montevina upgrade.... question about FSB and rendering (architecture student)

[terrordemon]

hi. i'm an architecture student who will be buying a MBP very soon (this summer). rendering is the concern that tempts me to hold back buying a MBP right now. i have a few questions about the montevina update:

1. will there be a speed bump? if so, any idea what the tiers of speeds will be (2.4, 2.5, 2.6 as it is now)
2. does FSB effect rendering? rendering is 100% dependent on the CPU, i know, but does FSB play any role in rendering??? this is the main question that i need answered before i make the decision to buy now or hold off

i know the argument to hold off. i know the argument to buy right now. its all dependent for me on these two questions

thank you!!

sincerely

a hopeful new mac'er

 

[illidian]

Expect a slight speed bump. 2.5, 2.66, and 2.8 perhaps - nothing too drastic.

 

[surferfromuk]

Just curious what's the application that you will be running ?

I now run Final Cut Pro on a 2.4Mhz MBP - but first I had the age old 'Macbook Pro' or iMac dilemma - and I first ran it on the new 2.8Ghz iMac with the faster fsb, before I went for the Macbook Pro - I can't say I feel like I'm missing something in performance..

The Macbook Pro is a fantastic piece of kit...

Can't help you with the waiting game - I don't think it boils down to some night and day performance issue - it seems to be more of a peace of mind thing...

 

[lhotka]

For RAM intensive applications, speed improvements of 10-20% over the current bus are expected. I use very large VMWare images and manipulate huge (multiple GB) photoshop files, so I expect to see those kinds of benefits.

 

[terrordemon]

i'm using rhino + v-ray. 100% cpu intensive. though, illustrator + photoshop do eat memory like theyre from africa.

so basically, what does FSB benefit? RAM applications, not CPU applications?

 

[lhotka]

Anything that moves and manipulates large volumes of data in memory.

The key is how much of the data is stored in RAM versus read from disk. One hint is to look at 'real memory' in activity monitor. Stuff that's paged out to disk will see minimal improvement.

VMWare grabs real memory. Handbrake reads from disk. Photoshop can do either (it also has it's own swap file system).

But Photoshop is a mixed case. For things like applying filters, yes, big improvement. For other things (like painting on a new layer), not so much.

 

[terrordemon]

lhotka: thanks for the info, it almost completely cleared up my question (possibly did)

so FSB has to do with how the CPU interacts with the physical memory; correct? so then FSB increase would increase performance of photoshop, illustrator?

 

[m1stake]

the FSB is the bottleneck on Intel CPU's at the moment, so a faster FSB will be excellent.

 

[Wotan31]

so basically, what does FSB benefit? RAM applications, not CPU applications?

FSB benefits anything that doesn't fit entirely within CPU cache. I.e. just about everything.

FSB is so important for performance, that's why Nehalem gets rid of FSB altogether in favor of intel QuickPath interconnect, which is similar to AMD's HyperTransport.

I want a Macbook Pro to replace my Powerbook but I'm definitely waiting for Montevina. I'm guessing August/Sept is when we'll see Montevina MBP's.