QuadCore/Nehalem Macbook Pro

[dausoner]

Thanks for convincing me that waiting for Nehalem isn't really that worthed. I was really tempted to upgrade to have Nehalem on a MBP as it's a big architecture change with the current ones... I thought that would give an extra boost to the performance.. But really if the tradeoffs of getting a quad core is battery life, I would rather get a 3GHz dual core.. We'll see what refresh Apple has around May/June

Not worth it? I have been waiting five years (plus one more to come) to upgrade my PowerBook G4 and finally have a damn good reason to upgrade. The comparison between Montevina and Clarksfield is that there will be none. Clarksfield will blow it away. Here are some reviews of core i7 albeit these are the desktop chips but it will give you an idea of what to expect:intel core i7 review roundup

Also, didn't MacNN recently expose a patent for notebook liquid cooling technologies?? Increased TDP for those quad cores?? Not a problem for Apple??

So once again, time to upgrade is all relative to what you are using your MBP for. If you really need the speed increases then by all means upgrade. If you can wait and not get your panties in a bunch, do it. Tick-Tock. Waiting for the "Tock" will give you a couple of extra years of life on your MBP because you will have the extra longevity of a new microarchitecture.

 

[Battlefield Fan]

Not worth it? I have been waiting five years (plus one more to come) to upgrade my PowerBook G4 and finally have a damn good reason to upgrade. The comparison between Montevina and Clarksfield is that there will be none. Clarksfield will blow it away. Here are some reviews of core i7 albeit these are the desktop chips but it will give you an idea of what to expect:intel core i7 review roundup

Also, didn't MacNN recently expose a patent for notebook liquid cooling technologies?? Increased TDP for those quad cores?? Not a problem for Apple??

So once again, time to upgrade is all relative to what you are using your MBP for. If you really need the speed increases then by all means upgrade. If you can wait and not get your panties in a bunch, do it. Tick-Tock. Waiting for the "Tock" will give you a couple of extra years of life on your MBP because you will have the extra longevity of a new microarchitecture.

not everybody can wait like that. the big advantage of the core i7 is that is has hyperthreading. And also just because the desktop chips dont offer any real performance difference besides in video editing, doesnt mean the mobile version wont.

 

[Scottsdale]

You know, when the Nehalem notebook chip is released, it will make for one bad ass MBP. Seriously, the whole purpose of Snow Leopard is to take advantage of multi-cores. It will be one screaming notebook by August or September of 2009. I would think Apple would want that in its "Pro" lineup. It may further differentiate between the MB and MBP lines.

I cannot wait. I want a MBA for myself, but I cannot wait to see those MBPs fly with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Nehalem chip. Dang!!! That will be some bragging rights... Looking forward to the Apple vs. Vista commercials.

Save your money, it will be worth it. Forget May June... Waiting til late third quarter will reward you greatly. Plus, the Unibody MBP will be nearly a year old. All of the bugs will be gone. Will be like third version by then. Version two in the Spring. Then version three in the Fall. I am excited for you. Wait it out. Sad that it takes all of us, well takes me anyways, years to save up for a new MBP. It's like buying a car (ok, a cheapie but still). Not saying it aint worth all the savings...

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

 

[TheRekz]

You know, when the Nehalem notebook chip is released, it will make for one bad ass MBP. Seriously, the whole purpose of Snow Leopard is to take advantage of multi-cores. It will be one screaming notebook by August or September of 2009. I would think Apple would want that in its "Pro" lineup. It may further differentiate between the MB and MBP lines.

I cannot wait. I want a MBA for myself, but I cannot wait to see those MBPs fly with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Nehalem chip. Dang!!! That will be some bragging rights... Looking forward to the Apple vs. Vista commercials.

Save your money, it will be worth it. Forget May June... Waiting til late third quarter will reward you greatly. Plus, the Unibody MBP will be nearly a year old. All of the bugs will be gone. Will be like third version by then. Version two in the Spring. Then version three in the Fall. I am excited for you. Wait it out. Sad that it takes all of us, well takes me anyways, years to save up for a new MBP. It's like buying a car (ok, a cheapie but still). Not saying it aint worth all the savings...

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

Well... I really doubt it will come at the third quarter at this point. If around May/June there will be news that it will definitely come out by the end of the 2009 I would wait for it, if not then I guess it won't be till 2010 and it's just way to longg.. I'd rather get it May/June and then on 2011 sell it and buy the Nehalem MBP.. if it's really that great

 

[dausoner]

Well... I really doubt it will come at the third quarter at this point. If around May/June there will be news that it will definitely come out by the end of the 2009 I would wait for it, if not then I guess it won't be till 2010 and it's just way to longg.. I'd rather get it May/June and then on 2011 sell it and buy the Nehalem MBP.. if it's really that great

I'd say its impossible that we are going to see it in the 3rd quarter 2010 on a 17"MBP, the others?? Again, it all comes back to how much you need the immediate speed bumps to justify an upgrade. With such an investment I want the depreciation value of my new computer to be as little as possible if you are going to resell in a couple years. In which case, I would personally buy used or refurb for a quick resell in 2011. BTW when you sell in 2011 you will most likely again be in a tick phase for Intel... should you wait for Sandy Bridge tock or go with the Nehalem tick? Ahhh the joys of processing technology.

 

[macipodiphoneap]

I would bet there is no chance of seeing a Nahalem based MBP in 2009 or even Q1 2010.

The first Nahalem based mobile chip, Clarksfield, will be released Q3-Q4 of 2009, but the TDP is 45w/55w vs the 35/25w Penryns in the current unibody MBPs.

