DailyTech - Apple to Begin Shipping New MacBook Pro

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Hardware Apple to Begin Shipping New MacBook Pro
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - February 14, 2006 6:47 PM

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18 comment(s) - last by Furen.. on Feb 17 at 6:48 AM

Along with publicly announcing the company would begin selling the new MacBook Pro - Apple also announced a speed increase at no additional charge

Apple announced today that it will begin shipping the new Apple MacBook Pro, the first Apple laptop that is powered by an Intel processor. It was expected that the two laptops would be either 1.66GHz or 1.83GHz, but Apple decided to bump the speeds up a bit anyway. Users will be able to choose from a 1.87GHz model for $1999, or a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo for $2500. Customers will also have the option to upgrade to a 2.16GHz model. Apple claims that the MacBook Pro will deliver up to four times the performance than the PowerBook G4.

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WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By shortylickens on 2/14/2006 11:17:33 PM , Rating: 2

What about all those years when Apple was saying their Uber-l33t PowerPC processors were several times faster than an x86 setup?
So now they move to an Intel and its 4 times faster?
WTF?
Do they even listen to their own bullshit?

RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By retrospooty on 2/14/2006 11:45:59 PM , Rating: 2

LOL

Where have you been the past month? This same question has been all over the place. No real answers, its just the usual Apple false claims, thats all. The industry is used to it, the non tech savvy Mac heads will all beleive it, and the rest of the world knows better.

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By fhornmikey on 2/15/2006 12:32:54 AM , Rating: 3

Actually, if you knew anything about processor architectures and the Power PC G5 processor, you would know that it's floating point performance was the tip of the top for quite a long time after it was intially released.

In fact, the Power PC G5 was the first single consumer processor capable of a teraflop worth of performance.

Also important to note is that Apple's laptops were unable to use the Power PC G5 processor because of battery life and heat dissipation issues. When making the claim of four times more power than the previous Powerbooks, this is when comparing an Intel Core Duo (a dual core, brand new processor) to a Power PC G4 (a 4+ year old single core processor).

Please educate yourself before posting and try not to perpetuate ridiculous stereotypes (i.e.- non tech savvy Mac heads). There are quite a few things that the Power PC architecture handles better than the x86 architecture, they just aren't always useful for a modern day operating system (case in point being the fact that both Microsoft and Sony chose the Power PC architecture for their next generation gaming systems).

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By Furen on 2/15/2006 3:42:15 AM , Rating: 2

Of course Microsoft and Sony didn't chose a powerPC based CPU because IBM is the only company willing to whore out (license, if you wish) its CPU architecture but simply because it's superior peak performance on heavily unrealistic loads. I'm sure its multi-core, in-order, deep and narrow cores with puny caches and SMT (the more features the better, huh?) are very lovely animals for things like AI and game control, or did you mean the very useful DSPs (SPEs) on the cell CPU? (I'm being sarcastic, by the way).

Apple's marketing benchmarks are a load of BS. A few months ago Apple was claiming that its G5s completely destroyed any P4 throw at them but suddenly a Core Duo is 2x better than a G5 and 4x better than a G4? Did they actually find any application where this is true? Of course not, they just used the theoretical specInt and specFP scores to give you your "Estimated performance."

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By Deimo on 2/15/2006 5:15:57 AM , Rating: 2

You do realize that the P4 is absolute crap compared to the Core Duo? Now I'm not going to defend apple's over zealous marketing attampts, as that's what they are, but yes the G5 is a more powerful chip that the P4, and yes the core duo is more powerful than both... actually steve jobs on the record as saying that each core of a core duo is about the same power as a G5! Now lets keep in mind one last fact; The core Duo will not be replacing any other G5's... the power mac will be replaced by Conroe. I don't think any speed information on Conroe has been released, but I have heard Merom compared to Yonah, and the number that's been knocked around is a 30% improvement. Common sense would have Conroe being faster than Merom, as it's a desktop chip.

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By aliasfox on 2/15/2006 10:48:49 AM , Rating: 2

And let's not forget that the G5 towers are all dual core (or quad core), and with the exception of the low end introductory models, have always been dual core/dual processor.

Apple's marketing (along with that of most companies) should be taken with a grain of salt. Of course Apple's going to try and paint the prettiest picture for itself. Do you really expect Apple to say "now with Intel processors running Photoshop under emulation at half the speed of before!" in their marketing materials? Of course not.

