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?

[Quaoar]

The biggest reason for the average consumer is that you move beyond the RAM ceiling of 4GB. Not that it probably matters on a laptop (yet), but I think that's the reason most people notice/care about.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[richdun]

Maybe. OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was the first version of OS X to support 64-bit, and some apps use it, but the Intel switch happened too soon for many to start using it (since the first Intel processors were only 32-bit, leaving the iMac G5 and PowerMac G5 the only 64-bit capable Macs before the Mac Pro). Leopard (OS X 10.5) will definitely use more 64-bit stuff, as the new Cocoa/Carbon libraries will be in 64-bit with native 64 and 32-bit support. At a minimum, I'd expect Apple to convert a lot of the pro and iLife apps to 64-bit, as they tend to use their own technologies pretty quickly (for obvious reasons).

So for Windows, 64-bit may not be a big deal, but for OS X, there should be more support very soon.

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?

[LaughingLinuxMan]

I use Cinelerra to edit video on 64-bit Linux (http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3). According to their website, Cinelerra is much happier doing its math in 64-bit land.

-LLM

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?

[phalse phace]

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

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:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[PayPaI]

When Vista comes out?

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ArbitraryConstant]

You can get more thanm 4 gb of memory with PAE now. The advantage is that it allows you to do that in one process's address space.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[hcob$]

Actually with Intel Processors (Since the Pentium Pro) and possibly AMD 32 processors, there are at least 4 extra address lines for the ram. This gives the option of up to 64GB of RAM. In Intel naming this is known as the PAE. In other words... We've been past the 4GB limit since the Pentium Pro.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[hritcu]

Support yes. But for both 32 and 64 bit. So if you just bought a 32 bit machine, you shouldn't worry too much either.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[alcmaeon]

Is your shift key broken or are you trying to write some bizzare kind of modern poetry?

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

With an Intel Mac it's possible-- in fact, it's commonplace-- for the "average consumer" to be running Parallels and Rosetta at the same time. That's Windows XP plus OSX 10.4.7 plus an emulated PowerPC G4 processor. Suddenly 2 GB doesn't sound like all that much...

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[jellomizer]

When you are using Photoshop or the Gimp for a high resulution image (Those you know that you don't see the pixels when printed on a full page) Or even worse doing multible layers of those images.
while screen resulution is roughly 72 ppi A good Printed High Res Printed image is around 600 ppi so for a standard 8*10 at 32bit color depth is about 115MB, and say you have 30 Layers you are using over 3 Gigabytes. Or just having a bunch of heavy apps running at the same time, like virtualization with VMware, with 4 VMImages running at the same time all that can use 1GB of RAM, It goes away quickly.

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?

[misleb]

Also, due to Apples applicaiton structure (e.g. Universal Binaries), it is a lot easier to distribute one program that will run optimally on many different processors. Some apps have come with both G4 and G5 optimized binaries for some time. As far as I know, Microsoft has no such mechanism for distributing binaries like that.

-matthew

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Pausanias]

Are there any other improvements in 64 bit CPUs other than the larger memory ceiling? Or is that it? Will power users get any other benefits from the CPU upgrade?

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?

[jellomizer]

It is because you can handle numbers larger then 4,294,967,296 (unsigned 32bit) you can handle 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (unsigned 64bit). While 4 Billion is a big number it is well used in todays math, say with corprate calculations even for a mid size company. A lot programs that handel big numbers can run a lot faster if they handle big numbers, because the program doesn't have to interprate and do the work twice to calculate 2 32bit integer, or use a much more wastful character calcultion.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[bradleytolman]

Extra memory is not the only advantage. In the new AMD/Intel 64 bit processers, the number of registers has been extended from 8 to 16.

If compilers could be optimized to take advantage of this, I would expect that certain applications would be sped up significantly.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Guy Harris]

Are there any other improvements in 64 bit CPUs other than the larger memory ceiling?

In the case of 64-bit x86 CPUs, there are 8 more registers for the compiler to use. (That's not true of any other 32->64 architectural changes I know of; those were either RISC architectures that already had 31 or 32 registers, or System/3x0 which already had 16 registers.)

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

The average consumer currently needs 512MB RAM. NEEDS. 256MB is no longer enough. It takes longer to boot than it does to write a letter. The power user needs 1GB minimum. 4GB will seem stifling very soon. Here's a true story for you: I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB RAM on my Athlon XP 2500+ system with a two-drive RAID0 (80GB, 7200RPM, x2) and cut my boot time literally in half.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

Right, what you can't do with 32 bit is have more than 4GB address space per process. If you think that's a lot, do some print-resolution work in photoshop. You can definitely run out of memory with only 4GB.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[pkulak]

http://innerexception.blogspot.com/2006/08/leopard -preview-revisted-64-bit-and.html

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

Also, due to Apples applicaiton structure (e.g. Universal Binaries), it is a lot easier to distribute one program that will run optimally on many different processors. Some apps have come with both G4 and G5 optimized binaries for some time. As far as I know, Microsoft has no such mechanism for distributing binaries like that.

They don't need a mechanism. You could use a 32 bit stub that launches either the 32 bit or 64 bit program depending on which your system was. Apple just makes it easier.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ceoyoyo]

Sure, but it's not a critical problem for the average consumer right now. In three years, yup, we're all going to want more than 4GB of RAM.

For Merom in September though, it's the speed and power consumption, not the 64-bitness. Before you really, really need 64-bit you'll probably be buying a new computer anyway.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[masklinn]

Uh i'd say that 1Gb of RAM is pretty much a baseline requirement nowadays if you're either running XP SP2 or OSX Tiger, with 2Gb the "sweet spot".

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Atzanteol]

And more to the point typically only 2GB of that 4GB is useful to the application. The other 2GB is reserved for the OS...

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ceoyoyo]

Boot time? Right... that's the thing that I do every month or so because there's a patch that requires rebooting.

Boot time isn't such a big deal (unless you're running Windows 98). The 2GB in my MBP is really nice for Aperture though.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[eturro]

Sure, you can get larger memory addressing, but there aren't that many machines where 32-bit's 2GB limit has come into play.

2^32 bits = 4GB, not 2GB.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

Boot time isn't such a big deal (unless you're running Windows 98).

We're talking about Windows XP in this case. A lot of your basic software installs and such require a reboot. I used it as an example, because it's an easy metric to work with and the disk cache is not yet filled when you boot.

But of course, you're an iFanboy, so you just wanted an excuse to talk about your MBP.

I'm personally sitting at a compaq nw9440, which has pretty much all the same trimmings. It's missing a couple of doodads (like a camera) and has some extra doodads (like a crypto module and a fingerprint scanner, and an ambient light sensor.) It has the same size and resolution of display, which AFAIK is the same panel, and the same processor. And of course, I too have 2GB memory. The major difference between my hardware and yours? For what you'd pay to get a 3 year warranty, I got 3 year onsite parts/service. Oh yeah, and the palm rest is a graphite color that won't yellow :D

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[AKAImBatman]

Sure, but it's not a critical problem for the average consumer right now.

