The only problem with "due for an update" is that architecturally, there is nothing to update to until these upcoming chips.
Yes, bigger/faster hard drives would be nice; better graphics cards would be nice, Blu-Ray would be nice... But those aren't really big enough to qualify for full "update" status. "minor rev", more like it. (Again, those would be VERY nice, I'm not trying to convince Apple to *NOT* update...)
I just really want a quad-core iMac...
the New Core i7 is bringing back HT from the P4 era. i wonder how well HT will do on the core CPUs. i know HT was great in some respects but it did have its downfalls. i wonder if they improved on HT from the P4 era
Most benchmarks show a decent improvement. Definitely nowhere near 100%, but a boost, nonetheless. (See
Ars, for one example.)
There are a few tasks for which HT actually hurts; but those are mostly single-threaded. Essentially, you are trading slower individual threads for twice as many threads. So if you're using something that can actually make use of 8 threads, you'll see better performance than 4 threads on the same chip with HT off.
The second problem is when your OS doesn't know about HT. Say you have two cores, 1 and 2. You have four virtual processors, 1a, 1b, 2a and 2b. You can combine one of 1a or 1b with one of 2a or 2b and both run at 100% speed. If the OS decides that you get processors 1a and 1b, then you are down to 60% speed. That is of course a stupid thing to do, and I wouldn't expect that to happen nowadays.
Sadly, Vista is stupid on this. It gleefully pairs up processors exactly the way you describe. (It also rather stupidly bounces a single process around all your cores. Talk about a cache hit nightmare!)
Also, it
appears that, if you follow standard Intel naming nomenclature, "Nehalem" is the codename for the processor architecture itself. "Core i7" is the trade name for the desktop chip; and from this and other rumor sites, it appears that the workstation/server chip will be "Xeon 5500" or "Xeon 3500" series parts. "i7" is purely the 'brand' for the desktop chip.
(Additional disclaimer: I may work in an Intel building, but I have no access to marketing info; so my knowledge on this is based solely on rumor sites. Heck, when I talked with someone who actually does know about the hardware side immediately after the "i7" name was announced;
I was the one that he heard the name from. So even the people I deal with at Intel know nothing about the naming and marketing side of things.)
