Montevina and Penryn RAM the same?

[wannabe07]

This might be a stupid question, but here goes.

My sister is coming to town to buy a new MB in August and I am going to upgrade the RAM for her. I want to have the RAM ahead of time and ready to install, but on the off-chance that the machine that she gets has Montevina and not Penryn, will there be any difference in the type of RAM that it will need?

From what I've read, DDR2 RAM should be replaced by DDR3 in Nehalem, but I haven't found anything about Montevina. I just want to be sure I buy the right stuff and not get stuck with RAM that she can't use.

Thanks!

 

[zioxide]

Santa Rosa is DDR2. Montevina will support DDR2 or DDR3, so it depends on what Apple decides to support.

Also, FYI, Penryn and Montevina aren't the same thing. Penryn is codename for the processor, Montevina for the platform.

Processor (Platform)

Yonah (Napa) -> Merom (Napa) -> Merom (Santa Rosa) -> Penryn (Santa Rosa) (current Macbooks/Pros) -> Penryn (Montevina)

 

[CanadaRAM]

You are best to wait, because nobody knows what spec Apple will release, and Macs are famously intolerant of out of spec RAM. You should be able to get RAM sent overnight courier if you need it.

 

[wannabe07]

Thanks for the info - I didn't realize that Montevina might support DDR3, depending on what Apple decides to do. I'll wait for a while and hope for a hypothetical update before August.

 

[fstfrwrd]

another question.
how much ram will montevina support?
still a maximum of 4GB?

 

[illidian]

I have seen that Montevina will support DDR3 RAM. However, it is still prohibitively costly compared to DDR2 RAM ($400 vs $100 for 4GB, $200 vs $60 for 2GB).

Even if the next line of MacBooks supports DDR2 RAM, I'm not expecting it to be of the same variety (667MHz) as the current line.