in the current MBP is dated to work for 5 + yrs, then do i purchase
I'm not sure what "dated to work for 5 +" years means. Do you mean will it physically last 5 years? Notebooks are less reliable than desktops, industry wide. There's definitely no guarantee any hardware is going to last 5 years. Get Applecare with it though, so at least you'll be set for 3 years.
If you mean "will I be able to run the programs I want to for 5 years", then that depends entirely on what programs you're going to try to run. 5 years from now I'm sure the current Macbook Pro will still be fine for browsing the web and basics like that. I'll be very very slow by future standards for other things, and quite possible unusable for gaming and the like.
i want snow leopard and if i can't upgrade it in my macbookpro if i bought today then its not worth it to me i don't buy out of date tech....or should i with a mac i;'m new
There's no question ANY recent Apple hardware is going to run 10.6. Apple does cut off older hardware, but much, MUCH older than products they're currently selling! I'd be shocked if it won't run at least the next couple of OS revisions, minimum.
Hyperthreading can easily hurt performance if:
- You have fewer computatble threads than logical cores
- *and* the OS scheduler is not HT-aware
Consider the trivial case of two computable threads.
If they are scheduled on logical cores that are on different physical cores, both will run at full speed - the job will complete 2X faster than a single core system.
If they are scheduled on logical cores that are on the same physical core, they'll only get the HT boost - it will take 1.2 to 1.4 times faster than a single core system.
That's a good point, and I'm not really sure how that's handled. Until i7, there have only been a very few systems in existence that have both multiple cores AND hyperthreading (and not a single Mac falls into that category). Basically just a couple of Extreme Edition Pentium 4/Ds.
I guess the OS can "know" about the Hyperthreading, and then schedule stuff more correctly? Because otherwise, yeah, it thinks it has 8 CPUs or whatever, so how would it know that when it puts 2 threads on 2 CPUs, it's really schedulling them on the SAME CPU and leaving another CPU unused, or whatever. Interesting problem.
Regarding Hyperthreading (ie SMT, if I'm remembering right); at first it was really badmouthed as a gimick. Part of that I think is that Intel's CPUs are already really efficient, so adding Hyperthreading dosen't necessarily do as much as it could on a really poor CPU design (like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 CPUs). Even the Pentium 4 looks like a masterful work of art compared with those things. I thought it was a gimick too...
...but I've had a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading for 4 years now, and have found it increasingly more useful. It really does help in situations where a single process is running at 100% at a highish priority-either because it's supposed to be, or because it's gone out of control. The system gets unresponsive on a single CPU, no Hyperthreading system, but keeps running okay with Hyperthreading, almost like it's got two CPUs. It also really does speed up some multithreaded programs or instances where I can run two processes, etc.
The thing is, Core 2 is vastly more efficient than even the Pentium 4 was, and so I'm wondering how it'll benefit that design. And yeah, without the OS's scheduler knowing about Hyperthreading, you could run into some issues where it's not being as efficient as it could be (although that'll happen even when the OS does know about Hyperthreading).
Also, another thing I've never really understood is how two processes interact that aren't using the same parts of the CPU. Like if one process is using almost entirely the integer units, then the CPU monitor will report that the CPU is running at 100%, yet really it has a ton of unused potential for something that needs mostly floating point or SIMD, etc.