Perfectly correct. However, these things need to be ready ahead of time, or we'll have a mad scramble on our hands when the memory limitations become a problem. Hell, Microsoft *still* hasn't gotten the kinks out of Windows 64bit yet. If they don't hurry, they're going to be in a serious world of hurt when the public makes the changeover.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[hcob$]

In linux it's generally a 1-3Gig split... 1Gig for kernel, 3 gig for user

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[LWATCDR]

There is a big difference between 64 bit on the X86 and 64-bit on the PPC.
To start off with the X86 architecture really does suck. It is register starved and the instruction set is miserable. It is a pig but because Intel and AMD have such a huge potential market they have thrown enough time , talent, and money to make it a very fast and cheap pig.
The PPC didn't gain a whole lot from going to 64 bit. If a program didn't need to do 64 bit math or a 64 bit address space then it would run as fast of faster as a 32 program. BTW this is a good thing. It means that the PPC was broken to start with and didn't force programs to use 64 bit pointers if they didn't need to.
When AMD created the Athlon 64 it fixed one of the X86s worst problems. AMD doubled the number of registers. Even if a program doesn't do 64 bit math or doesn't need more than four gigabytes of memory that will run 30% to 60% faster when compiled for 64 bit than 32 bit.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[King_TJ]

If I had mod points handy, I would have modded you up. I totally agree. I have a Macbook Pro and I can't really imagine the lack of a 64-bit Core2 CPU being a big impediment to its usefulness.

For starters, you can't put more than 2GB of RAM, total, in one of these right now due to motherboard design limitations - so people talking about 64-bit CPUs allowing better use of large chunks of memory seems like a non-issue for this particular machine.

Even if I was all concerned about making "full use" of OS X Leopard and its 64 bit support, I'd be better off waiting until after it comes out, and selling my Macbook Pro then to get credit towards a newer 64-bit capable model, because then it would include a copy of Leopard in the box with it. In the meantime, I've gotten nearly a full year of use out of the Macbook Pro I have - instead of waiting around for a Core2 Duo version of it!

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ceoyoyo]

No doubt. Apple moving to 64-bit with both their hardware and Leopard is excellent timing. All the people who've posted worrying that their Core Mac is a paperweight don't need to worry though.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[steveo777]

I have a buddy who runs a lot of photoshop and 3D rendering apps and he goes through the 4GB of ram in his Mac (G5, I think) pretty quick. It's kind of funny to see him get angry about it when he reaches the plateu and his computer starts squirming under the bit of pressure. Currently, he's drooling over the Mac Pro's just for the speed. I'm sure he's waiting for 64 bit support just for RAM support alone, but won't be able to afford it for some time to come.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ceoyoyo]

Kinda defensive hey?

I don't believe normal people reboot their XP machines all that often either (which is why I mentioned 98). XP is a pain to install and install apps or hardware on, but once you've got everything set up there's no reason to reboot except for patches. Even Grandma quit booting up her computer just to write a letter somewhere around the turn of the century.

Speaking of fanboy, not only did you have to mention your Athlon complete with specs but now you've just written a paragraph that's longer than your actual relevant post about your notebook! Wow.

By the way, my notebook is aluminum. There's no finish to wear off the palm rest or anywhere else.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[MrNixon]

32 bits is mostly useless for the purposes of image editing right now.

No adjustment layers, most tools don't work at all.

(Great for storing lots of definition though!)

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[shmlco]

Reread his post where he said "different processors". If you're supporting different architectures with the same application then a "32-bit stub" won't do the job, as it won't run on the other systems.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[misleb]

They don't need a mechanism. You could use a 32 bit stub that launches either the 32 bit or 64 bit program depending on which your system was. Apple just makes it easier.

I imagine you'd have issues with DLLs. Anyway, I wasn't saying it is IMPOSSIBLE to make a "universal" program under windows. Just that there is no mechanism for it. A lot of time just making something easy or obvious makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between something becoming standard operating procedure (as on the Mac) and having only a few people figuring it out and doing it (as on Windows).

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[snuf23]

Many application's on Windows use differing code paths depending on the processor they are running on. In general it's all x86 so the difference comes in with using instruction sets such as MMX, SSE, SSE2 etc. So if you are doing encoding and have a Pentium 4 it will use optimized code and you get better FPU performance. This is the same as a program being optimized for using a G4 vs a G3 on a Mac.
The Universal Binary is not used for this. It is used to compile an application with seperate code bases for totally different CPU architectures. So you get a binary for PowerPC and one for x86 bundled in one file.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Rosonowski]

I dunno, my aluminum powerbook is pitting on the palm rests... I'm not the only one for it to happen to, either.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

Reread his post where he said "different processors". If you're supporting different architectures with the same application then a "32-bit stub" won't do the job, as it won't run on the other systems.

Reread his post where he said "windows". There is no platform a currently-supported version of windows runs on that will not run a 32 bit, x86 executable.

Windows will run x86 code on itanic, it no longer exists for PPC, it no longer exists on Alpha any more either but you could run x86 code on that through FX!32, and on AMD64 (and poor imitations thereof such as those which come from intel) it will also of course run x86 code.

If you're supporting windows, then yes, a 32 bit x86 stub will do the job. For everyone else, there's batch files.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ceoyoyo]

Wow... you have have quite the sweat! My old Powerbook doesn't have any pits and it got used pretty constantly for two years, every day. I did pretty thoroughly wear the finish off the plastic trim on my TiBook.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Bits aren't individually addressed. Bytes are. The number of registers doesn't have anything to do with it.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[c_forq]

I disagree. I think my parents are in the definition of average consumer, and they get by just fine with 256 megs. Their computer runs office, gets them on the internet, and gets the pictures off their camera just fine. Also I don't think the amount of RAM matters nearly as much as the speed of the RAM (for normal use, obviously not true for CAD, gaming, or heavy photo editing). I know when I replaced a slow RAM chip with the 3200 I have in there now it made a difference.

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?

[ScriptedReplay]

2^32 bits = 4GB, not 2GB.

The standard memory management on 32bit x86 archs is 2GB reserved for the OS and the remaining 2GB available for the application (and sometimes, with some OS-level tweaks, a 1GB OS, 3GB apps partitioning can be achieved). One big boon for 32bit apps running on a 64bit/x86-64 OS is that the kernel no longer needs to reserve part of the 4GB segment for itself, so the application gets it all to play with.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Relic of the Future]

I got a 13" MacBook in July, and I had them cram as much RAM in that sucker as they could (2GB, btw). Why? One, the 13"-ers share system memory with graphics memory (a pain, but the smaller form factor was more important to me). Two, in two years 1/2GB will be a JOKE, and upgrading a laptop is generally a pain; increasing the RAM is the best investment to get the system to be "good enough" for as long as possible.

I don't buy new systems often, so I like them to actually last a while. My last laptop was a used Jornada 820 I bought six years ago, desktop was a cobbled together P3-1.1GHz (can't beat $0 though). The last new system I bought was a PentiumMMX (remember those? Shoved between the Pro and the II?) that I got in '97. A little extra RAM helps keeps the legs on an old system well after most people give up on them, trust me.

So yeah, consumer-level systems (or their users) will want >4GB RAM very soon. In three years, you'll be shocked to find someone doesn't have at least that much... which means you'll be shocked that my ancient MacBook I'll be using has "only" 2GB.

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?

