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Merom in MacBook and MacBook Pros in September?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Fri Aug 11, 2006 01:27 PM
from the time-to-upgrade-already dept.
Portables (Apple) Businesses Hardware Apple
Kevin C. Tofel writes "If you want to see where the computer industry is going, you often have to watch the computer component manufacturers, and that's just what DigiTimes did. AsusTek and Quanta both produce Apple notebooks and sources appear to have just revealed that September is the month for 64-bit Merom CPUs in the MacBook and MacBook Pro line."
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  • What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abscissa (136568) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:30PM (#15890542)
    I must be particularly dense. I have had an AMD 64 bit desktop computer for 2 years now and I have yet to take advantage of the 64 bit features. 64-bit Windows wants fancy new drivers (none of which exist, of course) and even MS software (E.g. producer) doesn't work on it.

    So I got a Macbook pro in ... June? Will I miss out big time on 64 bit computing?
    • No, apple didn't do much with PowerMac G5 systems either. Users got 64 bit memory addressing. That's about it. Unless adobe requires it for some reason when they finally release photoshop and their other products native, I wouldn't worry too much. It willl be a few years before its an issue.
    • The biggest reason for the average consumer is that you move beyond the RAM ceiling of 4GB. Not that it probably matters on a laptop (yet), but I think that's the reason most people notice/care about.
      • But since when has the "average consumer" needed more than 4GB of RAM, let alone 1GB or 2GB's?
        • Right, because nobody's ever been bitten in the ass by that kind of thinking before.
            • A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years. You can even get the backlight replaced for say $300 in year 4 and give it another 2-3 years of use. Batteries are a sore spot and usually have to be replaced after the first few years as well.

              (Typing this on a 4.5 year old Tecra 9100 w/ 1GB of RAM.)

        • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Funny)

          by PayPaI (733999) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:02PM (#15890761) Journal
          When Vista comes out?

        • But since when has the "average consumer" needed more than 4GB of RAM, let alone 1GB or 2GB's?

          1GB is pretty standard on systems these days. High end systems reguarly have 2GB. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that systems three years from now will be bumping up against the 3-4GB barrier. Especially as HD everything takes ahold, thus requiring insane amounts of memory to handle the latest multimedia files.

          For examples of this, look no further than the new generation of game consoles. Developers are alre

        • The average consumer currently needs 512MB RAM. NEEDS. 256MB is no longer enough. It takes longer to boot than it does to write a letter. The power user needs 1GB minimum. 4GB will seem stifling very soon. Here's a true story for you: I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB RAM on my Athlon XP 2500+ system with a two-drive RAID0 (80GB, 7200RPM, x2) and cut my boot time literally in half.
              • Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

                What it does suck memory for is caching. Doing most or all of the processing on the video card, the majority of the time is taken loading images from the disk so Aperture caches aggressively. The SLR photo

              • I'm personally sitting at a compaq nw9440, which has pretty much all the same trimmings.

                I'm typing this on an HP Pavilion and when I replace it I'll replace it with a MBP. I am sick and tired of all the hassles I've had with pcs and windows. I have Norton System Works installed on it and it's supposed to give notice when something is wrong and yet it never does yet my computer frequently freezes and I have to reboot. And for a while now my mouse hasn't worked properly, the pointer constantly stops mov

        • Uh i'd say that 1Gb of RAM is pretty much a baseline requirement nowadays if you're either running XP SP2 or OSX Tiger, with 2Gb the "sweet spot".

    • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Informative)

      by richdun (672214) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:50PM (#15890690)
      Maybe. OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was the first version of OS X to support 64-bit, and some apps use it, but the Intel switch happened too soon for many to start using it (since the first Intel processors were only 32-bit, leaving the iMac G5 and PowerMac G5 the only 64-bit capable Macs before the Mac Pro). Leopard (OS X 10.5) will definitely use more 64-bit stuff, as the new Cocoa/Carbon libraries will be in 64-bit with native 64 and 32-bit support. At a minimum, I'd expect Apple to convert a lot of the pro and iLife apps to 64-bit, as they tend to use their own technologies pretty quickly (for obvious reasons).

      So for Windows, 64-bit may not be a big deal, but for OS X, there should be more support very soon.

    • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by necro81 (917438) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:53PM (#15890702) Journal
      You make a valid point that 64-bit computing isn't very useful if the software can't take advantage of it. Sure, you can get larger memory addressing, but there aren't that many machines where 32-bit's 2GB limit has come into play.

      The difference here is that Apple has been producing 64-bit software for a while. After all, the G5 processor is 64-bit, and that's been in Apple's line since summer '03. Leopard, when it comes out next year, will supposedly do a particularly good job of allowing 32- and 64-bit applications to coexist and execute at the best levels possible. I recall hearing that Apple has been reworking it's software suites to take better advantage fo 64-bit computing (rather than just recompiling to work as 32-bit applications on a 64-bit machine). So, whereas your AMD machine has barely begun to take advantage of 64-bit capabilities, the Merom-based Apple's will do so from day one.

