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Intel Launching 'Merom' Notebook Processor
Hans Pecheston writes "Merom, Intel's notebook processor, will be joining in the festivities at their upcoming launch event. This chip will continue to use the Core 2 Duo brand and should display additional improvements in performance and power consumption over the current chips. Intel has already begun to ship Merom processors to its PC customers and systems with Merom should begin to appear around the end of August."
Interesting notes in Inquirer.
3 055
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=2
The unlimited RAM option looks like an interesting feature
Thursday... Intel plans to announce details about the branding strategy and systems that will appear with Merom processors
So no actual details, so don't bother reading the article. This is not worth an article!
Probably, as the current Meroms are close to compatible with Yonah, for which you can already buy ITX equipment. A new socket ("socket P"), FSB frequency and so on is coming in January.
Last year, Apple's laptop sales passed their desktop sales. This year, they are projected to do so by an even larger margin. How, exactly, is a desktop their 'flagship' product?
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I very much doubt they will upgrade the macBookPro (as some suggest) befor they update the iMac, that remains their flagship product.
From last week's quarterly conference call:
"Apple sold 529,000 desktops during the quarter and 798,000 notebooks."
E pluribus unum
Be careful with d/ling an "updated" BIOS, especially from Dell. There has been talk in the forums about the latest BIOS update locking out the possibility of a Memron upgrade instead of enabling it. And from what I have heard, it's incredibly difficult to roll back a BIOS update. Just FYI.
While I doubt anyone's going to have enough ram in a laptop to need 64bit pointers anytime soon, the extra general purpose registers will be nice.
That's not true at all. Here goes:
MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
1024MB 667 DDR2 - 2 SO-DIMM
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
2.0GHz Intel Core Duo
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
80GB Serial ATA drive @ 5400 rpm
Price: $2099.99
AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
Price: $349.99
Total: $2497.95
Inspiron E1505
Intel® Core(TM) Duo Proc T2500 (2GHz/667MHz/2 X 1MB L2 Cache)
Genuine Windows® XP Home
15.4 inch UltraSharp(TM) Wide Screen SXGA+ Display with TrueLife(TM)
FREE 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce(TM)Go 7300 TurboCache
80GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem
8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
Integrated Audio
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 Internal Wireless and Bluetooth
85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
3Yr Ltd Warr,At-Home Service,and HW Warr Support plus Nights and Weekends
Free SKIN Promotion 15 - Free Promotion for 15 inch Skin
Price: $1,766.00 (before 30% off coupon, which is practically always available.)
Price after coupon: $1,236.20
There are a few things the Macbook Pro has that the Dell does not. For one, the Macbook is lighter, thinner, and more aesthetically pleasing, which is no small thing. It also has a much more robust software suite--OSX is clearly a more complete OS than XP, and the pre-installed software package on an Apple computer adds value as well. In contrast, the Dell supports higher resolution, a more powerful video card, and a higher battery life.
With all of that said, do you really think one Macbook Pro is worth two Dell E1505s?
It also bears mentioning that I tried to make them as equivalent as possible in this scenario. I could have easily stuck another $200 worth of upgrades into the machine (XP Pro, bigger HDD, more RAM), and then used a $750 off of $2000 to get to the same price. In that case the Dell would be a clearly superior (from a hardware standpoint) machine.
The laptop chips (including Merom, Banias, Yonah, Dothan) come from Intel's shop in Israel and have code names from geographical locations there.
Meron is the name of the highest mountain in the Galilee in Israel, which is the area of Israel where Haifa is located, which is where the Intel R&D center that created this processor is located. Clear enough, or should I draw a flow-chart?
Just to clarify further:
;))
Meron is the mountain. Merom (with an M or mem) just means "Upper" as in Upper Galilee (Merom HaGalil). Very nice area in any case (though best to wait until our Lebanese friends have got bored with their fireworks display).
Banias is a freshwater spring/ glade on the Golan Heights and site of an old greek temple . Well worth a hike in summer, though best to time it with a ceasefire.
Yonah is the Hebrew version of Jonah (in Greek which was the first transliteration from the vernacular Hebrew, J is a Y sound), it's not a place (or a plaice
Dothan was a town in Northern Canaan/Judea/Palestine/Israel in biblical times. IIRC it's where Joseph's brothers go off to before they feign his murder and sell him (in the Old Testament).
29 mpg. YMMV.