[PitaBred]

The 2GB limit is the same as within Linux, where 2GB is allocated to an application, and 2GB is allocated to the kernel. This can change with different switches and compile options, but there is pretty much a 2GB limit for any application on a 32 bit computer. Go ahead, try to allocate more than 2GB, see what happens.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[jalagl]

In linux it's generally a 1-3Gig split... 1Gig for kernel, 3 gig for user

You can have that in Windows as well. You just need to add the /3GB flag in the Boot.ini file.

It is documented here: Memory Support and Windows Operating Systems

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Da Schmiz]

Unless you have a sign bit on your 32-bit word. 2^31 bits = 2GB.

Yes, this does happen.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[LWATCDR]

The probably couldn't. The x86 isa is so well known that I wouldn't bet that some programs use undocumented opcodes.
I guess they could have made an extended 32bit mode but then you would have to worry about the die size and if anyone would use it.
Hell the old 68k family had a much nicer ISA than the X86. I have to wonder how fast they would be if they had the resources that Intel spent on making the X86 the hyperfast pig that we all use today.
Thank you IBM for picking the cheapest chip you could for your little test machine called the 5150. If you only knew that it was going to become the standard for the next 20+ years I bet you would have done things differently.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

I strongly disagree - the amount of the ram is much more important than the speed, for the average user. If you're trying to milk the last bit of performance out of the system, you need fast memory; if you're just trying to go fast, all you need is a bunch of memory for disk cache to keep you from swapping, and even some old FPM DRAM is orders of magnitude faster than a hard disk.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[megaditto]

OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was the first version of OS X to support 64-bit

No. 10.2.8 supported 64bit G5s. That was about 3 years ago!

This, and most of the rest of the post, is just you talking out of your ass (sorry)

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?

[Em Adespoton]

I presume you're talking about running an XP-based machine. OS X (and soon Vista) depend on volume of RAM just as much as bus speed/RAM speed -- because of the way their memory management works. If you don't have enough RAM, you'll end up paging data to the HD, which is definitely not fast enough to compete with RAM. Maybe when MRAM is being used instead of hard drives, this won't be an issue. But until then....

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[wirelessbuzzers]

Bullshit. First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor and your laptop will obsolete in several other ways (battery won't hold a charge, video card will be obsolete, wireless will be obsolete, monitor will have faded). Second, since most [SO]DIMMs are at most 1GB, the chipset probably doesn't support more than 2GB per slot anyway. Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[crunch_ca]

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

They'll need 64 bits on Jan 19th, 2038 at 3:14:07 (or round about then). At this time 32 bit time overflows (for Unix at least). And by then, I'm hoping the "average consumer" will be on some kind of Unix.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[ryanduff]

/me eagerly awaits 128 bit computers!

Seriously though, 64bit never took off... much like other technologies that flopped so bad I can't even come up with their names.

I have a server in my basement and I run a nice RAID5 array and some virtual machines off it. I use 4GB of memory, but that is all that 64 bit has done for me. I was able to find an antivirus program (avast) that finally supports 64bit, but thats about it.

I can't even get my printer to work with it. I have a network printer (hp) set up on the 64bit machine and shared out, all my 32 bit clients throw an error when printing and half the time I get jibberish. (Yes, I do have the correct 32bit drivers installed for it on the server). They just won't talk with each other. I need to move it over to one of my 32bit virtual machines this weekend so I can get some decent prints from it all the time.

As far as I'm concerned, 64bit is a joke. There are no programs for it, no support for it, and no real use for it at the moment. Until everything else catches up its worthless. Much like the space ship in my back yard. Until someone builds a warp engine for it, it's nothing but junk.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[misleb]

According to Wikipedia Apple does indeed use fat binaries when producing code optmized for variants of the a CPU type (G4 vs. G5). The same mechanism is used to support both ppc and x86. "Universal Binary" is just a specific use of the fat binary system.

This is not how it is done on Windows to support SSE2 vs. MMX. On Windows one simply writes different functions within a single codebase. One function uses MMX and another using SSE2, for example.

-matthew

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[greed]

I thought the AMD64 instruction set did offer extended 32-bit instructions. This allows 32-bit applications to access the improved register file and so on.

But it isn't compelling: You need a new operating system supervisor to handle it, because your context switch now has to save and restore the larger register file. To really get good use out of it, you would want to change your ABI calling convetion. This means introducing new magic numbers into the loader, so that IA32 programs can still run.

Providing support for 64-bit isn't all that much more, because not _everything_ becomes 64-bit like in RISC. You've still got IA32-style extension words making up instructions, so IA32-code is still the same. You've just got some new extension words and some more registers to play with, which you can do with their 32-bit (...l) or 64-bit (...q) instructions.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[KylePflug]

My work computers run XP SP2 with a 733mhz processor and 256mb RAM. Sure, it's not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.

My old Tablet PC had a P3 1.3ghz and 512 RAM and was more than sufficent for all but HD video and gaming (due to the crappy integrated Intel shared video).

1GB is nowhere NEAR a baseline requirement except for power users and gamers. I have a gig in my desktop and with an AMD64 3200+ and a GeForce 6800 it can play anything on the market at max (slows down a bit on CS:S with the HDR on, although curiously not so much in DoD or Episode 1...). Explain to me how that's "baseline". I played HL2 on 512mb for a long time and yeah, I had to turn the texture resolution down to Medium, but that hardly means my computer was below consumer minimums, especially since the majority of computers out there will never do anything as intensive as running HL2.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[pathological liar]

SGI also did sort of a pseudo-64bit mode, where you could do 64bit operations, but didn't have 64bit pointers... which made sense at the time because the machines couldn't even fit that much memory (Indigo2-era, max memory on the earlier machines was 384mb) I'm not sure where that fits into your examples, I just thought it was worth mentioning because people seem to immediately associate 64bit CPUs with 64bit pointers.

That includes me when I haven't had my coffee.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[MeatNoodle]

As Apple announced at the WWDC, Leopard will be 64-bit top to bottom. The announced release of Leopard is sometime in Spring 2007.

What's it good for? Mostly increasing RAM beyond 4GB. This may sound like a lot, but when you're doing video editing and trying to also minimize virtual memory page faults, RAM beyond 4GB starts to sound attractive to some. Increased RAM is particularly useful for servers, also to minimize swapping stuff to HD.

In theory, HDs will also be able to be partitioned with smaller cluster sizes, making disk usage more efficient.

P.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[yarbo]

you address based on bytes, so it's 2^32 bytes

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?

[FreeBSD evangelist]

The thing you missed is at the Apple World Wide Developer's Conference they announced that OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
will be 64-bit through out. So, coupled with the new processor, you really can get the 64 bit performance that Windoze won't let you get out of your 64 bit x86 processor.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Guy Harris]

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.

MIPS IV has 64 GPRs? MIPSco disagrees with you:

• Fully MIPS IV(TM) and MIPS V(TM) ISA compatible
  ...
• 32 general purpose 64-bit registers (GPRs)

(No, MIPS I through III didn't have 16 GPRs.)

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Guy Harris]

No. 10.2.8 supported 64bit G5s.

...and ran them as 32-bit systems. Tiger was the first Mac OS X release to support 64-bit code.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[dfghjk]

"To start off with the X86 architecture really does suck. It is register starved and the instruction set is miserable. It is a pig but because Intel and AMD have such a huge potential market they have thrown enough time , talent, and money to make it a very fast and cheap pig."

