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

What is the deal with 64 bit?

[abscissa]

I must be particularly dense. I have had an AMD 64 bit desktop computer for 2 years now and I have yet to take advantage of the 64 bit features. 64-bit Windows wants fancy new drivers (none of which exist, of course) and even MS software (E.g. producer) doesn't work on it.

So I got a Macbook pro in ... June? Will I miss out big time on 64 bit computing?

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[laffer1]

No, apple didn't do much with PowerMac G5 systems either. Users got 64 bit memory addressing. That's about it. Unless adobe requires it for some reason when they finally release photoshop and their other products native, I wouldn't worry too much. It willl be a few years before its an issue.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[XLR8DST8]

i think so. the difference here is that apple not only makes the os, but the hardware as well - therefore drivers won't be a problem. benefits will also be noticed within the software apple produces as well, namely the Pro apps, & whatever else. it seems oftentimes when one must rely on various different vendors to get together & cooperate & decide on anything, even if they make a great product they tend not to play nice with others. a lot of people are afraid of getting 'locked in' to a particular company but apple's a great example of how, for lack of a better description, a 'closed system' can work beautifully. random, but, about a month ago, my brother bought an espresso machine. the 'Nespresso' or whatever. i had argued with him to the death about getting 'trapped' & having to buy the Pods from Nestle. you can only use their pods. so against my wishes he went out & bought the thing. honestly, i was blown away. the coffee's actually orgasmic, & the price of both the machine & the pods is actually really competitive compared to other options. it's also easy to prepare and keep clean. for lazy spoiled people such as myself, it's a godsend. i had to apologize to and commend him for buying something i was happy with in the end. i'm very much WARY of proprietary methods (uh, DRM anyone?) and i've not been too happy with Sony as a company, but that's another story. my point is that apple, and my espresso machine are, if at the very least, exceptions to the rule, they are still examples of a cohesive, seamless, inclusive environment, where everything just 'works', & works beautifully, without necessarily fucking the consumer in the ass. 3

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[necro81]

You make a valid point that 64-bit computing isn't very useful if the software can't take advantage of it. Sure, you can get larger memory addressing, but there aren't that many machines where 32-bit's 2GB limit has come into play.

The difference here is that Apple has been producing 64-bit software for a while. After all, the G5 processor is 64-bit, and that's been in Apple's line since summer '03. Leopard, when it comes out next year, will supposedly do a particularly good job of allowing 32- and 64-bit applications to coexist and execute at the best levels possible. I recall hearing that Apple has been reworking it's software suites to take better advantage fo 64-bit computing (rather than just recompiling to work as 32-bit applications on a 64-bit machine). So, whereas your AMD machine has barely begun to take advantage of 64-bit capabilities, the Merom-based Apple's will do so from day one.

I don't think you'll 'miss out,' because the improvement may not be apparent for some time.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[AKAImBatman]

But since when has the "average consumer" needed more than 4GB of RAM, let alone 1GB or 2GB's?

1GB is pretty standard on systems these days. High end systems reguarly have 2GB. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that systems three years from now will be bumping up against the 3-4GB barrier. Especially as HD everything takes ahold, thus requiring insane amounts of memory to handle the latest multimedia files.

For examples of this, look no further than the new generation of game consoles. Developers are already complaining that the ~22.5 GBytes/sec bandwidth on the video bus just isn't enough for 1080p resolutions, and Sony is betting that future games will require as much as 30 Gigabytes of storage!

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drix]

It's very useful for scientific research. I constantly run into the 4gb limitation when I run Stata, since it needs a contiguous chunk of memory, and the largest one of those you're going to find is about 1.5gb. Also if you're doing photo or video editing, obviously, the more RAM the better period.

For the average user I think it's pretty worthless right now. RAM requirements will creep ever northward, as do all hardware requirements, but by the time you find yourself needing (or even owning) 4gb of RAM this 64-bit thing will be old-hat.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Overly Critical Guy]

OS X Leopard will be fully 64-bit, and unlike Windows Vista, will seamlessly support 32-bit device drivers and applications, so going full 64-bit will be as simple as buying a 64-bit Mac.

That said, your implication is correct that 64-bit really isn't as big a deal as it was hyped to be by the likes of AMD (who teamed with CryTek to put out that awful 64-bit version of Far Cry with the higher-resolution textures to trick gamers into thinking having a 64-bit address space had something to do with that and not their GPU). XCode 2.4 supports four-architecture Universal Binaries anyway, so you'll have 32-bit/64-bit PPC/Intel applications. You shouldn't worry about missing out on anything

Besides, getting a Core 2 Duo system now would be silly when you can wait until first quarter of 2007 when Intel's Santa Rosa chipset comes out, replacing the Napa chipset used by the Core Duo. It'll have an 800Mhz bus speed upgrade that will really let the Core 2 take advantage of its power as well as ship with a new WLAN 802.11n chipset.

