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MacBook Pro's NVIDIA Chipsets Can Support Dual GPU and 8GB RAM
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Well, now that they got solid aluminum instead of plastic, I would settle for a little more thickness, if they made part of the bottom shell vented, put on some little feet (so that air circulates under the machine) and put in some fans blowing outward. I sit my current macbook on top of a targus cooling pad and it keeps the casing cooler than if it was just sitting on the table. the downer is my fans on my pad are getting ready to die (the pad is 4 years old, this is the 3rd laptop I am using it with), and the new ones I see no longer include the USB hub and you have to plug them in - they are not USB powered anymore. May have to go with a different model.
Even with the current plastic design, it is still cooler than my Dell XPS m1210 1.83 dual core ran. that had a huge exhaust fan on the side, and I used to be able to use it as a spare heater in my office.
Hmm, sounds like the early days of windows 95/98 (although that was an OS not a hardware issue), where the OS would only recognize the first 640k and you still had to tweak the system to load stuff in upper memory (like you had to in DOS). I would really love to have 8gb of ram in the future. some of my ZIP and RAR files are over 2gb pushing 3gb in size. Well, I have one that is 4gb.
I am trying to get out the need for these huge compressed files, thus why I have not bought stuffit yet.
This sounds reasonable. Remember earlier this year when apple admitted that they had tried to do too much in one go with the release of the iphone 3g, app store & mobileme? I'd rather that they took a little longer and got it right first time.
The real world performance is still quite poor so I haven't been compelled to yet.
I'm at 750 core, 1750 shader, 850 memory right now. That's less than 200% core but more than 200% shader and almost 100% memory from stock, so yeah I'm pretty much overclocking to 2x the stock speed of the card and yet the FPS return is pretty small.
It's not a great card.
Personally, I don't think GeForce Boost will ever be implemented on Apple computers. The main benefit of having GeForce Boost and getting 2 GPUs to directly work together is for games, which isn't exactly an Apple focus or of much benefit to the OS itself.
With Grand Central, Snow Leopard should be able to see the IGP and the discrete GPU as 2 separate processors and allocate tasks to each. SLI/GeForce Boost merges 2 GPUs to appear as 1 GPU, but that isn't necessary for GPGPU or OpenCL. Tasks can be distributed quite well to each separate GPU rather than 1 big hybrid GPU.
This won't directly improve gaming, but already nVidia has the GPU accelerated PhysX engine. Games that use PhysX can use the discrete GPU for all the visual work in the game while the PhyxS engine runs on the IGP. This doesn't require SLI/GeForce Boost to work. As OpenCL and CUDA becomes popular, I'm sure this will be the way to go rather than using SLI/GeForce Boost which only benefits the visual work in the game and leaving nothing free for the physics and other computational work.
And someone mentioned before the impediment to on-the-fly switching between the IGP and the discrete GPU may well be Quartz Extreme since it's probably difficult to shunt the frame buffer from 1 GPU to the other without logging off. It may not ever be on-the-fly switching, but hopefully Apple will get it down to a few seconds pause while it switches, without having to fully log-out.
With Grand Central, Snow Leopard should be able to see the IGP and the discrete GPU as 2 separate processors and allocate tasks to each. SLI/GeForce Boost merges 2 GPUs to appear as 1 GPU, but that isn't necessary for GPGPU or OpenCL. Tasks can be distributed quite well to each separate GPU rather than 1 big hybrid GPU.
This won't directly improve gaming, but already nVidia has the GPU accelerated PhysX engine. Games that use PhysX can use the discrete GPU for all the visual work in the game while the PhyxS engine runs on the IGP. This doesn't require SLI/GeForce Boost to work. As OpenCL and CUDA becomes popular, I'm sure this will be the way to go rather than using SLI/GeForce Boost which only benefits the visual work in the game and leaving nothing free for the physics and other computational work.
And someone mentioned before the impediment to on-the-fly switching between the IGP and the discrete GPU may well be Quartz Extreme since it's probably difficult to shunt the frame buffer from 1 GPU to the other without logging off. It may not ever be on-the-fly switching, but hopefully Apple will get it down to a few seconds pause while it switches, without having to fully log-out.
Thanks. I get how software is developed. I've been doing it longer than most people posting here have been alive. I've developed OS level drivers on a multitude of Unix systems for many years. I now develop software for one of the most regulated industries (healthcare) so I know all about software lifecycle and process.
My suggestion here was that supporting the multiple GPUs and 8GB RAM _MUST_ be harder than some missing device drivers (as others have been suggesting). If that's all it was, Apple would have taken care of that before release. They had plenty of time for that. The reason it is not support is much more architectural than that.
I'm guessing you'll be waiting for Snow Leopard for these features, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
Never say Never!
I can remember when the word was that no one will ever need my than 20MB in storage space. Thaat was not so long ago. My current Intel Mac Pro has 13 GB of memory, far from the 32 GB that could be in there. So it is easy to see that someone with an Intel MacBook could easily need over 4 GB of memory. Many people need more memory than we do.