Depends on your point of view. Whatever the instruction set, the proof is in the performance. x86's instruction set wasn't designed by the braindead, it was simply optimized to conserve memory. I wouldn't say it's a "cheap" pig either.

"When AMD created the Athlon 64 it fixed one of the X86s worst problems. AMD doubled the number of registers. Even if a program doesn't do 64 bit math or doesn't need more than four gigabytes of memory that will run 30% to 60% faster when compiled for 64 bit than 32 bit."

Not at ALL true. Where are your sources for this? Some applications benefit and others don't but 30% to 60% is grossly inaccurate. Some apps slow down due to the larger memory footprint.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[sickofthisshit]

As long as you repeat this stupidity less that 2^32 times, we should be fine.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[hkb]

Looking at your signature, you do realize that just about every programming language works on multiple platforms? Perhaps you meant "API"?

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[snuf23]

Ok so I'm not sure I get this. So say you want to support features in G3, G4 and G5 chips - you have a binary that is 3 times the size with a little forking code that identifies CPU type at the beginning? That seems a bit bloated.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

My work computers run XP SP2 with a 733mhz processor and 256mb RAM. Sure, it's not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.

I wonder (seriously) how much faster it would seem with 512MB or 768MB. My 1.7GHz laptop with 1GB of RAM is okay, but feels a bit on the slow side some days. Heaven help me if I dip into the swap file. (I'm at 870MB in use right now.)

For a new system, the extra $50 for the 2nd GB of RAM is probably not a bad purchase. Especially if it allows you to leave 2 slots free for future expandability. For the systems at work, we're spending the extra ~$100/machine to take them to dual-core and 2GB of RAM rather then trying to make do with 1GB and single-core.

It's a bit overkill now, but 5 years down the road those machines will still be viable.

I also find that once users have the power, they will start to multi-task more until the machine starts to stutter under the load again. With dual-core / 2GB machines I think they're going to be a while before they get to that point.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

My comfort zone for average users was:

32MB for OS/2
128MB for NT4
256MB for Win2k
512MB for WinXP

Most of the time we try to double those memory levels in new systems. Hopefully with the ability to double-up again a few years down the road.

I killed at least one HD back in the NT4 days because I only had 128MB of RAM. I was spending so much time in the swap file that the disk quickly gave up and died.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[wirelessbuzzers]

[ pointless sarcastic attacks removed ]

> "First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor"
> Why?

Because relatively few tasks that most people currently perform on a laptop have large RAM requirements but not high CPU requirements. For instance, photoshop, CAD tools, video encoding, compile jobs, all these take as much processor as RAM. In some cases, database or web serving is limited by memory capacity, but these aren't things you're likely to do on a laptop. I suppose you might want to run virtual instances of multiple OSes, but that's about all I can think up at this hour of the night.

> "Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't."
> And I'm certain that that will never, ever change.

Well, it will change, but probably not in the first generation of 64-bit laptops. Neither I nor GP claim that 64-bit laptops will never be useful, just that they wouldn't gain you that much now.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years. You can even get the backlight replaced for say $300 in year 4 and give it another 2-3 years of use. Batteries are a sore spot and usually have to be replaced after the first few years as well.

(Typing this on a 4.5 year old Tecra 9100 w/ 1GB of RAM.)

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

If you're in the swap file, more (slow) RAM is better then no RAM at all. Not having enough RAM will kill performance by at least 1 order of magnitude (maybe 2). The difference between PC2100 and PC3200 RAM isn't even close to a 10x to 100x increase.

The next time you visit your folks, try and catch them after using the PC for a few hours. Go into Task Manager and look at the peak memory used. If it's anything over 75% of physical RAM (as a general guideline), you should spend the ~$50 to double the memory.

Most users will benefit from a bump from 256MB to 512MB for a Windows XP system. And there's a large subset who would even benefit from 1GB of RAM. Especially if the system has been heavily used and tweaked for a few months.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Rosonowski]

Well, I'm the third owner, so I don't know if the process was set in motion by earlier owners or not, but they developed in the year and half or so I've owned it.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[MikeTheC]

For the most part, it's never been about the users' needs! It's about the needs of the tools that the user uses.

Here's a real-world example: How large of a garage do you need? Answer: You don't need a garage at all. You live inside your house, not in a garage. But the two cars you have, that riding lawnmower, the edger, the four bikes (your's, your spouse's, and two for your kids), the space for the ladder leading up to your attic, the canoe you hang on the wall, etc., these are the things which "need" a 3+ car garage.

So, does Joe Average User need 2 GB of RAM? Well, you're damn straight he does when doing his video-to-DVD project. He double-damn-well needs 2GB when doing image editing of those pics he took of the girls at the beach. (And no, we can save discussions of pr0n for another time.)

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[barole]

The n32 ABI did have double the number of floating point registers available to it (32 vs 16).

Perhaps this is because mips 3000 had 32 32-bit fp registers, but half the registers had limited functionality. They could be used as 16 64-bit fp registers. The r4000 had 32 64-bit fp registers.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Agripa]

Thank you IBM for picking the cheapest chip you could for your little test machine called the 5150. If you only knew that it was going to become the standard for the next 20+ years I bet you would have done things differently.

To be fair to IBM, the 16 bit 8088 had an 8 bit external bus that could use the existing 8 bit peripherals and allowed easy assembly language translation from the existing 8080 CP/M code base. Zilog probobably had a similar processor available based on the Z80 but if IBM had used it we would still have the same issues in the present.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[c_forq]

My folks use nowhere near 75% of their RAM, the only thing they use is internet (IE using only one window), Word, Excel, and their Canon photo software. Also, being older and not following with technology, they haven't really caught on to multi-tasking so never have more then one window of one application running. Luckily they are smart about e-mail and don't use the internet a lot so my spyware cleanups are pretty minimal.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Agripa]

The 32 bit address space includes the PCI and peripheral address space. Hardware and software permitting you can use PAE mode to increase the physical address space but Windows XP is artificially limited to 4 GB of physical addresses. Adding a couple of 512 MB video cards and the rest of the memory mapped I/O will limit maximum usable physical RAM to not much more then 2 GB and perhapse not even that much.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Rosonowski]

It's also probably worth noting I turn most plants brown by touching them (although it takes a day or so) and I kill wristwatches inside of a month, for no apparent reason...

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[k8to]

I disagree. I think the biggest reason for 64bit is that the 64 bit x86 arch variant just happens to be quite a lot faster, for reasons somewhat unrelated to its 64 bitness (larger number of registers, mostly). Of course this _only_ applies to x86-64, and not powerpc, alpha, sparc, etc, which all had more reasonable arches all along, but it is the most significant user-visible change at this time for any 64 bit upgrade.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Weedlekin]

"Zilog probobably had a similar processor available based on the Z80 but if IBM had used it we would still have the same issues in the present."

