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?

[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?

[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.