Consumers will not need more then 4 GB of RAM.
I can remember when the word was that no one will ever need my than 20MB in storage space. Thaat was not so long ago. My current Intel Mac Pro has 13 GB of memory, far from the 32 GB that could be in there. So it is easy to see that someone with an Intel MacBook could easily need over 4 GB of memory. Many people need more memory than we do.
Why 640k
My last CP/M heathKit came with 45k & had to be expanded to a whopping 64k. So why go above that limit? 64k for the home market & semiPros with your 640k reserved for only a select few ultra high-end Pros.
My last CP/M heathKit came with 45k & had to be expanded to a whopping 64k. So why go above that limit? 64k for the home market & semiPros with your 640k reserved for only a select few ultra high-end Pros.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)
All of this is great news. The new MBPs look better and better every day.
All of this is great news. The new MBPs look better and better every day.
Wow.. This makes the MBP seem like a beastly machine..
8GB ram?! SLI video..
Hmm, does anyone know if the current 8800 based 24" imac supports 8GB ram? The specs said 4GB is max, so I got that much, but another 4 wouldn't be a bad thing. You can never have too much ram.
8GB ram?! SLI video..
Hmm, does anyone know if the current 8800 based 24" imac supports 8GB ram? The specs said 4GB is max, so I got that much, but another 4 wouldn't be a bad thing. You can never have too much ram.
Yeah, which makes the theoretical maximum amount of RAM 18 EB (Exabytes...18 Million Gigabytes).
The Great Carnac predicts:
If Apple ever does implement this for MBP, I am sure they will find some way to charge you 10 bucks for the software upgrade.
Carnac also predicts that the fanbois will be only too happy to hand over ten clams, and defend Apples charging it as "an accepted accounting practice." Of course, they will say, "It is a bargain at ten bucks- I'd happily pay 20." They will possibly also try to justify the additional charge as just a small percent of the amount you originally overpaid to Apple for the MBP.
Just a supposition based on how Apple has handled things like this in the past.
If Apple ever does implement this for MBP, I am sure they will find some way to charge you 10 bucks for the software upgrade.
Carnac also predicts that the fanbois will be only too happy to hand over ten clams, and defend Apples charging it as "an accepted accounting practice." Of course, they will say, "It is a bargain at ten bucks- I'd happily pay 20." They will possibly also try to justify the additional charge as just a small percent of the amount you originally overpaid to Apple for the MBP.
Just a supposition based on how Apple has handled things like this in the past.
Apple on apple.com/macosx/snowleopard:
To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk.
Screw you guys, I'll wait for another year and buy 2x8TB DDR3 so-dimms for my Macbook Pro
To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk.
Screw you guys, I'll wait for another year and buy 2x8TB DDR3 so-dimms for my Macbook Pro
Some guy overclocked it to 7000+ in 3Dmark06 on a MSI laptop.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=312248
I realize that I've gone over the cynical edge, since my first reaction to this article was + expect another $1.99 "upgrade" because Apple's "accountants" told them that they just "have to" charge something.
+ expect another $1.99 "upgrade" because Apple's "accountants" told them that they just "have to" charge something.
I Knew it! It seemed apparent enough that is was a software limitation when looking at the perviously released chipsets that already support Hybrid SLI. To all you previous whiners, for shame. Now we just need to wait on Apple. Patience is a virtue.
It most definatly is and I see no incentive for Apple to develop the ability for the Macbook Pro to use both cards together. Apple don't care about 3D performance, if they did we'd see better drivers and cards on the Mac Pro where people actually use it. Gamers are the ones who benefit from SLI and when it comes down to it SLI isn't going to sell Macbook Pros.
This is what I've been thinking as well. I thought the whole point to SLI/Crossfire was to use two identical graphics units and have them SHARE the processing? I think nVidia was either not quoted properly or did not disclose the fact that, yes, GeForce Boost gives you the *capability* to run SLI but you need identical GPUs for it to be of benefit. It's like using a C2D and a Celeron to share processing.
I can see Apple using this in the future with an offering of a "real" MacBook Pro giving you dual 9600m GTs. Now we're talking.
ideal for iMac... and maybe sooner rather than later!
This does make a ton of sense for the new iMacs. Not only is battery life not a factor, but the heat dissipation and space allocation issues are more easily addressed in the larger form factor. Add 8GB RAM and Quad core processors and my 3.06 iMac is on eBay!
This does make a ton of sense for the new iMacs. Not only is battery life not a factor, but the heat dissipation and space allocation issues are more easily addressed in the larger form factor. Add 8GB RAM and Quad core processors and my 3.06 iMac is on eBay!
Are you disabling the speed throttling? What does the thermals of the GPU look like? What program are you running to test the GPU?
My question is, if I install a windows partition under bootcamp, would the boost feature work? In this case I could use all the graphic intensive programs under windows and keep OSX for the lighter applications, email and surfing.