I believe that Inspiron is more or less consumer-laptop. If you want to compare a Dell-laptop, you should be using Precision or Latitude-laptops. Here's such a comparison:
Dell Latitude D820 with following upgrades:
2Ghz Core Duo
1GB RAM
256MB Intel Quadro NVS
80GB HD
DVD+/-RW
Bluetooth
Total price: $1823
MacBook Pro with 1GB of RAM costs $2099. So it's about $270 more expensive. For that money you get all-aluminium construction (as opposed to plastic), backlit-keyboard, OS X, A LOT nicer overall design (everyone lusts after MacBooks Pro's/PowerBooks, no-one lusts after a Dell), slot-loading optical drive. MBP also has optical audio in and out and FireWire, I don't know about the Dell.
I honestly don't think that the Apple is THAT expensive.
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The Latitude D820 was conceived, designed and built with the rigors of the road in mind. Every Latitude notebook is stress-tested in extreme conditions to be sure that it can withstand the physical challenges it will meet in the course of any business day. These shock and fatigue tests, along with the D820's magnesium-alloy casing and steel hinges and patented Dell StrikeZoneTM technology, mean that you get a notebook that is designed to last, no matter how bumpy the road gets.
The superior build quality described above is one of the reasons a Latitude costs more than an Inspiron, and I'd honestly be surprised if the Apple build quality is as good (much less better), especially with all the reported heat issues. As to the design, well, I honestly prefer the D820 to the MacBook Pro. It doesn't look as flash when it's closed (i.e. when you're carrying it around), but I prefer the look when it's opened (i.e. in use): I prefer a blackish finish to a silver one, and think the Dell looks a wee bit more professional too.
The main thing that drove me away from the MacBook Pro was the lack of flexibility in terms of system options. I like high-resolution screens, and with Dell was able to choose WUXGA (1920x1200), amongst a wide array of options (including inbuilt fingerprint and smartcard readers for logon, which are quite nice to have). The 15.4" MacBook Pro, on the other hand, offers only one screen resolution, and a mediocre WSXGA (1440x900) one at that. On top of that, there's only a trackpad (the D820 has both a trackpad and a 'nipple', and I like to have both), and with only a single button (I can't fathom why Apple continue with this brain-dead design). I also prefer the feel of the keyboard on the D820 (even if it's not illuminated).
On the whole, even if the MacBook Pro (including Windows XP -- some software I use isn't available for Mac OS X) had been the same price as the D820, I'd still have gone with the latter, for the simple reason that, in my view, it's a better machine. As it was, the Dell was cheaper to start with, and Dell were offering a coupon discount of about 25%. Given that, it was dead easy to pick the Dell over the Apple, and I can't understand why any rational person would have gone with the Apple.
If you want to carry around a fashion item, or for some reason need OS X, I can see buying a MacBook Pro over a Latitude, but apart from that, I can't understand why any rational individual would pay substantialy more for a machine that's arguably inferior.
The reason Latitudes cost more is for two reasons--business-class support (which Apple DOES NOT provide for their Macbooks, and it's ridiculous to claim that they do) and modular interoperability. Latitudes are the only officially supported "upgradeable" notebooks from Dell: the D-line uses all of the same interfaces for their optical drives. Until the Dx20s, there was very little functional difference between Inspirons and Latitudes. But all Latitudes come with standard 3 year warranties, a business-class support team (that is not based in India), and guaranteed part-interoperability. They're a different class of machine altogether, and certainly should not be compared to Macbook Pros unless you can show me that Apple provides the same level of corporate support.
As far as build quality goes, nowadays there is a slight difference in quality between an Inspiron and a Latitude--and it's mostly just the chassis. But the components they use are functionally the same.
Well, that's wrong somehow... I think you either meant to say "Apple was the largest G3/G4/G5 system maker" or "Apple was the largest user of the PPC in desktop computers". The largest PPC system maker would be hard to pin down, but my bet would be either one of the car or printer manufacturers. PPC is all about embedded systems, Apple's use of them was just convinient fallout.
Obviously IBM/Motorola only bothered to announce the G3/G4/G5 chips when Apple was ready to introduce a new model using them, because those are names for variations on existing PPC chip designs that were designed and produced on contract with Apple explicitly for their use. While they do refer to unique chips, they were all fairly minor variations (mostly just increased specs) on chips that the relevant maker had already created. The G5 is just a variation on IBM's established POWER4 line, for example. Apple chips have always been evolutionary, not revolutionary (even back in the 680x0 days).
The only thing that's changed here is that you happen to be reading the press in which Intel chip announcements are published, while I'm betting that you never heard about all the developments in PPC chips over the past 20 years or so, except for the ones published by Apple.
There's a big list of some of the stuff that uses PPC over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerpc#Implementati
since Apple was the largest PPC system maker
This is false. Apple's use of PPC was/is small compared to their use in embedded systems.