      I don't think you'll 'miss out,' because the improvement may not be apparent for some time.

      • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Informative)

        by eturro (804858) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:56PM (#15891115)
        Sure, you can get larger memory addressing, but there aren't that many machines where 32-bit's 2GB limit has come into play.
        2^32 bits = 4GB, not 2GB.

        • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by barole (35839) on Friday August 11 2006, @03:57PM (#15891537)
          But under standard 32-bit XP, each process gets only a 2GB address space. That is much more of a limitation than 4GB total RAM for many applications, especially since graphics drivers, etc may eat into that 2GB.

          Also, if you use an app that needs large contiguous chunks of memory, you may run into a situation where you have say 600MB of address space left, but no one chunk is larger than 200MB. Then if your app needs a 250MB chunk of memory, it will fail even though there is 600MB left.

          Going to a 64-bit address space solves these issues.

        • Many application's on Windows use differing code paths depending on the processor they are running on. In general it's all x86 so the difference comes in with using instruction sets such as MMX, SSE, SSE2 etc. So if you are doing encoding and have a Pentium 4 it will use optimized code and you get better FPU performance. This is the same as a program being optimized for using a G4 vs a G3 on a Mac.
          The Universal Binary is not used for this. It is used to compile an application with seperate code bases for to

    • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drix (4602) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:24PM (#15890893) Homepage
      It's very useful for scientific research. I constantly run into the 4gb limitation when I run Stata [stata.com], since it needs a contiguous chunk of memory, and the largest one of those you're going to find is about 1.5gb. Also if you're doing photo or video editing, obviously, the more RAM the better period.

      For the average user I think it's pretty worthless right now. RAM requirements will creep ever northward, as do all hardware requirements, but by the time you find yourself needing (or even owning) 4gb of RAM this 64-bit thing will be old-hat.

    • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Overly Critical Guy (663429) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:29PM (#15890925)
      OS X Leopard will be fully 64-bit, and unlike Windows Vista, will seamlessly support 32-bit device drivers and applications, so going full 64-bit will be as simple as buying a 64-bit Mac.

      That said, your implication is correct that 64-bit really isn't as big a deal as it was hyped to be by the likes of AMD (who teamed with CryTek to put out that awful 64-bit version of Far Cry with the higher-resolution textures to trick gamers into thinking having a 64-bit address space had something to do with that and not their GPU). XCode 2.4 supports four-architecture Universal Binaries anyway, so you'll have 32-bit/64-bit PPC/Intel applications. You shouldn't worry about missing out on anything

      Besides, getting a Core 2 Duo system now would be silly when you can wait until first quarter of 2007 when Intel's Santa Rosa chipset comes out, replacing the Napa chipset used by the Core Duo. It'll have an 800Mhz bus speed upgrade that will really let the Core 2 take advantage of its power as well as ship with a new WLAN 802.11n chipset.

      I have an Intel iMac and an Intel MacBook, but I'm quite happy and waiting for next year's Macs before even thinking of heading to eBay. There's always something better around the corner, especially with Apple.

    • Re:What is the deal with 64 bit? (Score:5, Informative)

      by LWATCDR (28044) on Friday August 11 2006, @03:04PM (#15891172) Homepage Journal
      There is a big difference between 64 bit on the X86 and 64-bit on the PPC.
      To start off with the X86 architecture really does suck. It is register starved and the instruction set is miserable. It is a pig but because Intel and AMD have such a huge potential market they have thrown enough time , talent, and money to make it a very fast and cheap pig.
      The PPC didn't gain a whole lot from going to 64 bit. If a program didn't need to do 64 bit math or a 64 bit address space then it would run as fast of faster as a 32 program. BTW this is a good thing. It means that the PPC was broken to start with and didn't force programs to use 64 bit pointers if they didn't need to.
      When AMD created the Athlon 64 it fixed one of the X86s worst problems. AMD doubled the number of registers. Even if a program doesn't do 64 bit math or doesn't need more than four gigabytes of memory that will run 30% to 60% faster when compiled for 64 bit than 32 bit.
      • SGI did something similar when they brought out 64-bit MIPS chips and a 64-bit version of IRIX. They also doubled the number of registers. However, they permitted enabling those registers in 32-bit mode as well. Thus you could compile to old-32 ABI, or new-32 ABI (with 2x as many registers) or 64-bit ABI. So, most apps would be compiled for the new-32 bit ABI since few needed 64-bits but most could benefit from more registers. It's too bad AMD didn't do the same thing.
        • "Some apps slow down due to the larger memory footprint."

