I really want a macbook pro, but am waiting to see if apple will upgrade the X1600 mobility. Is this even possible? I know that there are two conferences coming up.
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Macbook Pro, Wait?
- Thread starter zeppelin68
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Maybe, your guess is as good as ours as to if they'll upgrade it or not. By "Is this even possible?" are you referring to consumers replacing the X1600 themselves? No. It's soldered on the the logic board. I suppose in THEORY you COULD, but well, it'd be ridiculously hard and near impossible.
See my sig. It's what I'm somewhat realistically hoping for.
When the MBP's are refreshed, ATI/AMD will have released their line of X2xxx GPUs. I am hoping that Apple will drop the trend of putting crappy graphics cards in the MBP, and go all out with an X2600, with options of the fastest version available. Maybe we'll see 512MB of VRAM in an MBP in the near future?
This upgrade should be worth waiting for. The Penryn upgrade could be too, (After the SR MBP's been out for a few months of course), but I think this upgrade will be more worthwhile. I have a feeling that the Penryn upgrade will be more along the lines of Core Duo to Core 2 Duo. Meaning about 10%. Nice, but not groundbreaking. DDR3 RAM is more exciting, but maybe that's Nehalem?
When the MBP's are refreshed, ATI/AMD will have released their line of X2xxx GPUs. I am hoping that Apple will drop the trend of putting crappy graphics cards in the MBP, and go all out with an X2600, with options of the fastest version available. Maybe we'll see 512MB of VRAM in an MBP in the near future?
This upgrade should be worth waiting for. The Penryn upgrade could be too, (After the SR MBP's been out for a few months of course), but I think this upgrade will be more worthwhile. I have a feeling that the Penryn upgrade will be more along the lines of Core Duo to Core 2 Duo. Meaning about 10%. Nice, but not groundbreaking. DDR3 RAM is more exciting, but maybe that's Nehalem?
Interesting, maybe I was just assuming things and had my upgrades mixed up, but your post implies that whatever upgrade we see next for the MBP, assuming (there I go again) that the upgrade is in the June ball park, that it will not be an upgrade that includes the Penryn 45nm architecture? On a related point Nehalem sounds like a major major upgrade and marks the beginning of a new phase whereas Penryn is a great upgrade, but one that marks the culmination of the core architecture, is that right? And with that said, how long does it typically take to go from "beginning production in 2008" to in our Macs?
I guess my point is that my powerbook is doing rather nicely and I was planning on just holding out until Penryn because I am in no great rush to upgrade, but if Penryn and Nahelem are not that far apart, which inherently they cannot be more than a year apart based on the stated production dates, I might just go for a current MBP model and then in about a year and a half or so make a move to the Nahelem based MBP (or whatever they call it by then).
It is my personal opinion that the SR upgrade is worth waiting for. It is my opinion that it is not worth breaking your neck to wait 6 months for Penryn. Maybe 2 or 3. I do not know when Nehalem will be released, but I believe it will be in the second half of 2008. Maybe WWDC2008, more likely MWSF2009...
I seem to remember it took like 2 months to get Merom MBP's? Or at least Macbooks... Couldn't be bothered to check. I would say Santa Rosa will be between a fortnight and a month old news before they come out in MBPs, probably longer for MBs. Excellent chance of SR MBPs at WWDC.
The Santa Rosa upgrade will (disclaimer almost) CERTAINLY NOT come with Penryn. Penryn MBP's are looking good for WWDC2008, as Penryn will not be released until the end of the year. Santa Rosa will be released I think May-ish.
The main reason to wait for SR upgrade is the possibility of a major GPU upgrade. Surely Apple won't stick with the X1600??? And if they are going to upgrade it, they might as well do it properly.
Based on everything I've read on the subject, this sounds just about right.
As far as performance, I think Intel is estimating Penryn to be a 10% bump from the Santa Rosa Merom (a different Merom than is being used now, IIRC). The real advantage to Penryn will be efficiency (less power consumption, less heat, etc.). Santa Rosa's advantage being the ability to address more RAM than is currently possible (along with many others).
According to Intel's timeline, Santa Rosa is scheduled for H1-07(Q2 now obviously--May hopefully), Penryn for "late" 07 and Nehalem "sometime" in 08.
My plan (FWIW) is to jump on the Santa Rosa update with the hopes that they (Apple) do go all out on this update for a machine that will last me several years. The Santa Rosa version should be a pretty significant step, at least from what I can gather it will be.
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On the subject of graphics, I haven't followed ATI or NVIDIA as closely as I have Intel, but I would hope that if the new cards are released around the same time as Santa Rosa, that Apple will incorporate them into their machines and make the update truly spectacular.
My plan (FWIW) is to jump on the Santa Rosa update with the hopes that they (Apple) do go all out on this update for a machine that will last me several years. The Santa Rosa version should be a pretty significant step, at least from what I can gather it will be.
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On the subject of graphics, I haven't followed ATI or NVIDIA as closely as I have Intel, but I would hope that if the new cards are released around the same time as Santa Rosa, that Apple will incorporate them into their machines and make the update truly spectacular.
That's my plan too. I should think that this next upgrade will be very decent, because there is a lot of stuff coming out at about the same time.
The main problem I can see with the new ATI/AMD graphics cards is their TDP. The X1600 has some pitifully low TDP of something well under 20W (I've posted it before), I don't see how the X2600 will be anywhere near that, considering the TDP's of the top of the line X2900 models of like 300W. Ah well. Hopefully Apple engineers will show us all yet again exactly what they get paid to do.
(Does a search, and discovers that I have posted about X2600 in 12 different threads. Is that a bit excessive??? Then again, that gives some indication as to how many "Should I wait for MBP?" threads there are...)