Zilog's 16-bit offering (the Z8000 series) unfortunately wasn't compatible with the Z80 in either op-codes or assembly language, and this undoubtedly had an adverse effect on its adoption (or rather, lack thereof). The Z80 used an enhanced version of Intel's 8080 instruction set, and Zilog felt that this was not a suitable basis for a 16-bit CPU, so they designed a completely new one for the Z8000 that included a number of advanced features, perhaps the most intriguing of which was the ability to "re-map" pairs of 16-bit registers to act like a single 32-bit or even 64-bit one. Those who used it reckoned that it was a very well designed CPU with the exception of its use of segmented memory which, like the 8086, was composed of 64KB pages, although the Z8000 could address a maximum of 8MB (at least in its Z8001 incarnation) compared to the 8086's 1MB.

In the end though, the Z8000's lack of compatibility with existing software together with launch delays caused by technical problems sealed its fate as a computer CPU. By the time it became available in any significant numbers, both the 68000 and 80286 had appeared, with 16MB "flat" memory addressing capabilities (although the 80286 required a special mode that was rarely used due to its incompatibility with MS/PC-DOS). It did however find a notable "second life" as an embedded controller, and was still manufactured in various forms until 1995 -- indeed, Zilog still make a CMOS "son of Z8000" called the Z16C00 series. Note also that several of its peripheral chips such as serial communications controllers (SCC) were and still are very successful indeed.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[SPY_jmr1]

Never used OS2 much, makes sense though that it would be light on ram.

heh, bad luck with the hard drive... Was that an IDE or a SCSI? "Back in the day", I can recall more NT4 machines with scsi drives in them then ide. The difference in quality of the two types has closed a lot since then, but scsi's were/are usually built like tanks.

Hrm, now that I think of it, computer design then didn't take drive heat into account very much... They still don't that much, come to think of it. I've seen some drives that are to hot to even touch when they're running.

I bet that since my linux box has its / drive mounted in a 5 1/4 inch bay (with rails) in an open case has helped it outlive its normal life. (Everyone can agree that gentoo can thrash a drive ;) )

Spy

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Agripa]

I may have been thinking of the Z800 but the comparability via mode switching looks questionable and it would have been released a couple of years too late. I assumed Zilog had a 16 bit alternative to the 8080 available at that time but it does not look like it. I doubt IBM would have selected it even had it been available because of second source issues.

Besides the technical reasons I wonder if IBM had problems dealing with Motorola in other ways. While I never had trouble getting data sheets and support documentation from them actual availability was always an problem. I assumed it was because they and their distributors were not interested customers smaller then super colossal giant but maybe something else was going on.

Most of the later CP/M systems I used were Z80 based naturally but I switched over to the 8086 soon afterwards and never used any of the later Zilog processors. Internally we used 8085s because of the simplified interfacing and system requirements.

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:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Weedlekin]

"I doubt IBM would have selected it even had it been available because of second source issues."

There were actually less second source issues than was the case with the 8088, because the Z8000 was made by Zilog, Hitachi, and AMD (I know of these ones, but there may have been others as well). IBM could also have licensed it quite easily and manufactured it themselves if they'd wanted to, but it wasn't available in commercial quantities when they were designing the original PC, and even if it had been, no version with an 8-bit data bus existed because Zilog didn't reckon that anybody would want a 16-bit CPU that wasn't a 16-bit CPU!

"Besides the technical reasons I wonder if IBM had problems dealing with Motorola in other ways."

I'm confused now: AFAIK Motorola didn't sell the Z8000.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[wirelessbuzzers]

A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years.

That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.

Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?

This typed from a MacBook with 2GB: 200 active, 200 wired (half by the video "card"), 600 inactive (caches), 1GB free. If I run virtualized Windows or Linux, or start a really big compute or compile job, the RAM is quite useful, but I very rarely use all of it.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

I believe it was a compaq mini-tower case with IDE and 128MB. (At the time, the large corporation that I worked for had a hardware deal with Compaq.)

Even modern designs don't seem to take heat into account. I've seen a few Dell systems where airflow for the hard drive easily becomes sub-optimal and the hard drive will cook itself under moderate load.

I run a few different hardware configurations for cooling drives. The most effective is a bay cooler that takes up (2) 5.25" bays and holds 1-3 3.5" drives. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in, and keep them slighly apart (about 1/2" between), the 80mm fan will push air over both drives at a hefty clip. Typical temperatures for those drives are 30C idle and 32C active. I suspect those drives are going to last forever because of the low-temperature change. One of those is a WD 10k RPM Raptor.

Some of the Antec cases do an okay job of cooling the drive bays. (Sonata, Sonata II, p160, p180/p180b.) The p180b has the most potential due to the design and the ability to add multiple 120mm fans to the case in various locations.

There's also a 4-in-3 bay cooler design that fits within (3) 5.25" bays and holds 4 drives. I use that on the p160 and p180 Antec cases to fit (4) drives into the upper drive bays.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[LWATCDR]

Actually I heard that the IBM used the 8088 because it was already being used in one of their dedicated word processors. Just for the record the 68000 could also use 8 bit peripherals. IBM did use the 68000 in many systems including a desktop 360. Everything I have ever heard is that IBM planned on the 5051 as more of a trial balloon to see if there was market. If IBM had known that it would have been a standard for the next goodness knows how long I would bet that it would have used the 801 or maybe even a new CPU that used a subset of the 360 ISA. I doubt that IBM's goals ever included the creation of Microsoft and Intel as direct competition to it's self.

Of course you have to wonder what would have happened if say AT&T, HP, DEC or Xerox had bought the Amiga or Atari ST and pushed it as a new standard in 85. Both machines where technicaly better than what IBM had to offer at that time and where much cheaper.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Agripa]

I'm confused now: AFAIK Motorola didn't sell the Z8000

I was refering back to the reasons they did not use the 68000 instead of the 8088. The technical reasons are pretty well cut and dried so this is just speculation on my part.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Agripa]

The 68008 was not available until sometime after the 8088 was in production. The Wikipedia article on the subject is pretty close to what I remember of the time. Keep in mind that the Amiga and Atari ST came out some time after the IBM PC and the cost premium of a 16 bit data bus had lowered significantly nevermind the availability improvements in cheap 68000 compatable peripheral chips. I never did any 68000 bus designs but my understanding is that 6800 bus compatability was marginal.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drix]

Oh, I always thought Stata did that purposely to prevent swapping. Regressions definitely run fast when you store the whole dataset in physical memory.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[LWATCDR]

I was sure that the 68000 had an IO mode to use 6800 support chips. The Amiga and Atari where close in time to the AT not the PC. Still for the price point of the PC when it came out that the price difference probably wouldn't have made a lot of difference. The PC was a kluge. The stinking serial port wasn't even properly supported in bios in the PC. It just sucked in just about every way. At the time the PC was produced 8Mhz CP/M machines where faster than the 4.77 Mhz PC and CP/M was every bit as much of an open standard as the PC ever was dozens of companies made CP/M machines. The PC is the biggest example of marketing over technical merit I have ever seen. In 82 you could buy an 8 Mhz Z80 CP/M machine that was faster and cheaper than a PC. In 1985 you could have bought the Amiga for a lot less than an AT. With the Amiga you had true multitasking, color, accelerated graphics, device independent printer support, stereo sound, and a flat memory model. For more money you could buy an AT with CGA or maybe EGA if you spent big bucks running MS-DOS 3.0! Wow a command line.....
To this day none of it makes any sense. Even the clones cost more than the Amiga or ST did.
That is when I learned that marketing is king. And we are stuck with the X86 and Windows today because of that.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[misleb]

Ok so I'm not sure I get this. So say you want to support features in G3, G4 and G5 chips - you have a binary that is 3 times the size with a little forking code that identifies CPU type at the beginning? That seems a bit bloated.

