Intel’s Product Roadmap Transparency Enables More Strategic System Upgrade Decisions
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
by Charles W. Moore
One consequence of Apple’s switch to Intel processor chips for Mac systems is that it’s now a lot easier to deduce the probable timing and substance of Apple hardware upgrades and new product releases. This aspect has to have secrecy-obsessive Steve Jobs gritting his teeth, but it does facilitate more strategically-nuanced and better-informed personal system upgrade decisions for Mac-users. However, it’s still a tricky exercise in deducing when will be the optimum time to maximize value for the money and avoid buyer-remorse.
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Focusing on PBCentral’s primary preoccupation with Apple notebook systems, the hot-selling MacBook Air is equipped with special small form-factor 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Intel 65nm “Merom” processors, while the most recent MacBook and MacBook Pro revisions, released at the end of February, have moved on to Intel’s next-generation 45nm “Penryn” mobile chips, which are slightly faster than the Merom processors they displaced, and also run cooler and draw less battery power.
The standard size Penryn chip was actually released last November, so it took about three months for Apple to get Penryn-based machines out the door. As we noted here in last week’s column, Intel’s next mobile processor, “Montevina,” is slated for release in June, so we can deduce that if Apple wants to stay with the program, and keep pace with PC laptop makers who get Montevina machines out the door quickly, they could conceivably have Montevina-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros ready to roll by September, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they wait until closer to Apple’s traditional notebook update time window a bit later in the fall.
Before that, I’m confident that we will see Revision B MacBook Airs with their current Merom-family chips replaced with small form-factor Penryns, probably with clock speeds similar to the Meroms (1.6 GHz; 1.8 GHz) they’ll be replacing, and that should happen soon, or possibly as late as the World Wide Developers Conference in June.
There doesn’t seem to be any logical home in Apple’s current notebook lineup for the 1.2GHz and 1.4GHz Penryn processors Intel also has on the shelf, whose advantage is that they draw a modest 10 watts, which gets this writer musing wistfully about the days of quiet PowerBooking without the cacophonous intrusion of cooling fan racket.
At the other end of the spectrum, Intel has made it known that they will be introducing a quad-core Penryn “mobile” chip which will have a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of approximately 45 watts. For some context, the TDP of the latest Penryn-equipped MacBook Pro is 35 watts. Whether Apple will decide to build a king-of-the-hill MacBook Pro with a quad-core processor, a machine that would thrill video-editors and high-end graphics professionals, is an imponderable conundrum at this juncture. I hope that will, but we’ll have to wait and see.
It has been recently rumored that since the transition to Montevina processors will reportedly require motherboard re-engineering due to Montevina not being pin-compatible with the Penryn and Merom chips they’ll be replacing, as a cue to go with a comprehensive and arguably overdue major redesign of the MacBook Pro especially, and if the rumor mills are on target, an aluminum MacBook. If these indeed materialize, it would seem to be a fairly safe bet that the design motif will incorporate themes introduced with the MacBook Air - with a thinner (although not as radically so as the Air) wedge-shaped form factor and softer-cornered, more “organic” contours.
That sort of form factor revision of course would not be especially hospitable to those torrid 45 watt quad-core Penryns, so we’ll have to see.
Personally, I was almost decided to go with a Penryn MacBook, and I may still do so, but I’m finding that rumor of a new, aluminum MacBook with the Montevina processor beguiling, and the decision equation has been further complicated by the emergence of a nasty little graphics corruption bug in the Early 2008 MacBooks and MacBook Pros with Intel’s Penryn 45nm process Core 2 Duo processors, which according to several reports and support forum discussions threads are afflicted with a graphics corruption bug that causes onscreen anomalies and flickering and incomplete scrolling.
As I noted in The Agenda yesterday, the problem reportedly exists on both MacBooks, which use Intel’s GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset, and MacBook Pros, which have a real NVIDIA 8600M GT graphics processor unit with its own dedicated video RAM, so it’s not evidently a graphics hardware issue.
The issues also reportedly show up most frequently when working in Apple Webkit-based applications such as Safari and Mail, and when scrolling through documents using the trackpad, rather than the arrow keys. An associated issue problem is flickering, exhibits, and other distortion of animations and screen refreshes, especially in video playback of Flash or Quicktime videos in a Web browser.
According to MacFixIt, the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.5.3 update will include specific fixes aimed at squashing this bug an eliminating what is being referenced as a “graphics corruption issue,” so I’ll definitely wait to see how successful that turns out to be.
On the other hand, I’ve reached that critical stage with my current front line workhorse ‘Book - a 1.33 GHz 17” G4 PowerBook, where it still is working great - I’ve never had any problems with this computer, but its performance with OS 10.5 Leopard and the latest software is beginning to feel compromised, or it’s not compatible at all. The big old ‘Book seems to be breathing pretty hard a lot of the time these days. A case in point is when running the new Photoshop Elements 6, which I love, but many of the more complex image manipulation functions (eg: image merges), and especially the new Adobe Bridge CS feature, are glacially slow and barely usable on the old G4, and some software I really want to use, notably MacSpeech’s new Dictate voice recognition software, isn’t supported by PowerPC machines at all.
Nevertheless, I can last a few more months.... I think.
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