One Year From Today! (Penryn and beyond)

How much better are things going to get in the next year? To be precise, I'm actually interested in what will be available next July... but here goes:

I know Penryn(with the 45nm form factor!) should be available within the year--which is a big deal, because a smaller cpu should generate less heat and eat less power, no? And it also will include support for 1333MHz FSB & DDR3--this means more performance, less power, and less heat, right? Although, are laptops going to see the same 1333MHz speed or is it going to be a lame upgrade like Santa Rosa and 800MHz (I'm teasing... but notebooks better not get stuck with 800MHz DDR2 the same time desktops are enjoying quad-core Penryn beasts and 64GB DDR3 when we can only fit dual-cores and a max of 2 ram sticks in notebooks anyway ) Either way, 45nm form factor alone means a lot for extra performance--and if 1333MHz&DDR3 means more performance too(for laptops), awesome! Can I expect Penryn will be available by next July? And also, will DDR3 ship with Penryn right away--or will it lag behind Penryn?

What else is coming out soon? Can we expect new gpus from nVidia and ATI beyond the 8M and R600 series? I wouldn't expect any new releases to dramatically improve on the 8M/R600 cards, but is there anything big in gpus to look forward to in the next one year?

HDDVD/Blu-ray drives are not exactly standard in laptops, yet; if you were needing a blu-ray drive today, your selection of laptops would be very small... But in a year, there will be a lot more models available with it, I'm sure. I really haven't been very enthused about blu-ray/HDDVD, but then I'm still adding to my VHS collection

Don't worry, I'm not pumping all you for information on my stock picks I'm just trying to decide whether I need to wait 1 year before buying a laptop, or if I should grab the hottest 14" santa rosa & dx10 notebook I can get:

I would love to get the hottest notebook now, but the notebook I buy is what I'm going to use for 4 years(college)...but it occured to me I could grab a cheap sub-$1000 laptop for my freshman year, and then grab the hottest notebook next summer...

I hear the rule is to wait as long as you can before you buy, and then never look back... But I'm only willing to force myself through a freshman year with a mediocre laptop if I have a lot of extra performance to look forward to a year from now.

I guess this is the question: How much extra performance can I expect the laptops of next year to give me above and beyond the IFT00 specs I listed above? The IFT00 certainly has 4 years of longevity in it--and I'm probably buying that unless next year's penryn+ notebooks are that much more alluring. I do game though, so how many years do you expect the 8600GT to last, although I'm really skeptical that next years gpus could be much better so I probably wouldn't hold off getting a laptop because of the gpu's longevity?

Anyway, I've discussed the Penryn processor and DDR3 ram, and blu-ray too.. what else is going on in the next year?

And if you have any advice for my notebook plans, share And yeah--the best idea would be to buy the hottest notebook this year, and then the hottest notebook again next year, huh? And maybe a year after that I can grab Hahaha, that's probably what I need to do because I won't be happy with a Compaq POS100 for one year, but I'm very excited about Penryn, too.

 

Right now, DDR3 is severely outgunned by DDR2. Monteneva might boost up mobile FSB speeds, but it will still be behind desktop tech. Also, Penyrn is expected to be a Santa Rosa refresh, so enjoy your lame 800MHz .

In other words, there is no better time to buy than right now

 

The mobile market will most surely have changed in one year. Penryn is planned for Q4, and whilst it isn't quad core, its something where we should see a nice performance increase. A mobile quad core should come with Intel's Gilo processor, but details are limited on that. Its supposed to be built on a 65 nm processor, and is planned for release around the same time as Penryn.

On the graphics card front, both nVidia and ATI do have new architectures planned. ATI has R700 planned, and thats for release on the desktop market for 2008, but it likely it will be delayed, and we won't see a mobile card until much later. nVidia's next generation is G90, and it seems like it may be a die shrink of G80, although its not clear yet. But, in general, one year in the desktop or mobile market is alot of time, and develop in such markets is very fast. Its pretty likely that what is present in one year will be more than whats expected.

 

Besides the die shrink, Nvidia is also upping the memory up to GDDR4 to support clocks of ~700 core, 2200 memory.

pgatz, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Every 6 months, something new comes out that will make your old laptop obsolete. If you keep waiting, you'll either (A) not ever buy anything because you're always waiting the extra 6 months for that great new thing, or (B) you'll end up spending too much because you want to stay on top of every single major release, ever. If you need a laptop for college, just get one off today's technology that will last you for 4 years.