Santa Rosa and Macbook

What are the advantages of the Santa Rosa except for faster speed (how much?)? Any changes to battery life, etc.?

And except for using the new SR, will the newer Macbooks have anything else different?

Finally, based on what you've seen before from apple, when Santa Rosa is released, do you think apple will lower the prices of its older macbooks?

 

Santa Rosa will perform better than current Yonah Intel processors, but be worse in terms of battery life and run hotter. It's up to the manufacturers to make changes to try and improve battery life.

 

1) Besides the faster FSB (which should give about a 5-10% increase in performance), you will get dynamic FSB scaling and single core overclocking. What this means is that if you are running a single-threaded application, one core will overclock itself while the other practically shuts off, giving you increased performance for those apps that haven't quite made the dual-core jump yet. The FSB switching means that the FSB can underclock to save on power.

2) Nobody knows if the Santa Rosa Macbooks will have anything else, but I would hope for at least for GMA X3100, Wifi draft N (I'm not sure if Apple already puts these in the Macbooks or not), and an ExpressCard slot would be nice. The GMA X3100 is at least a given.

3)Yes, I would expect the price on the refurbished Macbooks to go down. Today, the Core Duo Macbooks are on Apple's website for $800, which is a great deal from where they were when they first came out. But Apple will likely no longer sell them new when the new models are released; refurbished will be your only option.

 

Wait, why is this exactly? Why will they have worse battery life and run hotter?

I thought the Santa Rosa platform just used updated Merom CPU's anyway, so why would they have worse battery life and higher temps than those for the Yonah platform?

-Zadillo

 

Apple's been including draft N wireless for a while (although still needs to be "enabled"; it will probably be officially part of the platform with the update.

I really don't see Apple adding ExpressCard to the MacBook; ever since the PowerBook/iBook days, the expansion slot has been one of the features they've used to differentiate the pro and consumer models, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon.

-Zadillo

 

My guess would be the FSB. But early reports indicate that Santa Rosa/Merom pairing will have worse battery life than the current Napa/Merom pairing. My guess is that due to dynamic FSB though, actual battery life will be a little better (or at least the same) in the real world, but computer set on performance mode or being used heavily will experience worse battery life due to the higher FSB.

 

Honestly I'd want to see some actual benchmarks, battery life tests, CPU temp graphs, etc. from production notebooks before getting worried about this.

-Zadillo

 

I would love to as well. But I don't know of any legitimate ones out there right now. The platform is released tomorrow, so I don't think the wait will be too long.

 

Yeah, I didn't mean I thought there were already legit benchmarks and tests floating around.

I just meant that it will be nice to get some of these actual laptops out in the wild and tested, so we can really see for sure what performance benefits and pitfalls there are, just what sort of performance will be seen from the GeForce 8400M and 8600M, etc.

So much of the conversation now about the new platform and GPU's is so speculative.