I have an Intel iMac and an Intel MacBook, but I'm quite happy and waiting for next year's Macs before even thinking of heading to eBay. There's always something better around the corner, especially with Apple.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[barole]

But under standard 32-bit XP, each process gets only a 2GB address space. That is much more of a limitation than 4GB total RAM for many applications, especially since graphics drivers, etc may eat into that 2GB.

Also, if you use an app that needs large contiguous chunks of memory, you may run into a situation where you have say 600MB of address space left, but no one chunk is larger than 200MB. Then if your app needs a 250MB chunk of memory, it will fail even though there is 600MB left.

Going to a 64-bit address space solves these issues.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[barole]

SGI did something similar when they brought out 64-bit MIPS chips and a 64-bit version of IRIX. They also doubled the number of registers. However, they permitted enabling those registers in 32-bit mode as well. Thus you could compile to old-32 ABI, or new-32 ABI (with 2x as many registers) or 64-bit ABI. So, most apps would be compiled for the new-32 bit ABI since few needed 64-bits but most could benefit from more registers. It's too bad AMD didn't do the same thing.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[edwardpickman]

It'll eventually have an impact on things like 3D desktop environments. For now it's a massive boon to the graphics people. THere was some lag in software developers supporting it, not to mention hardware, but now that's changing. Where it really shines is rendering large scene files or working with complex scenes. The memory limts in the 32 bit systems were devastating. Having the memory limit change also has a major effect on modelling if you are a micropoly nut like me. Zbrush has been able to handle 20 million polygons for awhile now but the memory limits kept you from really taking advantage of that. My next purchase is a quad Xeon Mac with 16 gig of ram. It'd be laughable for word processing but for complex models and rendering large scene files it's the way to go. One machine now can take the place of what a few years ago was handled by a render farm. Photoreal shots are not only possible now but they are becoming accessable to smaller companies. Not many can aford a 999 machine render farms. Between software and hardware improvements a handful of machines can take the place what those massive render farms used to do. And best of all you don't need a sub station to power them. Just look at the difference in what Pixar does. Toy Story call all but be rendered live on today's systems. Ratatouille looks like a painting.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[SPY_jmr1]

I agree totally with you about XP. It's a decent environment, but it takes ram like mad. I do have a little nitpick about tiger, though.

It's interesting with OS X, besides the fact that each release seems to get faster on the same hardware (more optimization done, although things that can't be helped like slow IO on ibooks don't improve), OS X acts predictibly depending on how much ram is in it.

Examples*: Redhad 6 + 32 megs ram = no problem. Modern Linux, *256* ram, slower then a dying pig in quicksand. Windows NT 4, 64-128 ram, worked fine, 2k was a bit larger, liked 512, and XP with less then a gig is a bit self punishing, and SP2 just makes it worse.

OS X 10.4, 128 ram, acts like an older generation OS might: Slower then the state of the art, but still decent. With more ram it flies, of course, but my point is that the preformance/ram ratio seems to degrade much more gracefully then most OSes.

Now, linux is the next best, but it takes things like icewm, or a *box WM to preform well on older/limited hardware; XP is really bad about this, even with all the eye candy off, it doesn't help much, since the underlaying system, and the miriad of things that run on top of it are the main items which slow things down.

That tiger can run its regular UI (albeit without the new core image eyecandy) and be usable on a older machine machine is just good design, I think.

Spy

* I know linux itself flies, and gnome/kde/$BLOAT are the slowdowns, but i'm trying to compare XP, Linux, and Tiger, and that means Desktop, apps, eyecandy, all that jazz.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Weedlekin]

"Some apps slow down due to the larger memory footprint."

And the need to process bigger pointers. These often need to be moved to and from memory, which means potential latency problems; while caches obviously help here, 64-bit data takes up twice as much space, meaning that the effective capacity of the cache is reduced, and therefore its potential hit-rate.

In real terms therefore, as you say, what benefits one sees depends on the applications that are being used. I've seen figures in the +/- 15% range for various types of general purpose programs -- some benefit, some lose, and it isn't necessarily related to particular app categories, but how each individual program has been coded. However, much greater speed-ups can be seen for things like databases running on systems with 64GB RAM where all data and indexes can be kept in memory instead of paged from disk, scientific software that manipulates huge data-sets, graphics software which must process very large images (or groups of related images), etc. One does however need a _lot_ of RAM and applications that have been written to use it for handling big chunks of data before realizing any really significant gains, so for most laptops and indeed desktops that are hardware-limited to 4GB RAM or less, or bigger systems running re-compiled 32-bit software, "64-bit" will essentially be a marketing buzz-word used in epsilon-geek "my computer's better than your computer" pissing contests.

Re:Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[Anonymous Coward]

New rule: any /. title ending with a "?" should be ignored.