intel roadmap

I bought my MBP 2.16 when I did because I have owned a lot of computers over the years, and near the end of model run usually means that most of the kinks have been worked out and nothing I read led me to believe that Santa Rosa was going to be anything other than an incremental improvement (bus speeds to 800MHz, slight CPU increase) and I did not want the first LED screens. The new video cards are quite good, but the X1600 is enough for what I do with it.

So far, that flimsy theory seems to have held up. My MBP as been rock solid and runs cool. I find the LCD screen to be fine with none of the real uneven lighting and graininess that people complained about.

Another thing is, I don't buy Apple care for $350. Instead I use the 1 year warranty. If all goes well, I gamble that I can get another 6 months or so and then sell the laptop off. So far that theory has held up, I have not been burned on this.

Executive Summary: I will be ready for the first update to the MBP LED notebooks! lol, let the speculation begin!

What can we expect from the next upgrade? Obviously there are no easy upgrades in the Core 2 Duo. The Santa Rosa upgrade was not so much of a speed bump, as it was a move to get the CPU in synch with the bus speed.

2.16/2.33 on 667MHz
2.2/2.4 on 800Mhz

Pure clock speed is not the answer, as demonstrated by the Pentium 4 experience. Is the Core 2 Duo pretty much tapped?

http://www.intel.com/products/roadmap/laptop.htm

It's a great chip btw, so, I'm not railing against it in anyway, just wondering what could be coming up.

 

i think that although they are going to hang onto the core 2 duo moniker for a while (thank God there is no core 3 duo / core 3 quado, they need to hire a dedicated processor namer imo) the merom chips are basically peaked.

nothing new is going to happen until they bring the manufacturing process down a notch.

 

There's always penryn and nehalem and westmere!

Maybe someone will depart from the traditional setup and come up with something revolutionary?

 

Penryn is going to be the next big revision to the Core2Duo. Along with it should come actual utilization of 800MHz bus speeds, lower power requirements, and lower heat output. I believe the overall speed improvement is around 30-40% over the current mobile Core2Duos (Merom, I think they are called). Apparently the super improvements will be with code requiring division, where speed improvements will be closer to 50%. Technically, Penryn should work on existing 2.2 and 2.4 architecture (Santa Rosa), although considering it is integrated into the logic board, that is probably out of the question.

 

what do you mean actual utilization of 800mhz bus speeds??

 

I think he means that the ram should run at 800mhz. Right now only the FSB works with 800mhz and the Ram with 667mhz.

 

Yep, that is what I meant. Although I'm not sure 800MHz ram will ever show up in notebooks. If it did, we'd probably see more of an improvement, but I don't know how it would impact power requirements. Heck, they may just jump to DDR3 ram, although I don't see that becoming mainstream until late next year.

 

Below is a memory kit upgrade I am looking at for my notebook. The 667MHz memory kit is $200 cheaper. Will the 800MHz memory kit improve the preformance enough to justify the $200 extra?



Module Size: 4GB kit (2GBx2)
Package: 200-pin SODIMM
Feature: DDR2 PC2-6400
Specs: DDR2 PC2-6400 • CL=5 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR2-800 • 1.8V • 256Meg x 64

 

I believe this question has been addressed and answered in multiple threads, including this one:

In other words, NO. DDR2-800 is not supported by the MacBook, MBP, or Santa Rosa platform (Intel 965 Chipset) in general. Although some may speculate and argue that an update could enable 800Mhz DDR2 RAM support in the future; Nobody knows for sure.

 

For me, Intel's roadmap isn't that important...I care more about the features that apple puts into their notebooks (i.e. LED screens, ultraportable form factor, etc).

 

Personally, I'll just wait for Leopard and the updates at that time. I'm hoping for a new Macbook or a smaller Macbook Pro.

 

That's true. I bet quite a few people would be willing to buy a Macbook Half-Pro at 14" over the MB and MBP, even if its specs came somewhere inbetween the two.

 

you don't necessarily need 800 mhz ram to fully utilize the 800mhz fsb. ram bandwidth and fsb bandwidth are two different things. more of both is good, but since the cpu talks to more things than just the ram, it's a good thing that the fsb operates faster than the ram.

having said that, you are quite correct in that benchmarks are showing pretty marginal performance improvements for santa rosa, indicating that the fsb on the older 945 boards wasn't really all that much of a bottleneck. as expected though, bandwidth intensive things like media encoding are the benchmarks that seems to be getting the most gains.