Maybe it isn't worth it for G3 vs. G4 when the primary difference is Altivec vs. no Altivec. You would probalby do as you would in the PC world and just detect the presense of Altivec. But there are some advantages to be gained by compiling the whole binary for a specific CPU. GCC is full of CPU specific optimizations. When it comes to G4 vs. G5, you must have different bianries if you want to take advantage of the G5 because it is 64bit. If you want a fat binary that ALSO works on intel, then you would have a fat binary that is 3 times larger. And i imagine if you wanted support for x86-64 you'd have a fat binary that is 4 times larger. But so what? Hard drive space is cheap. And it is only the executable. There is MUCH more to modern software than just the program executable itself. That stuff isn't duplicted by using fat binaries.

But if the "bloat" really bothers you, any end user can use the 'lipo' tool to strip out the unwanted binaries. Fat binaries make the whole process of using different CPUs a lot more transparent to users. 64bit users on the PC could only dream of such a smooth transition as Apple has provided. Hell, even the move to intel has been relatively painless and that is a whole different architecture completely.

-matthew

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[heinousjay]

Ah, I see a luddite got some mod points. I heartily apologize. It's wrong people who shower are allowed to use computers now, and that we aren't satisfied with your cryptically arranged 70s legacy. We'll promptly stop wishing for progress and join you in your desire to keep things as they were 30 years ago.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[snuf23]

I forgot about the 64bit nature of the G5. SO yeah in that case it would make more sense to compile the binary for the G5 but yeah G3 to G4 seems you would just optimize for Altivec.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[SPY_jmr1]

Thanks for the tips!

Mine has two seagates and a WD right now, and although they don't have fans, they all have at least an inch of clearence above them for the heat to escape to, and openings around them for the heat to get out of the case.

Actually, the machine (its a 1.4ghz P4 on an intel 850GB board) only hase the power supply fan and a cpu fan, and it runs fine... very very rock solid. The odd part is the video card, a 5600FX, on which the fan died, so I found out accidentally that they will run fine with just a heatsink as long as there is not a card in the next slot.

Spy

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

Mine has two seagates and a WD right now, and although they don't have fans, they all have at least an inch of clearence above them for the heat to escape to, and openings around them for the heat to get out of the case.

That only helps if there's air moving in those gaps. If the air isn't moving, it just sits there and cooks the drive. Fortunately, it doesn't take much airflow to cool a drive. (I've seen SATA drives cook in a fanless bay, even with 1+ inch of space all around the drive.)

Hopefully you're monitoring your drive temps with SpeedFan or lm_sensors.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[Weedlekin]

OK, fair enough. It is though a shame from a historic viewpoint that IBM didn't use a 68000 instead of the 8086 family, which were by far the worst of the 16-bit batch in terms of both performance and architecture. Anybody who had to program in the "bad old days" of DOS will remember various horrid hardware and software hacks that were used to try and get around the limitations imposed by a 1MB address space whose top 360K was directly mapped to hardware, and an architecture which divided that limited space into 64K chunks. Those who also programmed on the Mac, Amiga, or Atari ST will also remember how wonderful it felt to work with a CPU that was not only free from those limitations, but also had a largely orthogonal instruction set that had been designed instead of feeling like something cobbled together with bits left over from the 8080 project.

Some of those who are too young to remember the days before IBM launched their PC may think that it had some sort of technical merit which allowed it to smash the competition, yet the fact of the matter is that it was actually slower than most 8 bit systems, had notably inferior graphics and sound capabilities to home computers that cost a fifth as much, and was totally smashed in every respect by any of the 68000-based computers that were launched more or less concurrently with it. Of course, this was quite usual with IBM kit of all sizes, which had constantly been outstripped both technically and on price by competitors, yet still managed to gain and hold 90% of the entire computing industry until the end of the 1980s. The IBM PC could therefore have used a 4004 and still become the dominant platform, because the executives who gave large sums of money to IBM never had to use computers themselves, and therefore didn't care about details like technical specifications, which they didn't understand anyway: if the IBM salesman said it would do what they wanted, then it would be bought, and using it then became Somebody Else's Problem.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[WuphonsReach]

That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.

That might depend on when you bought the laptop. Stuff from 2001 and prior was still part of the "not quite there" era. Plus, computer power was doubling every 12-15 months in the late 90s (up until around 2002). But after 2002, it took about another 4 years for computers to double in power again.

For example, IIRC, a fast machine in 2000/2001 was a 1GHz CPU. By 2002, the 1.7-2.0GHz Pentium 4s were available. But things topped out at around 3.4GHz around 2005/2006 (Pentium 4 CPUs). I might be off on my dates a bit.

So if you bought a machine in 2002 or later, you probably have something that will be reasonably capable until 2010 if taken care of.

I definitely won't classify this laptop as fast, but as long as I stay within my 1GB memory limit it works well. Over the past 4 years, I've upgraded the HD to a 100GB model, moved the memory from 512MB to 1GB, replaced the keyboard / mouse buttons, had a new DVD drive put in and will get the backlight replaced next year (before handing it off to a less demanding user).

Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?

Depends on your application, I guess. For developers, there's no such thing as "enough RAM". Especially when getting into things like virtualization where you have multiple servers running at the same time as part of your test suite. Or having the compiler, 6 web browsers, documentation, spreadsheets and a few dozen other applications all running at the same time.

For video editing, more memory means video files can either be put into a RAM disk or simply use the extra memory for cache (making NLE faster).

Photography memory needs are also slowly changing. Used to be a that a 3-megapixel picture was "large" (figure 9MB of RAM used). Now we have 7-megapixel cameras in common use which doubles the memory requirement. If you're working with multiple pictures at the same time, it's not long before you're into the 1-2GB of working set territory.

But, as you say, until the 4GB SODIMMs show up on the market, it's a bit of a moot point. I know the T60 Core Duo only supports 2GB SODIMMs with no word on 4GB SODIMMs, but if the new Merom laptops support 4GB SODIMMs I can see them being installed in the next 3 years.

Heck, I'd give my eyeteeth to be able to upgrade past 1GB on this Tecra 9100. If I could've dropped another 1GB of RAM into the unit, I'd keep it for even longer rather then moving to a newer 2GB dual-core laptop (next year).

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[drinkypoo]

If they only have 256MB, I'd be very surprised if their canon photo software isn't taking them over the 75% mark. Remember, you have to figure out if 75% of your real memory is used, not memory+swap. Just booting a fresh install of Windows XP, for example, will scarf 128MB.

Re:What is the deal with 64 bit?

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Meanwhile in Linux land, full x86-64 desktop computing is a reality for more than 2 years now. Hell, even most proprietary drivers support it.

Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[hlimethe3rd]

Digitimes is not a good site for this kind of thing. Historically, they've been very poor with these kinds of predictions. I'm not going to find any examples right now, but searching the archives of macrumors.com or some similar site will turn out many.

