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- Mar 1, 2007
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- Your Mac's Specs
- Powerbook G4 1.67ghz, Macbook Intel Core Duo 1.86ghz
Intel's next major upgrade to their Core processors is due out later this year. Amongst other improvements, "Penryn" includes:
-High Cache- 6 or 12mb
-Higher Clock Speeds- 3.33ghz confirmed for quad core
-Higher FSB speed- Xeons up to perhaps 1666mhz from 1333mhz.
-Lower power usage and therefore lower temps.
-New intel technologies not available in "Conroe" Core 2 chips, such as SSE4.
Anandtech Coverage of Penryn
From initial benchmarks, it looks like there's a significant speed increase, higher than the expected increase with clockspeed (Up to 45% in CPU intensive tasks, claim Intel).
My guess is this will be part of the Mac Pro refresh. We all thought they'd bring out new Mac Pros, but instead only gave an 8 Core 3ghz one as an option. My guess is all Mac Pros will be 8 core, with 2.66, 3.00 and 3.33ghz configurations, or something similar. Then high end imacs will have quad core mobile Penryns, probably reaching the mid 2.0ghz, whilst leaving dual core for the lower end. I would guess the same for the MacBook and MacBooks pros.
It's interesting- with PowerPC chips, which would refresh in a matter of years, there would not be substantial upgrades to Apple hardware for some time. Now they're with Intel, who bring out product refreshes every few months, Apple may have some difficulty in staying at the bleeding edge. However, i think this is a significant enough upgrade to warrant a hardware refresh, at least for the Mac Pros.
-High Cache- 6 or 12mb
-Higher Clock Speeds- 3.33ghz confirmed for quad core
-Higher FSB speed- Xeons up to perhaps 1666mhz from 1333mhz.
-Lower power usage and therefore lower temps.
-New intel technologies not available in "Conroe" Core 2 chips, such as SSE4.
Anandtech Coverage of Penryn
From initial benchmarks, it looks like there's a significant speed increase, higher than the expected increase with clockspeed (Up to 45% in CPU intensive tasks, claim Intel).
My guess is this will be part of the Mac Pro refresh. We all thought they'd bring out new Mac Pros, but instead only gave an 8 Core 3ghz one as an option. My guess is all Mac Pros will be 8 core, with 2.66, 3.00 and 3.33ghz configurations, or something similar. Then high end imacs will have quad core mobile Penryns, probably reaching the mid 2.0ghz, whilst leaving dual core for the lower end. I would guess the same for the MacBook and MacBooks pros.
It's interesting- with PowerPC chips, which would refresh in a matter of years, there would not be substantial upgrades to Apple hardware for some time. Now they're with Intel, who bring out product refreshes every few months, Apple may have some difficulty in staying at the bleeding edge. However, i think this is a significant enough upgrade to warrant a hardware refresh, at least for the Mac Pros.
