Intel Launching 'Merom' Notebook Processor 201
Hans Pecheston writes "Merom, Intel's notebook processor, will be joining in the festivities at their upcoming launch event. This chip will continue to use the Core 2 Duo brand and should display additional improvements in performance and power consumption over the current chips. Intel has already begun to ship Merom processors to its PC customers and systems with Merom should begin to appear around the end of August."
Re:iMac (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And in the first week of August... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And in the first week of August... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why this is Apple-relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Intel world, Intel announces a chip family and that day the big Wintel vendors are already showing off their prototypes of "about-to-ship computers using it. Apple can't be as close to the vest as they traditionally have been regarding their plans anymore - for instance, it's a no-brainer that they'll speedbump their systems anytime Intel ships speedbumped versions of the same chip. Also, the announcement of a Mac Pro is now seen as inevitable at WWDC, since the chips to power it are officially on the market. Unlike years past, the speculation is focused this year on the little details - Xeon or Core 2 Duo? Completely redesigned case or minor refresh? The fact of the machine itself is more of a done deal.
Because this is the first WWDC in the post-Intel era, it'll be interesting to see what the buying trend is - for instance, I have one client who is holding off the two weeks until WWDC before buying either a G5 tower or Xserve - based on the system configs in play, that's about $40k in deferred revenue (on the other hand, another one just bought a G5 Quad). Part of the reason that Apple used to be so tight-lipped about announcements was to avoid these deferred purchases, so it'll be interesting to see what happens now.
Re:Why this is Apple-relevant (Score:0, Insightful)
If performance is the need, then quad-970 Macs will beat the crap out of anything coming out of Intel or AMD this year.
If existing Mac software needs to be run, the paltry amount of native Intel apps makes PPC Macs the only choice.
If neither of those, then there is little reason not to save a huge amount of cash and buy from Dell or any other x86 OEM.
Re:Merom has 64bit support (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the same philosophy as ZFS; no one is ever likely to need a 128-bit filesystem. Without resorting to quantum storage, you would need a hard drive the size of a planet if you encoded one bit per atom. If you used electron states for storing data then you could maybe shave some of the size off, and reduce it to the size of a small moon. It is likely that within the next 5-10 years, however, that a lot of people will start needing a 65-bit filesystem.
Re:Why this is Apple-relevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides that, since you generally don't pay a huge speed penalty in running apps through Rosetta (depends on the app, of course), if you need a newer Mac, why not buy the technology that's going to be shipped/supported far longer down the road, suck it up a little for now and use Rosetta, and get a big improvement when the universal upgrade ships? I really don't see that as enough of an deterrent to convince a diehard Mac user to change to Windows. With rare exceptions, Mac people are Mac people, period. The only thing that would get them to Windows is either force or no more Apple. And if I actually thought they'd be better served by generic x86 hardware and Windows, and I pushed them that way, the easiest thing my clients would do is probably find someone else who wouldn't push Windows on them.
Look, I don't hate Windows. And I've built most of my own x86 boxes over the years. I even own six Dells, including my home gaming PC and what's in my office. But c'mon - to really assert that there's no reason to buy an Intel-based Mac because G5 quads are faster with pre-universal software is silly. And to call anyone spending $40k on Intel Macs an idiot - that's just a troll, and a bad one at that.
And on a related note, I see no problem with delaying a non-time critical Xserve purchase to see what will replace it in Intel equivalent products. I've told the client that unless the Intel-based Xserve turns out to have a compelling feature (like onboard video freeing up both PCI slots, or on-board RAID for the built-in drive bays), to stick with the PPC version during the transition period that's likely to occur (there's usually an interval of a couple of weeks when you can order both models).
Re:And in the first week of August... (Score:3, Insightful)
The MacBook *Pro* is not for home users, it's a *Pro* laptop. Gig-E, Firewire, DVI, weight, etc, all matter in that environment. Basically you should redo the entire comparison with a more appropriate base model. For example, an E1505 with stock GMA950 IGP vs the MacBook Amateur. Or the MacBook Pro vs an actual pro-level Dell.