          And the need to process bigger pointers. These often need to be moved to and from memory, which means potential latency problems; while caches obviously help here, 64-bit data takes up twice as much space, meaning that the effective capacity of the cache is reduced, and therefore its potential hit-rate.

          In real terms therefore, as you say, what benefits one sees depends on the applications that are being used. I've seen figures in the +/- 15% range for

  • Digitimes is not a good predictor. (Score:5, Informative)

    by hlimethe3rd (879459) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:35PM (#15890577)
    Digitimes is not a good site for this kind of thing. Historically, they've been very poor with these kinds of predictions. I'm not going to find any examples right now, but searching the archives of macrumors.com or some similar site will turn out many.

  • 64 or 32 bit ?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Harmonious Botch (921977) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:38PM (#15890592) Homepage Journal
    All this talk about 64 bits...on wires, for god's sake!! In my day we had to push the eletrons around by hand.
    And it was uphill... both ways.
    And when it snowed, the gates froze up and we had to execute the same instruction over and over until spring thaw.
    64 bits?? You youngsters have it easy!!!

  • News? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by necro81 (917438) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:40PM (#15890600) Journal
    The features of the Merom processors (multicore, 64-bit, aimed at mobile processing), and Apple made the Intel switch largely due to Intel's processor roadmap and what was coming down the pipeline. Based on Apple's past desire to gobble up the latest processors as soon as they are available, I'd say it was a foregone conclusion that the Merom would show up in the MacBooks as soon as they came off the fab line. So I ask: is this news?

  • yay! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spykemail (983593) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:40PM (#15890608) Homepage
    Assuming Apple takes this opportunity to eliminate hardware defects I'm officially declaring Spring 2007 "but a new labtop" season. With Merom, Leopard, Bootcamp, and no more serious hardware problems the MacBooks will be posed to slurp up more market share in the US, if not everywhere.

    • Re:yay! (Score:5, Funny)

      by IDontAgreeWithYou (829067) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:21PM (#15890870)
      ...I'm officially declaring Spring 2007 "but a new labtop" season.

      Not to be a grammar nazi or a spelling nazi or both, but only on /. could a statement such as this be "interesting"

  • Manufactured Demand (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wwiiol_toofless (991717) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:43PM (#15890624)
    Core 2, 4x4, SLI, physics cards...

    64 bit processing, let alone dual-core tech has yet to be fully applied in the mainstream. People salivate and argue over the latest and greatest and when to buy what to stay "future-proof" in terms of hardware.

    I'm still waiting for a viable 64-bit OS fer cryin' out loud, and don't get me started on SLI...

    I am going to purchase a single-core AMD 64 San Diego core for $139 bucks and I'm going to be just fine for the next 2 years minimum. I keep my gaming system in tip-top shape, so I don't need an extra CPU core to process all the spyware running in the background.
    • Viable 64-bit OS? Troll much?

      My Gentoo box has been working fine for the last several months [it's a new box] and my previous AMDX2 before that ran fine and my Intel 820 ran fine and ...

      Oh you mean, a Redmond based OS... well TFB.

      Tom

  • TRFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2006, @01:43PM (#15890634)
    The Real Fabulous Article [digitimes.com], instead of the submitters lame-ass ad page.

  • iMac (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Balthisar (649688) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:49PM (#15890685) Homepage
    I'd like to see this in an iMac. Yeah, I know -- "consumer model." How about a more expensive iMac Pro?

    I've had a 17" Intel iMac for just over a month now -- it was bought to replace my homemade Windows PC. I also have plans to replace my "main" QuickSilver with a 20" iMac as soon as I have cash-in-hand, but I may wait things out. I'm usually against the all-in-one solutions, but this iMac really has impressed the hell out of me with its elegance and simplicity. That's no laughing matter, either. My Quicksilver is a bundle of wires -- keyboard, mouse, USB hub, the round thing that gives me audio-in-over-USB (pre-"digital audio" PowerMac), monitor cable, power to the Mac, power to the monitor, speaker wires, power to the speakers. Sheesh. I do like the expandability of my PowerMac, but all I ever really install are hard drives. I don't even do that anymore, because I've set up a homemade Myth box dual purposed as a NAT with 600GB of RAID1 storage so I can work on any computer in the house.

    So, yeah, I do want a Pro machine's power, and am willing to pay for a Pro machine's power, but I really want the all-in-one-ness of the flat panel iMac.

    • Re:iMac (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phalse phace (454635) on Friday August 11 2006, @01:59PM (#15890746)
      It wouldn't be a big surprise to see the Merom in the iMacs since the Mac Pros have Dual-Dual Core Xeon processors in them. If Apple puts a Merom in a iMac, there'd still be a significant difference between it and the Mac Pro.

    • Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MarcQuadra (129430) * on Friday August 11 2006, @02:10PM (#15890804) Journal
      It's not 100% native 64-bit like the AMD64 is, but it's closer than the existing EM64T CPUs. From what I've read, the Core 2 is actually a bit slower when in 64-bit mode than when in 32-bit mode (but much less so than the Pentium 4-based CPUs, which were MUCH slower in 64-bit mode).

      The Core 1 CPUs were basically Pentium IIIs with extra instructions and much-revamped layout and FSB. The 64-bit Pentium 4s were regular Pentium 4s with the ability to break down 64-bit instructions into chunks that the lowest-level of the CPU could work with. The Core 2 is still the venerable i686 from the good 'ole days, but they've done some rather dramatic changes (much more than from PIII -> Core 1), including execution units that can chew 64-bit instructions in the raw. The other huge advantage of Core 2 is that Intel FINALLY fixed SSE. Until now, SSE always used at least two clocks to get 128-bit work done, and usually many more. Now SSE has been fixed to be a lot more like the Altivec unit on the G4, it works like a _real_ vector coprocessor and can chew on 128-bit instructions in one clock.

      Overall, my impression is that the implementation isn't as 'clean' as the AMD64, but Intel invested in all the right places, and the overall product is obviously a winner. Sometimes doing the 'wrong thing' really well is better than doing the 'right thing' three years ago and sitting on it. When AMD fixes their SIMD implementation, I'll go back to championing the Athlon; until then, the Core 2 is the best bang, for your buck or otherwise.
    • Yea, I'm really pissed that I bought my Core 1 MacBook. As soon as the Core 2 ones come out, I'll have to live with the fact that the new ones... uh... encode video faster. How exactly will the new processor affect the performance of the machine again? Oh yea, that's right, except on paper, probably not at all.

    • Re:dust + settle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Overly Critical Guy (663429) on Friday August 11 2006, @02:39PM (#15890990)
      Core Duo is a great chip. If you're kicking yourself over getting an Intel Mac, don't. This year's Core 2 Duo Macs would be made obsolete next year anyway, when Intel's Santa Rosa platform is released. See here [intel.com]. The summary is that Santa Rosa has a faster FSB, DirectX 10-level graphics, 802.11n, and more, and is designed for the Core 2. The Core 2s being released this year are just an "initial version" put out there to meet the holiday buying cycle, which is why they're socket-compatible with the Core 1. The real Core 2 platform is coming next year.

      Quote from the press release:

      The next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa and detailed for the first time in Maloney's keynote, is designed to give users better overall performance and graphics, improved wireless connectivity and improved security and manageability. Santa Rosa is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset, codenamed Crestline, an IEEE* 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, codenamed Kedron, as well as Intel-optimized advanced management and security solutions. The platform will also include Intel's NAND flash-based platform accelerator, codenamed Robson, which enables much more rapid boot-up time and power savings. Santa Rosa, available in the first half of 2007, will use Intel's next-generation dual-core mobile microprocessor based on Intel's Core(TM) microarchitecture, codenamed Merom, Intel's new foundation for delivering even greater energy-efficient performance. An initial version of Merom will also be available for the current Intel Centrino Duo platform to align with the 2006 holiday buying cycle and will be socket or pin-compatible with the current version of Intel® Core(TM) Duo processors.

      • Re:dust + settle (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2006, @03:14PM (#15891238)
        Core Duo is a great chip. If you're kicking yourself over getting an Intel Mac, don't. This year's Core 2 Duo Macs would be made obsolete next year anyway,
        This is such complete bullshit. At least when I was buying a PowerPC based Mac I could know that there would be 4-5 years between PowerPC generations, but now with this Intel crap my computer is obsolete the minute it rolls off the assembly line. Bring back the PowerPC!!!

      • Re:dust + settle (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GWBasic (900357) <slashdot.andrewrondeau@com> on Friday August 11 2006, @04:27PM (#15891733) Homepage
        If you keep waiting, you'll never buy anything!
    • You shouldn't be that concerned, since XCode produces Universal Binaries not only for different architectures but for 32-bit and 64-bit. That said, if you're so concerned about upgrading to Core 2 Duo, wait until next year anyway, because Intel will be releasing a new chipset in Q1 2007 codenamed Santa Rosa that will replace the Napa used today on the Core Duo. It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs. :) I say June of next year.

    • Imagine intel macs being 64 bit from the start.

      That would either mean that they'd be running Tiger, in which case you'd have the same limitations as on the G5 machines (no GUI in 64-bit code, so you'd have to split the app between a 32-bit front end and a 64-bit back end), or Leopard, in which case "the start" would have been Spring 2007.

      As it is, I'm sure they're stuck running in 32 bit mode for 'compatibility' reasons.

      If you're "sure", presumably you just got your Mac Pro and tried building a 64-bit ap

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