This is a thread dedicated to the 'eternally waiting for the next hardware update'-bunch...
January 2008 might be good bet for an update for the MacBook Pro. Many believe it because this date matches with the release of the Intel Penryn microprocessors. The question is -> is it really worth the wait?
To find that out we could try to gather all the facts we know about 'Penryn' and see what the improvements would most likely be. So far there are quite a few neat things being murmured around like less power consumption for example. But how this 'less power consumption' really works out is still not clear. An interesing fact about this would be that the 'Penryns' have a function called 'Deep Power Down' but doesn't that actually sound a lot more like 'longer sleep times' then longer battery times in general?
Anyways, here is what I know about Intel's upcoming 'Penryn' microprocessor:
- 45 nanometer architecture, prolly said a shrink
- greater L2-Cache around ~6 MiB's
- in January same Front Side Bus Speeds like current 'Merom's' @ 800MHz
- January models will fit on the 'P' Socket
- 35 Watt will be required for the cooling system to dissipate (equal to current Merom)
- multiplier ranging from ~10x to ~13x (again equal to Merom)
- Enhanced Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology, might be a slight improvement or merely a way to do it with quad-core CPU's?
- SSE4 instruction set - the only thing I know so far is:
Yea, well let's gather some facts and see what comes out in the end!
January 2008 might be good bet for an update for the MacBook Pro. Many believe it because this date matches with the release of the Intel Penryn microprocessors. The question is -> is it really worth the wait?
To find that out we could try to gather all the facts we know about 'Penryn' and see what the improvements would most likely be. So far there are quite a few neat things being murmured around like less power consumption for example. But how this 'less power consumption' really works out is still not clear. An interesing fact about this would be that the 'Penryns' have a function called 'Deep Power Down' but doesn't that actually sound a lot more like 'longer sleep times' then longer battery times in general?
Anyways, here is what I know about Intel's upcoming 'Penryn' microprocessor:
- 45 nanometer architecture, prolly said a shrink
- greater L2-Cache around ~6 MiB's
- in January same Front Side Bus Speeds like current 'Merom's' @ 800MHz
- January models will fit on the 'P' Socket
- 35 Watt will be required for the cooling system to dissipate (equal to current Merom)
- multiplier ranging from ~10x to ~13x (again equal to Merom)
- Enhanced Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology, might be a slight improvement or merely a way to do it with quad-core CPU's?
- SSE4 instruction set - the only thing I know so far is:
Instruction: MPSADBW
Compute eight offset sums of absolute differences (i.e. |x0-y0|+|x1-y1|+|x2-y2|+|x3-y3|, |x0-y1|+|x1-y2|+|x2-y3|+|x3-y4|, ...); this operation is extremely important for modern HDTV codecs, and (see http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1246.htm) allows an 8x8 block difference to be computed in less than seven cycles. One bit of a three-bit immediate operand indicates whether y0 .. y11 or y4 .. y15 should be used from the destination operand, the other two whether x0..x3, x4..x7, x8..x11 or x12..x15 should be used from the source.
Yea, well let's gather some facts and see what comes out in the end!