Re:Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[hritcu]

This is quite obvious that sooner or later Apple will upgrade the MacBook Pro line to Merlom. So the only thing Digitimes can get wrong is the exact time.

Re:Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[Funkcikle]

Digitimes may be rubbish, but nothing beats a self-submitted story which is basically just a link to your own advert-covered blog with a few extra words arranged around a link to...Digitimes.

Re:Digitimes is not a good predictor.

[Anonymous Custard]

"but nothing beats a self-submitted story which is basically just a link to your own advert-covered blog with a few extra words arranged around a link

Seriously! What is this, Digg.com?

64 or 32 bit ??

[Harmonious Botch]

All this talk about 64 bits...on wires, for god's sake!! In my day we had to push the eletrons around by hand.
And it was uphill... both ways.
And when it snowed, the gates froze up and we had to execute the same instruction over and over until spring thaw.
64 bits?? You youngsters have it easy!!!

Re:64 or 32 bit ??

[necro81]

And you kids will have a real hard time pushing those 64-bits through the tubes, too!

News?

[necro81]

The features of the Merom processors (multicore, 64-bit, aimed at mobile processing), and Apple made the Intel switch largely due to Intel's processor roadmap and what was coming down the pipeline. Based on Apple's past desire to gobble up the latest processors as soon as they are available, I'd say it was a foregone conclusion that the Merom would show up in the MacBooks as soon as they came off the fab line. So I ask: is this news?

yay!

[spykemail]

Assuming Apple takes this opportunity to eliminate hardware defects I'm officially declaring Spring 2007 "but a new labtop" season. With Merom, Leopard, Bootcamp, and no more serious hardware problems the MacBooks will be posed to slurp up more market share in the US, if not everywhere.

Re:yay!

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

...I'm officially declaring Spring 2007 "but a new labtop" season.

Not to be a grammar nazi or a spelling nazi or both, but only on /. could a statement such as this be "interesting"

Re:yay!

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

LaPtop. Not a LaBtop.

Why the hell do so many people call them labtops?

Re:yay!

[mcmonkey]

Why the hell do so many people call them labtops?

I just call them nobebooks.

Re:yay!

[gordyf]

They have a bad cold. Cut them some slack.

Re:yay!

[Narcoleptic Electron]

I'm officially declaring Spring 2007 "but a new labtop" season

Make sure you test the keyboard before you buy this time.

Re:yay!

[J3r3miah]

tried searching for "labtop" on ebay.. while everyone is trying to snipe the "laptop"s

Re:yay!

[zsazsa]

Origin of "labtop.". People call them labtops because it's "funny"!

Re:yay!

[kalidasa]

Perhaps, with Professor Farnsworth, he can't wait for the National Ray-Gun Association to get into office and get rid of that three-day waiting period for mad scientists. Have to protect our constitutional right to bear doomsday devices, of course.

I use my labtop for duck hunting.

Re:yay!

[The Ham of Truth]

Assuming Apple takes this opportunity to eliminate hardware defects...

Is that actually plausible? From what I've seen out of Apples response to The Embarrassment Named MacBook, I'd warn everyone away from Apple hardware.

Save yourself some trouble, here. Every time something goes wrong with this thing I kick myself for waiting that one extra day before ordering that new PowerBook. I mean, who switches a product line on a Tuesday, right?

Re:yay!

[spykemail]

I apologize for being used to fancy sites - you know, the ones with edit buttons.

Re:yay!

[spykemail]

Yes, it's plausible. It was a new design and they clearly rushed it to market in favor of testing / fixing problems. It would be suicide not to quietly fix the problems.

Re:yay!

[toddestan]

Yes, but it will be the first generation with the Merom processor! Oh no! Better wait for the 2nd generation!

Re:yay!

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

There's a preview button. Use it.

Manufactured Demand

[wwiiol_toofless]

Core 2, 4x4, SLI, physics cards...

64 bit processing, let alone dual-core tech has yet to be fully applied in the mainstream. People salivate and argue over the latest and greatest and when to buy what to stay "future-proof" in terms of hardware.

I'm still waiting for a viable 64-bit OS fer cryin' out loud, and don't get me started on SLI...

I am going to purchase a single-core AMD 64 San Diego core for $139 bucks and I'm going to be just fine for the next 2 years minimum. I keep my gaming system in tip-top shape, so I don't need an extra CPU core to process all the spyware running in the background.

Re:Manufactured Demand

[tomstdenis]

Viable 64-bit OS? Troll much?

My Gentoo box has been working fine for the last several months [it's a new box] and my previous AMDX2 before that ran fine and my Intel 820 ran fine and ...

Oh you mean, a Redmond based OS... well TFB.

Tom

Re:Manufactured Demand

[wwiiol_toofless]

I kinda like to run Games without emulation on my hardware though. I've got debian on an ancient box for my kids. I didn't run games, I wouldn't be spending so much on hardware.

Re:Manufactured Demand

[Swift2001]

Leopard is 64-bit all the way through. Tiger supports 64-bit in the UNIX part. (My G5 suddenly started encoding video many times faster using ffmpegX.}

On the other hand, if games is what you want, stay with Windows. Yawn. Go ahead, waste your time in foolish pursuits. (I know, flame bait.)

Re:Manufactured Demand

[Doctor Memory]

I'm still waiting for a viable 64-bit version of Windows XP fer cryin' out loud, and don't get me started on SLI...

FTFY...

(As a Solaris 10 user, I couldn't let that one slide. Well, OK, I could, I just chose not to.)

Re:Manufactured Demand

[brendank310]

When that extra core will cost you $10 more, why bother with the single core?

Re:Manufactured Demand

[tomstdenis]

My puter is for work and multimedia. My xbox is for games. If you want a box for gaming install a 32-bit OS on it.

Tom

Worth the wait?

[SengirV]

I'm hoping it will be worth the wait to get the Macbook if it also comes with Intel's 965 GPU.

Re:Worth the wait?

[lowe0]

Buyer beware:

There's two versions of the 965 GPU: the GMA 3000 (old and busted edition) and the GMA X3000 (new hotness edition). The non-X version still only does SM2.0 in software, while the X version does 3.0 in hardware. The X version will also have a WDDM driver that works best with Vista (though the regular version should work at least as well as a 950 with Vista).

Re:Worth the wait?

[SengirV]

Why would a person want to limit their options? Why not try to get the biggest bang for your buck?

This line of thinking surrounded Macs has always confused me. We pay more for less(GPU in this case) and we're supposed to be proud of that fact? Sorry, not me. I want something that can run vista if need be AND something that I can run NON-bleading edge games like Civ 4 and HOMM 5. Is that asking too much? I don't think so.

Re:Worth the wait?

[snuf23]

"something that I can run NON-bleading edge games like Civ 4 and HOMM 5. Is that asking too much? I don't think so."

You'd be surprised. Since turn based games like these have moved to 3D engines they can be pretty demanding. Civ 4 runs fine for me but HOMM V occasionally gets very choppy when rotating the view on my Nvidia 6800GT. This is at 1280x1024 with 2xAA 4x Aniso. Keep in mind this same setup runs current FPS games like Prey at the same or better settings without so much as a burp.

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[tomstdenis]

Um keep in mind that Core 1 is a mild upgrade from the Pentium M. So buying into it was like "wow, this exact same orange looks slightly different."

