Merom in MacBook and MacBook Pros in September?

Kevin C. Tofel writes "If you want to see where the computer industry is going, you often have to watch the computer component manufacturers, and that's just what DigiTimes did. AsusTek and Quanta both produce Apple notebooks and sources appear to have just revealed that September is the month for 64-bit Merom CPUs in the MacBook and MacBook Pro line."

Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[hlimethe3rd]

Digitimes is not a good site for this kind of thing. Historically, they've been very poor with these kinds of predictions. I'm not going to find any examples right now, but searching the archives of macrumors.com or some similar site will turn out many.

TRFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The Real Fabulous Article [digitimes.com], instead of the submitters lame-ass ad page.

Re:Manufactured Demand

[tomstdenis]

Viable 64-bit OS? Troll much?

My Gentoo box has been working fine for the last several months [it's a new box] and my previous AMDX2 before that ran fine and my Intel 820 ran fine and ...

Oh you mean, a Redmond based OS... well TFB.

Tom

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Quaoar]

The biggest reason for the average consumer is that you move beyond the RAM ceiling of 4GB. Not that it probably matters on a laptop (yet), but I think that's the reason most people notice/care about.

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[modmans2ndcoming]

uhh.... the... Mac....books... Already have dual cores.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[richdun]

Maybe. OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was the first version of OS X to support 64-bit, and some apps use it, but the Intel switch happened too soon for many to start using it (since the first Intel processors were only 32-bit, leaving the iMac G5 and PowerMac G5 the only 64-bit capable Macs before the Mac Pro). Leopard (OS X 10.5) will definitely use more 64-bit stuff, as the new Cocoa/Carbon libraries will be in 64-bit with native 64 and 32-bit support. At a minimum, I'd expect Apple to convert a lot of the pro and iLife apps to 64-bit, as they tend to use their own technologies pretty quickly (for obvious reasons).

So for Windows, 64-bit may not be a big deal, but for OS X, there should be more support very soon.

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[MarcQuadra]

It's not 100% native 64-bit like the AMD64 is, but it's closer than the existing EM64T CPUs. From what I've read, the Core 2 is actually a bit slower when in 64-bit mode than when in 32-bit mode (but much less so than the Pentium 4-based CPUs, which were MUCH slower in 64-bit mode).

The Core 1 CPUs were basically Pentium IIIs with extra instructions and much-revamped layout and FSB. The 64-bit Pentium 4s were regular Pentium 4s with the ability to break down 64-bit instructions into chunks that the lowest-level of the CPU could work with. The Core 2 is still the venerable i686 from the good 'ole days, but they've done some rather dramatic changes (much more than from PIII -> Core 1), including execution units that can chew 64-bit instructions in the raw. The other huge advantage of Core 2 is that Intel FINALLY fixed SSE. Until now, SSE always used at least two clocks to get 128-bit work done, and usually many more. Now SSE has been fixed to be a lot more like the Altivec unit on the G4, it works like a _real_ vector coprocessor and can chew on 128-bit instructions in one clock.

Overall, my impression is that the implementation isn't as 'clean' as the AMD64, but Intel invested in all the right places, and the overall product is obviously a winner. Sometimes doing the 'wrong thing' really well is better than doing the 'right thing' three years ago and sitting on it. When AMD fixes their SIMD implementation, I'll go back to championing the Athlon; until then, the Core 2 is the best bang, for your buck or otherwise.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

But since when has the "average consumer" needed more than 4GB of RAM, let alone 1GB or 2GB's?

With an Intel Mac it's possible-- in fact, it's commonplace-- for the "average consumer" to be running Parallels and Rosetta at the same time. That's Windows XP plus OSX 10.4.7 plus an emulated PowerPC G4 processor. Suddenly 2 GB doesn't sound like all that much...

Re:What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[Overly Critical Guy]

You shouldn't be that concerned, since XCode produces Universal Binaries not only for different architectures but for 32-bit and 64-bit. That said, if you're so concerned about upgrading to Core 2 Duo, wait until next year anyway, because Intel will be releasing a new chipset in Q1 2007 codenamed Santa Rosa that will replace the Napa used today on the Core Duo. It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs. :) I say June of next year.

Re:dust + settle

[masklinn]

You'll be able to run 64bits OS/softwares on Core2 macbooks too.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[eturro]

Sure, you can get larger memory addressing, but there aren't that many machines where 32-bit's 2GB limit has come into play.

2^32 bits = 4GB, not 2GB.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[LWATCDR]

There is a big difference between 64 bit on the X86 and 64-bit on the PPC.
To start off with the X86 architecture really does suck. It is register starved and the instruction set is miserable. It is a pig but because Intel and AMD have such a huge potential market they have thrown enough time , talent, and money to make it a very fast and cheap pig.
The PPC didn't gain a whole lot from going to 64 bit. If a program didn't need to do 64 bit math or a 64 bit address space then it would run as fast of faster as a 32 program. BTW this is a good thing. It means that the PPC was broken to start with and didn't force programs to use 64 bit pointers if they didn't need to.
When AMD created the Athlon 64 it fixed one of the X86s worst problems. AMD doubled the number of registers. Even if a program doesn't do 64 bit math or doesn't need more than four gigabytes of memory that will run 30% to 60% faster when compiled for 64 bit than 32 bit.

Re:dust + settle

[masklinn]

How exactly will the new processor affect the performance of the machine again? Oh yea, that's right, except on paper, probably not at all.

While this may be paper for you, Anandech found Core 2 Duos to perform 10 to 15% better than Core Duos on average [anandtech.com] with exactly the same power draw (and therefore autonomy)

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[tomstdenis]

Bah, TurionX2.

I'm more interested in the new core. I've been dual-coring since the beginning of last year. Nothing new here.

But the new ALU and FPU of Core 2 intrigues me more as an implementor of software it's a new architecture to play with.

Tom

Re:Apple's Aperture

[ceoyoyo]

Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

What it does suck memory for is caching. Doing most or all of the processing on the video card, the majority of the time is taken loading images from the disk so Aperture caches aggressively. The SLR photos Aperture is designed to work on are big too.

I use Aperture pretty much exclusively, only opening up Photoshop when I need to do something special. I've heard Lightroom is good too though. I didn't realize they were including it with CS3.

Mac vs Windows

[falconwolf]

I'm personally sitting at a compaq nw9440, which has pretty much all the same trimmings.

I'm typing this on an HP Pavilion and when I replace it I'll replace it with a MBP. I am sick and tired of all the hassles I've had with pcs and windows. I have Norton System Works installed on it and it's supposed to give notice when something is wrong and yet it never does yet my computer frequently freezes and I have to reboot. And for a while now my mouse hasn't worked properly, the pointer constantly stops moving then it starts flashing all over the screen. Then two days ago I ran Norton's hardware diagnostics and it said my ram was bad. Well I've already had to replace ram twice so yesterday was the third tyme. After replacing the ram Diagnostic told me the ram was still bad. And this was after having to replace the motherboard once, harddisk twice, and reinstalling Windows a few tymes.

Falcon