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How soon before we see Conroe in the iMac?

iMacs will get Merom, not Conroe. iMacs are basically a MacBook with a detached keyboard and mousing system.

Duh MDN, do we really want Microsoft software to be better?

What would happen to Apple if Vista was a good, safe, secure and reliable operating system? Mac users would be forced to switch if they wanted a job or to run any software.

Even Steve Jobs doesn't see much room for improvement in the Mac or Mac OS X, they are turning into PC's right before our eyes. Even the iPod now doesn't even have Firewire anymore.

Conroe may be too hot for the iMac. We may have Merom instead.

"iMacs are basically a MacBook with a detached keyboard and mousing system."

I think you mean MacBook Pro

I wonder where the "Apple-Made-a-mistake-picking-Intel" crowd are.

How long before we see a new iMac? Forget which chip it ends up getting, will there be a redesign to really take advantage of all this new power?

Intel is undercutting AMD, pricing their chips purposely to destroy the compeition.

IBM is gone from the desktop, AMD is next. Then all we will have left is Intel.

Of course then watch the innovation increase at a rapid pace when there is no competition.

By the way most PC's don't need all that performance, most are used as dumb terminals anyway. Word and Excel, perhaps a database.

3D games are all going over to more powerful consoles.

Sure some acedemics and research may buy the new powerful processors, but IBM is already in that space with the Cell processor.

Cell = 1 general purpose PPC processor surrounded by 8 more dedicated processors. The more "Cells" added, the more powerful the whole computer becomes.

It makes these Intel processors look weak.

I'm tired of ads in RSS please stop putting ads in the RSS... I'll see your ads when I click to see what you've posted I may even click on an ad or two on your main site, but please stop putting ads in the RSS reader... whats the point of RSS of you have to look through ads to see what you want to read ... I understand ads and why you need them but give me a break, you'll make your money already

Off-topic:

MDN - please DO NOT persist with your new practice of inserting ads into the site's RSS feeds. This is simply taking things too far. RSS feeds should offer users a clean, easy to navigate way of viewing the stories that interest them, free from the clutter of the "main" page. You've got every kind of advertising imaginable already (which I've so far tolerated), but this is just taking the p*ss. Please stop this practice or you'll lose me and I'm sure quite a few other readers.

For Pete's Sake:

do some research:
the Cell looks incredible on paper, untill you look into the details: it's a one-trick-pony that cannot be used in a "normal" computer.

Apple chose well but the same could be said if they chose AMD. This is what is best about being in the mainstream CPU market. AMD and intel are continually leapfrogging each other.

Right now (core for core) IBM still has a lead with the PPC - but because of the lack of competition they will not be pushed as hard to improve. I am glad they moved to intel, but I would have prefered the mainstream had moved to the PPC - t is simply better.

for Pete's sake

I hope that you are kidding when you wrote:

"Of course then watch the innovation increase at a rapid pace when there is no competition".

This is the opposite of what happens when there is no competition, why would you continue to ?

Sorry but I need this kind of power in my home computer.
Why?

Ever reencode video from one format to another?
Use iDVD and author 2 hours of video?

Do this on a regular basis and that nice fast G5 is tied up doing video stuff all the time.

I want to handle video quickly and not have to wait hours for it to finish.

RSS mainly exists to avoid adverts. If you, and others, persist in doing that kind of shit, then there will be RSS v2.0 and a whole new ream of alphabet soup which summarises to "STOP PUTTING ADVERTS IN, DICKHEADS".

R,
Don't complain about MDN's ads. Complain that Safari's RSS is plain stupid. Firefox's is so much better. Why should I have to open a page to read the news from a site? Isn't RSS supposed to give me the ability to not have to do this? In Firefox, only the headline is displayed and its displayed as a bookmark. This way, I can scan all the headlines for MDN by simply clicking on my MDN RSS folder rather than having to open a page up for MDN.

Adapt Safari. Firefox definitely has you beat on this one.

If you read some of the comments to the original article, you will see that the majority are calling BS on Intel. There are all kinds of links to testing that indicates Intel is blowing smoke in regards to performance of these new chips. I didn't read or analyze them all, but there are sure a lot of people doubting Intel's data.

RE: no brain-cells


> the Cell looks incredible on paper,
> untill you look into the details: it's a one-
> trick-pony that cannot be used in a "normal"
> computer.

Your right, but nevertheless, the possibilities of the Cell for applications beyond gaming looks intriguing:

Researchers Analyze HPC Potential of Cell Processor

Is there any way to go back in time and laugh at all the switch whining?

"Wouldn't it be nice to see such paranoia on the part of Microsoft in regard to their flag-crate Windows?"

That will never happen for two reasons. Gates and Balmer. They can never beleive that any portion of their empire is in any danger from anyone. How quickly they forget that at one time Novel was about 80% of networks and Ms was about 20%.

