tidy review of Santa Rosa

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2985&p=1

Let's say I feel vindicated by my purchase of my Mac Book Pro 2.16 last month.

If you are thinking about waiting for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, it looks to be as much about the LED screens as anything.

Personally, part of the reason I wanted an "EOL" MacBook Pro was that they have a lot of the kinks worked out.

LED screens are the future, but I don't really want to be a part of the Gen 1 experience.

Processors are pretty much the same, 2.2 and 2.4GHz offerings.

Draft n wireless, but I already have that.

667 v. 800MHz FSB. Meh.

Slightly better power saving features but I'm almost always plugged in.

 

thats how i felt when i ordered yesterday. i'm sure next-gen will be great. but with next-gen comes more waiting until all the little problems here and there are fixed. ..... remember the MBP core duo... eughhh

 

Yeah, it looks like Penryn or even Montevina is what we should be waiting for. For the Mac camp, you've already got 802.11n. Intel Turbo Memory looks sadly disappointing, and the added heat is always bad news for a 1" thin laptop.

 

Yeah, real power-savings might come from 45nm chips (which arrive late Q4 07), and battery life savings while nice, will always be improving. Since Apple already put in 802.11n hardware, I felt no need to wait until later this year for a MBP. Plus, I got mine refurbished and saved some cash too!

 

Every processor or platform release is pretty much like this. A lot of hype and then upon release it ends up being a fairly minor jump. There are exceptions but rarely.

 

The TurboMemory had some error in AT's test, because other tests have not shown performance degradations. They said that the BIOS in the whitebook testbed wasn't correctly configured for Robson, so I think the results are off.

 

I think one exception would be the Core Duo. This is especially true with the Macs. I'm hoping the Montevina platform will be the next big jump, especially when they shift to the quad cores.

 

The original Pentium M (Banias and Carmel) was a pretty big leap[although not for the Mac side]. I mean, coming from slightly scaled down desktop processors to a dedicated mobile CPU was a pretty big leap.

I would actually argue that it is the biggest such jump, even more so than Core Duo was.

 

I was going to wait but I might as well order today

 

Santa Rosa was never really expected to offer much of a performance increase. 4MB L2 cache mean Merom performs fine on a 667MHz FSB, in fact previous reviews have shown little performance difference between Merom and Conroe at similar clock speeds despite the big FSB difference.

When I bought my MBP I was never worried about Santa Rosa. DX10 GPUs were a bigger concern, but I'm not disappointed. DX10 GPUs have had constant delays and now the new 8600M GS turns out to only have 16 shaders like the desktop 8500GT and the 8600M GT is clocked lower than the desktop 8600GT so they are hardly revolutionary.

 

I'm more excited about LED displays than the new Santa Rosa chipsets in the Macbooks.

LED: Revolution
Santa Rosa: Evolution

 

PIII was good chip, within reason. PIV was a sucky chip, and even suckier in mobile applications, so, Pentium M was definitely a great leap. Core Duo and Core 2 Duo are the laptop chips we've all been waiting for our whole lives, so, that also qualifies as a great leap.

I'm not really complaining about Santa Rosa, obviously, over time, enough evolutionary changes will result in better product, but, it will probably be Penryn, or dual duo or quad core with mature LED screens before the next round could be called truly compelling.

I wish RAID and stuff was more commonplace. The hard drives and waiting for external drives and CD-ROM drive to spin up that are making current laptops feel like 1999.

 

I think Penryn will probably be a pretty evolutionary step, just as Merom was over Yonah. It'll still be using the same chipset, but again, the big additions to the Centrino platform will not be the processor, but rather other features like WiMax. I really expect quad core to be the next big thing.

 

I´m pretty sure this thread is all about people wanting sympati for their loss of patience!
Because they just bought yesterdays hardware, when the future´s some week away!

 

I'm pretty sure the people waiting for the future don't really have any choice since they only have $8 in checking. Also, the future is not "some week away." Apple has not even announced these machines, and they are even further from that from shipping.

lol, seriously though, questions about Santa Rosa come up daily. I bought mine last month, fully knowing that Santa Rosa is imminent. Part of the reason is that I feel than an "End of Life" product has a somewhat better chance of being more reliable since the kinks have been worked out. The fit, finish and performance of mine seem pretty much solid.

So, if one was to look at the situation with all the new knowledge about Santa Rosa, it would appear that:

1. The performance gains are fairly modest. In the 5+% range.

2. LED screens are the future, but, are the first Gen ones going to be quality and reliable? It's not known.

3. Draft n wireless? The current Core 2 Duo machines already have it.

4. Better integrated graphics? Not relevant for the MacBook Pro, probably quite a bit more relevant for the MacBook. The MacBook Pro will prolly get a new video card, but the X1600 does not exactly suck, and if you are a hardcore gamer, the X1600 is not all that, and it's successor probably won't be bleeding edge either.

I also feel that the design of Apple's laptops will be new. I think this has more to do with the fact that that the next release was really the Leopard release, and that just happened to coincide with Santa Rosa. The new cases may very well be better in some unknown respect, they also could have some issues that take a while to get ironed out.

Basically, I'm happy with my purchase. I wish I could have gotten the 256MB X1600, but the price difference was nowhere close to worth it. In a month, or two, or three, I won't have the latest model in the coffee shop, but, I will be reasonably secure in my purchase nonetheless.