I for one am happy that Apple's bidding farewell to the G4. Its a marvel of efficiency - clock for clock, more efficient than a PIII back in the day. Too bad it hasn't scaled as fast as it needed to, and too bad Moto/Freescale never gave it the proper IO support to compete in the modern computing world.

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By plinden on 2/15/2006 11:50:23 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Do you really expect Apple to say "now with Intel processors running Photoshop under emulation at half the speed of before!"

Well, in his keynote speech last month at MacWorld, Steve Jobs did say that Photoshop worked ok but probably wasn't good enough for professionals (ie. graphics pros - I'm a professional software engineer but I've never used Photoshop). But what graphics pro would use an iMac with 512MB anyway? All of them that use Macs have dual and quad G5 PowerMacs or would at least max out the memory.

People who do use Photoshop on the new iMac have told me that they got 3x-4x times the performance by adding 1GB RAM, showing that Rosetta is a memory hog. This speed up is probably more than good enough if you're coming from a G4.

Also, I find that my 1.83GHz Core Duo iMac is 50% faster at compiling Java (while using only one core - javac doesn't appear to be multiprocessor aware) than my 2.26GHz P-M laptop, which is turn is 50% faster than a 1.67GHz G4 PowerBook.

As for benchmarks, there are plenty of 3rd party benchmarks out there than showed the PowerMacs better than or at least equivalent to high end Intel workstations at pro apps.

What happened was, IBM or Motorola would make a breakthrough, e.g. develop the G5, Macs would indeed be faster at almost anything (not games-related), but development would stall and Intel and AMD would quickly catch up and pass the G5.

Games are different - but that's more to do with games not being optimized for Macs than with anything inherently inferior. And anyway, would you use a Dell Precision dual core Xeon workstation to play Doom?

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By plinden on 2/15/2006 11:53:43 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Also, I find that my 1.83GHz Core Duo iMac is 50% faster at compiling Java (while using only one core - javac doesn't appear to be multiprocessor aware) than my 2.26GHz P-M laptop, which is turn is 50% faster than a 1.67GHz G4 PowerBook.

Sorry, had a mindfart - I meant to say the 2.26GHz P-M is twice as fast as the 1.67GHz G4 PowerBook. I had 50% on my brain. This shows a 3x speed up for the iMac over the PowerBook, and the MacBooks should show this too.

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By aliasfox on 2/15/2006 4:22:11 PM , Rating: 2

If your Dothan at 2.26 GHz is up to twice as fast as your 1.67 GHz PowerBook at Java compilation, and if a Core Duo is roughly equivalent to a Dothan in non MP aware applications on the same platform, than its fair to say that a Core Duo @ 2.16 GHz is up to four times faster than a PowerBook G4... I think.

On another note, I find it ironic that after pushing hyperthreading for a few months, Intel's high end now consists of "real" multi-core processors. I never followed hyperthreading, did it not work as well as advertised?

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By fhornmikey on 2/15/2006 10:35:45 AM , Rating: 3

If you honestly think that peak floating perfomance is "unrealistic" you need to seriously take a look at what kind of calculations games and more imporantly, games with realistics physics engines use, FLOATING POINT CALCULATIONS. Go ahead, keep on talking out of your tail end, you only make yourself look stupid.

Anyone who knows ANYTHING about microprocessors knows that the Pentium 4 and it's Netburst architecture are not efficient processors. More so than that, everyone who had done any research on the matter also knows that the Core Duo is a MUCH stronger processor than the P4 and truly is a major step up for Intel.

For your edification, game consoles have been using proprietary in order processors for years. In fact, in alot of ways the Cell Processor is very similar to the Emotion Engine used in the PS2, and we all see what a huge flop the Playstation 2 was (look I can be sarcastic too!). So wait a second here... IBM is the only one willing to "whore out" their license? Hrm... that seems odd to me considering Microsoft used a PENTIUM III in the original Xbox. Are you honestly so naive as to think that Intel wouldn't have worked with Microsoft on a processor for the Xbox360?

Sure, I will be the first one to admit that Apple's performance claims have always seemed a bit slanted to me, but them claiming that the Core Duo is four times faster than a five year old processor? Sounds about right to me, so like I said, keep on typing sir, your comedic entertainment is invaluable.

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RE: WAIT A SECOND!?!?!

