Macbook Air Speed Question

[ercanbas]

Hello!

I am definitley set on buying a Macbook Air. I was currently going to wait for their next upgrade but I just can't resist these beauties any longer! I am currently using a Gateway notebook with a 2.0ghz AMD turion64 mobile processor. I have nothing bad to say about it but I am curious about the speed of the Air. Since it is duo core, is it 1.8x2? Or do both of the processors add up to 1.8? I played around with them at the stores and they seem much faster than my laptop which has a faster single processor. I am constantly checking this board and I've heard some mention how it seems faster than a MBP. Can someone clear this up for me? Thanks!


....Go Apple!

 

[berkleeboy210]

You will def. see an improvement from the Air vs. your current machine.

I currently have my MB for sale will be buying an Air ASAP.

I've lived with the 80gb drive on my MB for just about a year, and I've survived. As for processing power, mine currently has a 2ghz Core 2 Duo. and the MBA has a 1.6 C2D.

For what I do, (email,web browsing,word, itunes, importing photos and occasionally light video editing) I'm sure the air will be fine for me.

But you will surely notice a positive difference between the MBA and your current Gateway.

It's either 1.6x2 or 1.8x2 pending the model you get. Also the higher end model has the Solid State Drive in it.
Good Luck!

 

[wordy]

When they were comparing it favorably over the MBP, they were talking about loading time for programs, which is due to the SSD.

 

[sanPietro98]

but I am curious about the speed of the Air. Since it is duo core, is it 1.8x2? Or do both of the processors add up to 1.8?

Each core runs at 1.8GHz (somewhat) independently of the other.

The dual cores help by enabling native multitasking between the 2 cores. In single core machines, the operating system takes care of the multitasking (e.g., running iPhoto and iTunes simultaneously) by interweaving their execution among the processor cycles. With Dual Cores, the OS still interweaves the various programs' instruction codes, but has a second core to share the load, which makes the computer faster. But even if the computer is running a single application, it can still be faster because most modern applications are multi-threaded anyway (e.g., while iTunes is playing music, you can still navigate your library).

This is a drastically oversimplified explanation, but this is actually a pretty complex question to answer. There are a lot of factors that affect performance, including: common shared bus usage, caches, disk I/O, and whether the programs are optimized for multicore machines, etc.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

It's 2x 1,8 yes. Two cores running parallel to eachother.

It's a common misconception that each core 600 MHz or the combined speed is 3,6 GHz. You don't add the cores together.

 

[alphaod]

If an application is single threaded, and your computer have infinite cores, it's still going to run at the speed of 1 core. So when you have say 2 programs, they can use one core only which is the advantage.