Lastly, I've never been a fan of the way Apple keeps these things secret. It makes it very hard to plan purchased, especially for business owners, and it makes us have these ridiculous conversations based mostly on speculation. But, hey... it is what it is.

 

I dont think going from the current platform to Santa Rosa is going to make a world of a difference. Like Count Schemula said in another thread, going from the G5 to Intel Core Duo was a huge improvement.

I've always wanted to purchase a MBP because of its clean and simple design but its way too expensive. Plus I'm more of a Windows user and gamer so I can find something cheaper and better for a less.

Just curious does anyone use Windows and play games on their MBP?

 

I run Vista on mine. Runs perfect. Fast.

It would game, but with Boot Camp splitting the drive (I only have a 40GB windows partition), and the extra heat gaming produces, I just game on a junky PC dektop.

 

The Pentium M is actually more closely related to the PIII than the PIV. the PIV was Intel going down the wrong path. They made a step backwards so-to-speak in going the Pentium M which led to the current Core architecture.

 

Agree with the first part, Pentium-M was definately a leap.

I don't think CD or C2D can be classed as a leap, just a major evolution. Perhaps as software develops to take better advantage of the dual core architecture that will change, but at this stage I don't see a drastic difference between my C2D machines and my Pentium-M machines.

Intel's marketing all those years ago pushed us all into a processor power driven market, something even they had trouble getting away from with the lower clocked chips. But when you take away the hype, do 99% of people really notice the seconds saved doing the everday tasks (surfing, writing docs, spreadsheets, playing media)?

The Pentium-M was a huge leap because it brought performance in a useable package. No more sub-notebooks crippled by the likes of the transmeta. No more running to find a plug socket because you decided to do something a little challenging on the machine.

Performance in a reasonable and useable package. Thats what the Pentium-M brought us. I think we're now forgeting how revolutionary that was. And slipping back towards the power at all cost.

The other key change was the movement of WLAN into the mainstream. I guess some of the credit goes to the Centroino platform, but not all of it. Either way mainstream wireless networking and efficient performance contributed to one of the biggest leaps in mobile computing history.

What we're seeing now with S.R, C2D and CD is just a mediocre evolution IMO. The next big leap will be when we see the culmination of all the follwing technologies in the mainstream: WWAN, OLED displays, SSD drives, efficiency of 45nm processors, efficient yet discrete GPU's, new battery technology (fingers crossed ), etc.

That should bring smaller, more efficient and versatile notebooks.

 

I see what you are saying, but, I've had many many dual CPU computers: 604e 180MHz, G4 450MHz dual, G4 800MHz dual, G5 2GHz dual, PIII 500 dual, PIII 850MHz dual, dual Athlon 1800+, Athlon 64 Xs 3800+, Dell E1505 C2D 2GHz, MacBook Pro C2D 2.16GHz.

I've always thought that dual CPU did much to eliminate lag (ie the computer could much better keep up with my mad clicking style) and it gave me a lot more muscle when it came time to render 3d or compress video, something I do a lot of.

I doubt we would have seen dual CPUs in a laptop, so, CD and C2D are everything the Pentium M was, plus the ability to perform pretty serious multimedia work.

If you are a pretty linear user, ie open Word. Type in Word. Close Word. Open browser. Surf web, then yeah, you might not think dual or dual core is all that, but I've long since thought that if the computer was doing something and I also wanted it to get started on something else, that that is exactly the kind of thing that will make a single core computer literally seem to freeze up for a few seconds and exactly the kind of thing dual and dualcore pretty much solves, even with less than optimal software.

When I say C2D is the chip we've been waiting for all our lives, I mean, for me anyhow, that I may have bought my last desktop.

 

I do understand where your coming from, and the CD and C2D do make a difference as all processor evolutions have. I'm not a typical laptop user either, and have managed to grind most of my machines to a halt.

But if I look at it objectively I can't honestly say the CD and C2D machines have been a leap above the Pentium-M machines we've had.

Stuff like the HD, memory, OS, etc still contribute to their fair share of slow downs. And i've managed to make both my CD and now C2D machines hang.

For 3D rendering, media encoding/decoding, etc you could go for a machine with a suitably equiped GPU. And even if that wasn't the case, I think to be classed as a leap it really has to make a big difference to a significant portion of the target market. Pentium-M made a big difference to everyone that used a laptop, I don't think CD and C2D have.

On an individual level I would class the advent of WUXGA displays in something other then a desktop a leap. But for most of the market, its just an evolution.

Surely Multi-Core processors will be part of the next big leap in mobile computing. But not on their own, IMO. The processor just hasn't been the major issue in mobile computing since the Pentium-M arrived. Stuff like the HD, LCD, GPU, battery are where the next leaps are needed.

 

GPU does not do anything for rendering or encoding. That's all CPU.

A good GPU may help you manipulate large 3d models or see pre-rendered effects in real-time or close to it.

I love Pentium M. I love how it was an Intel product at a time Intel was hyping GHz above all else, so it did what AMD and Apple had already been doing. PIV always felt a little sluggish to me, no matter what the GHz.

But in my case, as a multimedia designer, I always felt like I had to have a dual CPU desktop around for the heavy lifting, and with C2D I don't feel that way anymore.

I don't miss the noise from the case fans AT ALL!, lol