Merom in MacBook and MacBook Pros in September?

Kevin C. Tofel writes "If you want to see where the computer industry is going, you often have to watch the computer component manufacturers, and that's just what DigiTimes did. AsusTek and Quanta both produce Apple notebooks and sources appear to have just revealed that September is the month for 64-bit Merom CPUs in the MacBook and MacBook Pro line."

Comments

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Moofie]

Right, because nobody's ever been bitten in the ass by that kind of thinking before.

Re:dust + settle

[Overly Critical Guy]

Core Duo is a great chip. If you're kicking yourself over getting an Intel Mac, don't. This year's Core 2 Duo Macs would be made obsolete next year anyway, when Intel's Santa Rosa platform is released. See here. The summary is that Santa Rosa has a faster FSB, DirectX 10-level graphics, 802.11n, and more, and is designed for the Core 2. The Core 2s being released this year are just an "initial version" put out there to meet the holiday buying cycle, which is why they're socket-compatible with the Core 1. The real Core 2 platform is coming next year.

Quote from the press release:

The next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa and detailed for the first time in Maloney's keynote, is designed to give users better overall performance and graphics, improved wireless connectivity and improved security and manageability. Santa Rosa is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset, codenamed Crestline, an IEEE* 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, codenamed Kedron, as well as Intel-optimized advanced management and security solutions. The platform will also include Intel's NAND flash-based platform accelerator, codenamed Robson, which enables much more rapid boot-up time and power savings. Santa Rosa, available in the first half of 2007, will use Intel's next-generation dual-core mobile microprocessor based on Intel's Core(TM) microarchitecture, codenamed Merom, Intel's new foundation for delivering even greater energy-efficient performance. An initial version of Merom will also be available for the current Intel Centrino Duo platform to align with the 2006 holiday buying cycle and will be socket or pin-compatible with the current version of Intel® Core(TM) Duo processors.