MacWorld Keynote Speech Time again, coverage here:Engadget, Gizmodo (live link), MacRumors, MacNN (started 5pm-ish UK Time).
Expected rumours:
15" Intel ibook, Plasma TV, Shuffle with screen etc
Things announced:
- FM Tuner and remote control for iPod (lets you listen to FM radio through your ipod), $49 (alternatively buy one for £1 from the poundshop!)
- New OS X 10.4.4
- New iLife. New iPhoto with Photocasting. (podcasting for photos, uses RSS)
- New iMac with Dual Core Intel 2.0ghz CPU (in 20" version) Shipping Today - "The new iMac is 2 to 3 times faster than the iMac G5."
- New MacBook Pro - Dual Core Intel 15.4" widescreen LCD. (shipping Feb)What's impressive here is that, probably last week, dual core Intel PC Laptops were appearing (being announced!), but desktop PCs are/were still stuck with Athlon (dual core available) or (crappy) Pentium 4 CPUs (dual core available) or niche Pentium M (single core chips), whereas now, right now, in a Mac you can get dual core Intel chips (based on the pentium m*)!
* The Pentium M is pretty much the fastest x86 cpu available (or was before they made a dual core version) and is the fastest at SETI, so these dual core versions must ROCK!
Apple.com now updated with full details, pictures and specifications.
3 comments:
mac has also launched mac ibook pro at keynote speech. my blog laptop review
just a note about the 4x faster claim on the laptop and 2x faster claim on the iMac. I'm trying to understand this myself - because floating point and integer performance is between 4 and 5x faster than a 1.67ghz G4 laptop, and because the bus speed on the old laptop was pretty poor too, they've shown that certain application (rendering software, which would use fp alot) is over 4x faster. Typical application performance is shown to be 1.7x faster, assuming a recompiled application.
Discussion / Comment : It is likely that the old rendering application was not utilising the G4 chip's floating point units very efficiently and that compilation for intel chips is much more successfully optimised (using GCC).
Hope that my english made sense there. Also hope I don't sound like I'm just defending the G4, as I've not really used one in a long while, but maybe (I seem to recall that possibly) they reduced the features of the laptop G4 quite a bit (for reasons of increasing the maximum clock speed, power consumption)
G4 = Motorola 7457 = Apollo 7, 130nm version of 7455. 200mhz bus speed, 512k level 2 cache. uses 33w at 1.67ghz. (source).
7455 = Apollo 6, 180nm
Apollo has four integer execution units, one double precision FPU, and four 128-bit AltiVec execution units, consumes 10-20w and runs at up to 1ghz. (January 2002).
Ah.. that was it.. before the second generation G4, motorola couldn't get their 7400 to go at above 550-600 mhz, and then finally they redesigned bits and released 800 mhz - 1000 parts (the 7450) which in fact were shown to be, not actually as fast as the clock speed would have you believe - ie; a 600mhz old chip would out-perform the 800mhz new chip.
Interestingly enough, you can download G4 and G5 specific versions of firefox.. Blimey.
Summary:
1. The G4 chip in the powerbooks is a well old design, and hasn't been updated in 2 years.
2. Although the G4 does have processing units which can in theory be utilised for efficient 4 at a time 'floating point' instructions, it is very probable that floating point limited applications are not automatically converted to use the vector units.
3. Dual core chips are brilliant if you design your app to use them both well.
4. Faster bus speed (well its about time really)
And: Does GCC have specific optimisations (eg; by intel) that make Jonah core chips perform well?
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