The Cell looks incredible on paper, untill you look into the details: it's a one-trick-pony that cannot be used in a "normal" computer.

Right it's only ONE general purpose CPU as compared to 2 in a Core Duo or 4 in a Quad.

But one can also place 4 Cells in a box like a Mac Pro and get all the same general purpose processors like a Quad, in addtion to 32 dedicated processors to render video with.

It would be awesome, no 3D video card needed.

The Cell technology is scaleable, each Cell added increases the performance as they all work with each other.

"If you read some of the comments to the original article, you will see that the majority are calling BS on Intel. There are all kinds of links to testing that indicates Intel is blowing smoke in regards to performance of these new chips. I didn't read or analyze them all, but there are sure a lot of people doubting Intel's data."

If you read the article. you notice that it also refers to "independent benchmark results." This means that Intel had no more to do with the results than AMD did.

Please note that it is the independent geek shops, not the fanboys of any vendor, that are verifying the superiority of Intel's new chips over AMD's best. It is true that Intel had rested on its laurels for many years and allowed AMD to eat into its market.

And Intel has a past history of failure in making new architectural advances as opposed to purely semiconductor processing advances. Remember, you old guys, the IAPX-432, Intel's p-code instruction set microprocessor that was going to take the world into the new age of 32 bit computing? It was a total disaster. The first Intel 386 was also a disaster, but Intel was able to fix it. Then came the Itanium, for which few could generate decent application code. And the Pentium 4 was and is a disaster, even if Intel sold a lot of them. So there is room for skepticism.

But every test of the new chips -- using the Core 2 architecture -- show that it is a winner. Apple is riding the right horse.

BTW, I have not decided yet on whether or not the Cell Processor has potential. The scientific guys claim that, with one small change, it will be eight times faster at one eighth the power per core as the competition. But now I read that Sony has run into a disastrous design bug that slows down reads of the locally, per core, memory by three orders of magnitude, making the Cell a failure. What is the truth? We will have to wait for it to be sorted out.

But Apple is in top position for some years to come.

Jeff & R

Want to get rid of the ads? Show only the headlines in Safari RSS? Learn your software!

Adjust the Article Length in the right hand column. Just below Search Articles and above Sort By.

The Force can be with you.

"R,
Don't complain about MDN's ads. Complain that Safari's RSS is plain stupid. Firefox's is so much better. Why should I have to open a page to read the news from a site? Isn't RSS supposed to give me the ability to not have to do this? In Firefox, only the headline is displayed and its displayed as a bookmark. This way, I can scan all the headlines for MDN by simply clicking on my MDN RSS folder rather than having to open a page up for MDN.

Adapt Safari. Firefox definitely has you beat on this one."

Actually, I don't like the way Firefox handles it. I like being able to lump lots of RSS feeds together into one giant page. Then, I can glance and see that there are X new articles that I haven't looked at for my computer news websites. In Firefox, I'd have to check about 10 different bookmarks to look at them and then it still doesn't tell me if they are new or not.

Adapt Firefox. Safari definitely has you beat on this one.

"But now I read that Sony has run into a disastrous design bug that slows down reads of the locally, per core, memory by three orders of magnitude, making the Cell a failure. What is the truth? We will have to wait for it to be sorted out." - LinuxGuy

This has been discussed at /. and apparently the article was an exaggeration. Cell is intended for PS3 game consoles and it only needs to write to the memory very fast so that the data can be rendered on the screen. It does not need to read from that part of memory. Why does Cell need to read what's going to be rendered on the screen? The data will be useless once the image appears on the screen anyhow.

Where is "Odyssey67" when you need him? Just goes to show you that Apple knows technology and where it is headed.

This guy writes for ZDNet? Man, is he ever in desperate need of a proofreader. I know it's just a blog, but wow. Some of those passages border on unreadable. I guess it's true -- anyone can be a "journalist" these days.

Already old news today... check AMD's announcements from this morning. AMD is catching up. Once both chips are out, we will see which is faster, but whatever Intel may be ahead today, in a couple months the opposite may be true. Then repeat. Intel was probably the right choice for Apple right now... maybe permanently. Doesn't much matter in the long run. AMD is not going anywhere. They have 30% of the processor market NOW, and GROWING. Relax. Enjoy the fast computers and the processor competition driving them faster and cheaper at the same time. Good times ahead for all... Windows users, Mac users... for everyone.

KaramaData, meet MacDude.

MacDude, KaramaData.

Here is an analogy for you:

Microsoft: McDonalds;
Apple: In&Out;Microsoft can say "Billions of Burgers Sold."
Apple can say "Yeah, But Our Burgers Taste Good."

