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What are the chances of a new MBP in Oct?
- Thread starter sartajc
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Not much of a chance there. If you need it now, buy it now, but if you can wait for an update, wait.
Are you in college? If so, you're missing out on a free Nano (which even if you don't want, you can sell for a good return). If you're not in college and still in high school, then just wait until after October if you don't need a new computer. Mind you, you could be waiting for as long as November or even January (as some on these forums believe) for a new mbp. If your current computer isn't going to last that long, then buy it when you need it. You can't always be looking around the corner when it comes to technology.
What are they going to update to? Apple use Intel notebook processors for everything except the Mac Pro and the iMac and MacBook Pro are using the top of the range processors at the moment.
MBP's were just updated June 5th. Unless you want a 17 inch LED screen, which could come...there won't be any major updates for at least 4-6 months.
Server-class Penryn chips are not due until November, and the Mac Pro will be receiving those. Expect mobile Penryn chips in early '08 - perhaps there will be an announcement @ MWSF. Until then, there isn't really anything for Apple to upgrade other than something very minor.
1) Use the forum search.
2) Not going to happen until AT LEAST January. Most likely later.
And it won't be much of an update. Just slightly faster CPUs.
(I know it says like 40% faster, but both the Santa Rosa platform and Merom were supposed to give like 40% speed boosts each, and turn out to be about 10%. I expect this will be the same.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and make a prediction. From now on, and into the near future (5-10 years) redesigning the computer cores is not going to bring large increases in speed, only 10-20%. The major increases in speed will come from adding extra cores. I would expect Apple to start selling quad core notebooks in late 2008, or more likely mid 2009.This will hopefully be made possible with the Nehalem redesign, hopefully allowing a low wattage quad core to be made, thereby increasing the speed of the CPU by a significant factor over the ones today (2x). Unless of course someone can find me a mobile quad core Penryn (NO EXTREME VERSIONS).
Hmmm... grumpy 20 year old man...
2) Not going to happen until AT LEAST January. Most likely later.
And it won't be much of an update. Just slightly faster CPUs.
(I know it says like 40% faster, but both the Santa Rosa platform and Merom were supposed to give like 40% speed boosts each, and turn out to be about 10%. I expect this will be the same.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and make a prediction. From now on, and into the near future (5-10 years) redesigning the computer cores is not going to bring large increases in speed, only 10-20%. The major increases in speed will come from adding extra cores. I would expect Apple to start selling quad core notebooks in late 2008, or more likely mid 2009.This will hopefully be made possible with the Nehalem redesign, hopefully allowing a low wattage quad core to be made, thereby increasing the speed of the CPU by a significant factor over the ones today (2x). Unless of course someone can find me a mobile quad core Penryn (NO EXTREME VERSIONS).
Hmmm... grumpy 20 year old man...
very true. i completely agree. only thing i would add is that there will be additional improvements like solid state HD's that hopefully make notebook HD's as fast as desktop HD's. currently that seems to be the bottle neck.
Hopefully we'll have flash based HDs soon (maybe 2009ish). I expect that by that time, prices will have fallen enough for it to be feasible. Then again, we might see hybrid HDs sooner than that. They could design the notebook to have a 10-15GB flash HD for just booting up, and a standard HD for everyday stuff... then again, I'm just pulling stuff out of my a*s, so disregard it
While it's unlikely the current lineup of MBPs will be updated, there is some talk of a new Ultraportable being introduced this Fall. I'm curious about what kind of new technologies this new product could bring: probably some sort of multi-touch (either on the screen or onn an enlarged touch pad), some sort of Flash HDD, 11" or 13" LED display, etc.
Some clarification: Obviously this hypothesis will not hold true forever. The point is that major advances in processing power will not come from redesigning cores while keeping everything the same. At some point, single cores will be able to run at 10 GHz, 100 GHz, 1 THz, etc, but not using silicon. Most likely it will be carbon nanotubes that allow these crazy speeds to be reached, and later some crazy quantum hybrid.
But single cores will be limited to ~3GHz for many years yet.
Should start a thread on this stuff, because I find it fascinating!
Very little chance of a MBP update and as previosuly stated the next update is unlikely to be significant unless Apple are sitting on some amaznig technology not previously released.
Wait for Leopard if you can before purchasing to save some $ or £...
Wait for Leopard if you can before purchasing to save some $ or £...
Adding more cores is not going to speed things up unless applications become more multithreaded than they currently are.
Adding instruction sets like SSE4 can dramatically increase performance. In some test the new Penryn class processor gains a neat 100% performance increase over similar clocked Woodcrest based processors with applications optimized for SSE4 instructions.
It's about building more intelligent designs and Intel is currently committed to bring a new architecture out every 18 month.
EDIT: But the performance between now and early 2008 is not going to be dramatically different, as you say.
The MacBook's last update was May 15, 2007. If it sees an update soon it will only be a very minor one, as there simply isn't much that can be upgraded right now in terms of chip architecture, etc.
you can add as many cores are you want, the real issue here is creating software which is able to multithread and make use of these cores, which is NOT a trivial task. in terms of hardware, flash memory and getting rid of spinning disks is going to make a realy difference to things, i think thats the main bottleneck at the moment, and has been for the last few years
edit - didnt see the other guys post that already coverd much of what i just said
Far better to be a grumpy 20 year old than a grumpy 55 year old... although not as many excuses.
And of course most programs that actually require that much horsepower are already multithreaded. Any that aren't soon will be, or will be dropped as other multithreaded programs eat them up.
I call BS on this one. Not your BS, but Intel's BS. Core 2 Duo was supposed to be leaps and bounds over Core Duo. Santa Rosa platform was supposed to bring massive speed increases. Guess what? They didn't. Preliminary tests and benchmarks are always seriously skewed. Also, check to make sure you're not comparing a 2 core to a four core CPU. Woodcrests are dual core, and I should think pretty much all of the Xenryns (my word!) will be quad core.
I completely disagree that more intelligent designs will increase speed all that much. The major breakthroughs will come from adding more cores, maybe making it easier to write multithreaded apps, and changing the materials (nanotubes), structures (trigates), and fundamental workings of computers (quantum computing).
Obviously none of these things will occur until sometime next year, when maybe Nehalem will result in an across the board doubling of cores, resulting in an across the board doubling of speed for the vast majority of apps that will benefit from the extra speed.