Battery life and heat seems to be somewhat of a priority to Apple, judging by their decision to include a hybrid graphics engine instead of a single 9600m gt or superior GPU. The technology for a 9800/8800 level GPU has been there and they had every chance to implement it, but obviously cost/heat/battery tolls prevented apple from utilizing it.

Considering both Penryn and Nahalem CPUs use 45nm technology, the quad core counterpart will produce significantly more heat. The higher TDP would also mean drastically lower battery life if apple were to decide to implement it in their MBP, not to mention will be significantly more expensive than the staying with the dual core.

MB/Ps may looks slick, but Apple can't perform miracles and are subject to physical limitations due to it's slimness - and that doesn't equate to good things in terms of internal hardware.


The second mobile Nahalem chip, Auburndale, will be released in Q1 2010 w/ a TDP of 45/35W - the most likely candidate if Apple ever decides to implement a Nahalem quad core mobile chip.

Apple seems to like the $2000/$2500 MBP pricing scheme - so until the manufacturing cost of parts or CPU/GPU goes down, you won't see a huge boost in upgrades.

If Apple were to implement a Nahalem chip, I speculate it wouldn't be until mid-late 2010 - and would most likely require a refresh of the design to accommodate the extra heat produced by the quad versus a dual core. Judging by the temps that 35w dual cores are pumping out in the unibody MBPs, there is no way, without a complete internal overhaul, that there will be adequate cooling for 4 cores in the current design.

Alot of people rag on Apple for not adding this.. or having that... but that's the price you pay for having such a sexy machine. People seem to like to think upgrading a processor is as easy as tossing it in and callling it a day. Apple has alot to consider and has to ride that fine line between sleekness and power so all their fanboys won't cry about it.

nicely said but i think every1 who reads this believes u but hopes ur wrong, in a good way. I hope it comes in 2009 but if u are correct, well, it seems what u are proposing is correct

 

[The SpinDoctor]

Read my thread here where the question we both had is basically answered

 

[iMacmatician]

they aren't popular because of price. many people hope the i7's qc are going to be cheaper.

Probably not given the 2.0 GHz $348 Penryn quad-core, but the trend is clear that quad-cores are moving down the market.

Personally I think apple needs to come out with a line of notebooks called Macbook Extreme. (quad core, nice battery and everything else that makes the ultimate notebook.)

Definitely. And all those who complain about the MacBook Extreme can buy a MacBook Pro.

I would bet there is no chance of seeing a Nahalem based MBP in 2009 or even Q1 2010.

The first Nahalem based mobile chip, Clarksfield, will be released Q3-Q4 of 2009, but the TDP is 45w/55w vs the 35/25w Penryns in the current unibody MBPs.

It's a bit confusing. The Nehalem chipset (or something) consumes 10 W less than the current Intel chipset, so you have to subtract 10 W from the Nehalem TDPs. So the 45 W Clarksfield would theoretically work in the MacBook Pro.

The second mobile Nahalem chip, Auburndale, will be released in Q1 2010 w/ a TDP of 45/35W - the most likely candidate if Apple ever decides to implement a Nahalem quad core mobile chip.

It's dual-core.

Not worth it? I have been waiting five years (plus one more to come) to upgrade my PowerBook G4 and finally have a damn good reason to upgrade. The comparison between Montevina and Clarksfield is that there will be none. Clarksfield will blow it away. Here are some reviews of core i7 albeit these are the desktop chips but it will give you an idea of what to expect:intel core i7 review roundup

Core i7 has features that Clarksfield/Auburndale won't have. So the performance gains won't be as big.

 

[Hugoss]

More power....

Personally I think apple needs to come out with a line of notebooks called Macbook Extreme. (quad core, nice battery and everything else that makes the ultimate notebook.)

I like this idea. Maybe the solution is to have a super powerful fan in the MacBook Extreme that would be enabled only when plugged in to the mains to save battery power. All new intel based machines can detect the cpu heat at the bios level and can be set at the bios level to turn up the fans and/or turn down the power to the cpu in order keep cool - so where is the problem? If you need the extra power and can put up with a noisy fan then you could switch to 'Extreme Mode' or 'Turbo Mode' or something.

Before anybody asks - yes I do need the power - I already use a macbook pro for home and meetings in my job as the creative director of a 3D animation company- it's fantastic to show your work on at meetings, - it looks slick, and it has a superbly vibrant 16x9 screen - but realistically I can't work on it, which is such a shame.

3D rendering is fully multi-threaded in all main 3d software - also things like video editing, compositing, encoding etc are multi-threaded. The Cinebench 3D rendering benchmark (which is a real rendering test) give a score of about 20000 for an i7, a core2duo at 2.6 ghz will give a score of about 4800 so it's over 4 times faster for multi-threaded applications. If you are like me and you spend half your life waiting for things to render this is really important.

Here is a good CPU benchmarks page to put things into perspective:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

 

[10THzMac]

What do you do that requires a quad core? ....

I recently read a report that said dual cores are sufficient for most people, and quad core was slightly overkill, and octo core was even more overkill. From what I see, I'd rather have performance gains on the memory/bus standpoint than even more cores.

I think the entire industry has jumped on what used to be Apple's bandwagon

You do not seem to grasp the way the industry is going. My own main use is with Mathematica - version 7 just released is already multi-core aware and has a number of built-in parallel processing tools, and many types of calculation will immediately go 3-4 times faster right now on a QC laptop. While my serious work uses 8-core boxes networked together - I am DESPERATE for a quad core laptop for working in parallel on the go and doing demos. The last update was, IMHO, utterly pointless - who wants to buy a machine just coz it is machined out of one piece of metal? More cores please, yesterday!

 

[Solemony]

so you think just go with whatever Apple offers in May?

I think you should just go with what Apple offers during Q1 or Q2 of next year. I'm pretty sure Snow Leopard should be out by Q2...