MacDailyNews Take: "Capitalism at its finest. Wouldn't it be nice to see such paranoia on the part of Microsoft in regard to their flag-crate Windows? "

Right on brother - you preach the word from the depths of your soul. I am right in this grove with you MDN.

I think I meant I'm in the "groove with you." Anyway... So much for my preaching career.

Posting this here just in case (and it is more relevant to this thread):

Want to know more about the new Intel Core 2 Duo that will be used in up and coming Macs? Loyd Case (and this guy is an EXPERT) talks about it on DL.TV episode 67 here:

http://gearlog.com/blogs/digitallifetv/archive/2006/06/07/13443.aspx

*** Fast forward in to 8:00min if you don't care about the other stuff

4 instructions per clock cycle, 4MB L2 cache, SSE in one cycle instead of two (video encoders will be happy about this) and more. Very interesting stuff. He also tells a bit about AMD's newest offerings and sort of does an opinion comparison. About a 5 min long segment but very interesting.

Apart from effectively being able to put a G5 in a laptop (which is a huge thing, admittedly), I am still waiting to see the promised fruits of the intel switch.

The low power usage roadmap was alleged by Steve to enable Apple to produce all sorts of products we would never have previously imagined.

Any ideas? I am still a bit confused, I have to admit.

^^^^ Brad, I have to agree with you, but it is still VERY early in the Intel switch. Personally, I wish they would have stuck with PPC, but I don't run the company nor know the "inside info" that made them go with Intel. Right now it's wait and see. I still hate to see the PPC go, considering IBM was already making the next generation of the chip (G6?) after the G5 was anounced. The tech industry is a crazy world - you never know what's going to happen next.

NewMacDude: I'm here - just a few days behind catching up on my reading

Namely, I've been reading up on Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest. Things are a lot more promising on this core version than was the case with Yonah, but these preliminary benchmarks aren't worth anything. For one, Intel and Intel fanbois have had way too big a hand in their implimentation. Tin foil hat be damned, the fact is Intel has a horrible track record of rigging this stuff, so these results just can't be trusted yet.

Two, the huge caches on these CPUs will skew certain results, not giving a true idea of what's capable under the hood. For example gaming benchmarks; typically games are single threaded (high clockspeed friendly) and feed info into the CPU at sizes that fit well within these exaggerated caches Intel is running now. If the CPU never has to leave cache, to go to main memory for info, then that's hardly a good test to see how the CPU performs across the widest performance range. When caches were smaller, gaming was a fine benchmark b/c things like memory latency (which affected the whole system) were exposed as good or bad too. Plus, with most programs being rewritten for multicore/threads, single core intensive gaming benchmarks just aren't as representative of potential real world gains anymore.

Last, Intel still has a huge problem with it's mobo based FSB. It's not only slow, but apparently it's an energy hog too. Also, word is these FBDIMMs Intel is pushing are going to be a real turkey - the second coming of RAMBUS. Since they'll also support DDR2, lets hope Apple stays as far away from it as possible. However, Intel hasn't announced support for DDR3 at all, while AMD has, and that's expected to be a much better performer. So in some very important ways, Intel is behind the 8Ball in the long term.

In the near term, Conroe will probably put a hurtin on AMDs current AM2 K8s, but that will be mitigated by very limited availability and - probably - much higher prices (not to mention that the current K8s won't be the best available by the time Conroe is available in numbers that matter).

Speaking of prices, this is going to be a problem for Apple, as I've said countless times before. Intel is going to have to make up revenue from their Netburst firesale somewhere, and I'd expect a high performing Core2 to demand a lot of coin. due to the limited numbers being made, even preferential buyers probably won't get too much of a break. The other reason is that Intel will only have this high ground to itself for a limited time. Bt the time the K8L hits, I think we'll see a very swift swing back in AMDs favor. DELL forsees this as well, which is why they gave up their exclusive Intel deal. So Intel will leverage it's moment in the sun for it's best financial advantage.

Basically, as I see it, all AMD really has to do is widen the data pathway for their SSE instructions to 128bit, and maybe tweak their integer and FP registers a little, and they will have done everything Intel has of any consequence. Cache sizes are already expected to rise, though they won't need to match Intel MB for MB. After that, all of AMDs other longstanding architectual advantages should simply reassert themselves & put them back on top.

In the meantime, my best advice is don't get too complacent Mac Fans.


PS - I'll say it again; the financial costs of going to Intel are not going to be worth the performance gains. None of these developments are things that weren't/aren't being done on the PPC side, among ALL the players. Apple knew this, which just goes to show that performance wasn't what Jobs saw the future of the company being tied to. He went with Intel for DRM and how that would help him create a multimedia, video paradigm. His (IMHO) miscalculation, that technological lockdown will be more important in that arena than technological innovation, is his Big Mistake.