By Furen on 2/17/2006 6:48:51 AM , Rating: 2

I didnt say that floating point performance was useless, I said that PEAK floating point performance is useless unless your code is something like 2 trillion FP adds with no branches or any other nasties in it. Different CPUs perform the different FP operations at different speeds and the peak performance numbers are normally chosen by the manufacturer as the maximum theoretical values. Even using benchmarks like SPECfp2000 can sometimes give you misleading information (for example, according to this benchmark a P4 1.5 Willamette is about 40% faster than a K7 Tbird at 1.2 but in real world applications Willamette was quite worse).

The Pentium 4 was a great architecture. The only reason why it's not completely obliterating everything out there is because of the insane amount of heat that it produces, but that does not mean it isn't a good architecture, just one that met unsurmountable barriers. Remember that efficiency DOES NOT equal performance and having a high clock speed more than makes ups for its lower IPC. The Pentium M is better than the P4 only because the P4 is unable to hit its 5+ GHz clock speeds but even so a Core Duo at 2.16GHz will NOT outperform a Pentium D at 3.6GHz, for example.

Yes, can you tell me which graphics accelerator the PS2 uses? If you know anything about the PS2 you'll know that it basically has no GPU and draws everything with the CPU, which is why it can make use of the insane amount of FP performance that it can muster (by the way, FP operations in graphics are much simpler than FP operations in AI, collision detection and the like, which is why you can make insanely fast specialized graphics chips but can't use these same chips to accelerate your AI, for example). I've heard that Sony actually planned on doing the same thing with the PS3, having the CPU do all the graphics too, but after learning that the GPU on the XBox360 was going to be so good (which it is) it decided that it needed a standalone GPU to be able to get even close to its graphics performance. The SPEs in the Cell CPU, in fact, would have probably been really suitable for graphics but who knows what they'll be used for now.

IBM is the only major manufacturer willing to whore out its architecture. Intel SOLD THE CPUS to Microsoft, it didnt sell the design. IBM actually allowed Microsoft (and Nintendo, though Cell is a collaboration with Sony and Toshiba) to customize its CPU and to go get it fabbed at any place. Do you see the difference? In the past Consoles could get by using more unconventional architectures but since there aren't any competitive-performing architectures outside Power, Sparc (which is not in too good of a shape right now), EPIC and x86 there wasn't much in terms of choice. Also, being able to own the design for Xenon, in the case of Microsoft, allows it to get the chips manufactured anywhere it wants, which should reduce cost. Intel would have sold CPUs to Microsoft but it wouldn't have sold it the design and allowed it to go get it fabbed outside, since its microarchitectures are trade secret (or at least, I think they still are).

So now, let's recap. According to Apple it outperformed the P4s (single core) with the G5 yet Yonah cannot outperform a dual-core 3.4GHz P4 yet (supposedly) it outperforms a G5 by 100%? Hardly. Apple always choses the benchmarks that suit its needs best and Apple fans are quite good at ignoring the fact that sometimes newer benchmarks contradict older ones.

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Cancelled My Order

By ohnnyj on 2/15/2006 1:48:05 AM , Rating: 2

Just cancelled my order yesterday. Really need a laptop but did a lot of hard thinking. These models are basically beta testers and the whole Rosetta thing kills performance on many apps I would use (i.e. Photoshop). Hopefully when Intel releases the Conroe core (Mermon?) chips toward the end of the year Apple will use them. By then the Universal discs should be out.

RE: Cancelled My Order

By nomagic on 2/15/2006 2:51:52 AM , Rating: 2

I almost ordered one and cant agree more. We should wait for the revision. We never know if the first batches will have problems.

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RE: Cancelled My Order

By NainoKami on 2/15/2006 3:51:29 AM , Rating: 2

I would order one now if I had the money... The apps I need are already out in Universal Binary (Logic Pro 7.2... Sitting with the disc in my hand), so I would go for it in an instant... If I wasn't so damn poor! Anyone want to sponsor? :)

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RE: Cancelled My Order

By kelmon on 2/15/2006 5:02:39 AM , Rating: 2

I am in much the same position in that I want a Merom-based system with a 17" screen so am waiting for the latter half of the year. I am expecting some issues with the first version of the MacBook and that is definitely one reason why the cash isn't being spent now despite the fact that I am crying out for a new laptop to replace my ageing PowerBook. However, in your situation it is worth noting that Adobe is not planning to release a Universal Binary of Photoshop or the rest of the Creative suite until its next full release, which likely will not be until 2007. The same is also true of the Macromedia Studio applications as well. Since I'm not a photography or web development professional (I play but don't get paid for it) I am not expecting Rosetta to be a problem in the interim, particularly since my current laptop is more than a bit slow anyway.

Just an FYI.

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