I knew back then that Core 2 would be a real step up for Intel. So buying a 2000 laptop back then cuz it has a new fancy Intel cpu when your existing laptop is just fine .,.. == teh stupid.

And yes, I know a few people who bought the new macbooks BECAUSE they have a new Intel processor in them.

Tom

TRFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The Real Fabulous Article, instead of the submitters lame-ass ad page.

Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[ThinkingInBinary]

I'm curious... in the articles I have read about Core Duo and Core 2 Duo (Yonah and Merom, at least on the notebook end of things), I never saw anyone mention 64-bit support as some amazing new feature. I heard a few mentions of it in the early stages of speculation, but now that it's the eve of the release, nobody's making a fuss about it. Usually, when a new 64-bit processor is coming out, it's a big deal. So is Merom actually 64-bit, or did that part get scrapped, or what?

I'd like 64-bit, since x86_64/amd64/whatever_it_is_called gives me double the registers each with double the bits, which is cool. (Of course, then I have to deal with all the issues that a 64-bit arch has, like not being able to interact directly with 32-bit codec DLL's from Windows and such...)

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[MarcQuadra]

It's not 100% native 64-bit like the AMD64 is, but it's closer than the existing EM64T CPUs. From what I've read, the Core 2 is actually a bit slower when in 64-bit mode than when in 32-bit mode (but much less so than the Pentium 4-based CPUs, which were MUCH slower in 64-bit mode).

The Core 1 CPUs were basically Pentium IIIs with extra instructions and much-revamped layout and FSB. The 64-bit Pentium 4s were regular Pentium 4s with the ability to break down 64-bit instructions into chunks that the lowest-level of the CPU could work with. The Core 2 is still the venerable i686 from the good 'ole days, but they've done some rather dramatic changes (much more than from PIII -> Core 1), including execution units that can chew 64-bit instructions in the raw. The other huge advantage of Core 2 is that Intel FINALLY fixed SSE. Until now, SSE always used at least two clocks to get 128-bit work done, and usually many more. Now SSE has been fixed to be a lot more like the Altivec unit on the G4, it works like a _real_ vector coprocessor and can chew on 128-bit instructions in one clock.

Overall, my impression is that the implementation isn't as 'clean' as the AMD64, but Intel invested in all the right places, and the overall product is obviously a winner. Sometimes doing the 'wrong thing' really well is better than doing the 'right thing' three years ago and sitting on it. When AMD fixes their SIMD implementation, I'll go back to championing the Athlon; until then, the Core 2 is the best bang, for your buck or otherwise.

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[Sketch]

Yonah ("Core") is not 64-bit. Merom (Core 2) is 64-bit, but there are no Macs out with Merom yet. The Mac Pro is the first Intel mac with a 64-bit CPU. (Unless you count the Developer Preview boxes which had P4's with EM64T.)

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...nobody's making a fuss about it. Usually, when a new 64-bit processor is coming out, it's a big deal. So is Merom actually 64-bit, or did that part get scrapped, or what?

Merom is 64-bit. No one is making a big deal out of it because for most people, it isn't a big deal. Sure if you need to address more than 4 gig of RAM with a single thread for video processing or something, this means you don't need a hack, but really while OS X is moving to full 64-bit support no one cares that much.

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[ThinkingInBinary]

Didn't Intel have a partial 64-bit system where the system could access more than 4GB of memory but the registers were still 32-bit? (It added layers to the page tables.) Is Merom really fully 64-bit, just like an Athlon 64 X2, or can it just access more memory?

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[ThinkingInBinary]

The Core 1 CPUs were basically Pentium IIIs with extra instructions and much-revamped layout and FSB.

Actually, the Pentium M was basically a Pentium III with extra instructions and a revamped layout and FSB. The Core 1 CPU (I think Yonah, the laptop version, was the only Core 1 CPU; they have started adding the desktop and server versions with Core 2) is basically a dual-core Pentium M, with some more features. Merom is basically a beefed up version of Yonah, the major features being: it's supposedly 64-bit, it's got twice the L2 cache on some models, it can do 128-bit SSE instructions in 1 cycle instead of 2, and it's got some minor improvements in in performance (larger reorder buffer, more issue ports, etc...).

Re:Is Yonah 64-bit as well?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Didn't Intel have a partial 64-bit system where the system could access more than 4GB of memory but the registers were still 32-bit?

I don't know about Intel, but programs on OS X on 64-bit G5 chips could access more than 4 Gb using a hack built into the OS. The Merom chips are fully 64 bit, just like the G5s and the Athlon 64, but unlike the Yonah. The real difference is that OS X 10.5 is fully 64 bit as well as 32 bit and supposedly takes full advantage of 64-bit OS's and allows programs to do so as well without any extra work (Xcode builds both 32 and 64 bit fat binaries for x86 and PPC). For the average user, however, this will provide negligible benefit. Your Web browser, e-mail client, and video games will not run any faster. Your database, ray-tracer, and graphics compositor might run a bit faster, but most people aren't using any of these.

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[modmans2ndcoming]

uhh.... the... Mac....books... Already have dual cores.

Just bought an MacBook!

[Numeric]

Doh! I just bought a MacBook this week from CompUsa. I spoke to them I can return it for a CompUsa GiftCard for my purchase price. I'll wait til next month and repurchase a 64-bit.

Re:Just bought an MacBook!

[shmlco]

Keep in mind that there's a better than even chance that only the MacBook PRO line will be upgraded, and that the MB's will stay with the cheaper chip.

iMac

[Balthisar]

I'd like to see this in an iMac. Yeah, I know -- "consumer model." How about a more expensive iMac Pro?

I've had a 17" Intel iMac for just over a month now -- it was bought to replace my homemade Windows PC. I also have plans to replace my "main" QuickSilver with a 20" iMac as soon as I have cash-in-hand, but I may wait things out. I'm usually against the all-in-one solutions, but this iMac really has impressed the hell out of me with its elegance and simplicity. That's no laughing matter, either. My Quicksilver is a bundle of wires -- keyboard, mouse, USB hub, the round thing that gives me audio-in-over-USB (pre-"digital audio" PowerMac), monitor cable, power to the Mac, power to the monitor, speaker wires, power to the speakers. Sheesh. I do like the expandability of my PowerMac, but all I ever really install are hard drives. I don't even do that anymore, because I've set up a homemade Myth box dual purposed as a NAT with 600GB of RAID1 storage so I can work on any computer in the house.

So, yeah, I do want a Pro machine's power, and am willing to pay for a Pro machine's power, but I really want the all-in-one-ness of the flat panel iMac.

Re:iMac

[phalse phace]

It wouldn't be a big surprise to see the Merom in the iMacs since the Mac Pros have Dual-Dual Core Xeon processors in them. If Apple puts a Merom in a iMac, there'd still be a significant difference between it and the Mac Pro.

Re:iMac

[akira69]

I kind of agree, but I don't want to have my monitor tied to my computer. I'm looking for the infamous 'headless imac.' Why not call it simply, "Mac." Give me a single dual core processor, 1 optical drive bay, 2 HD drive bays, 3 PCI-E slots and call it a day.

Re:iMac

[masklinn]

I'd like to see this in an iMac. Yeah, I know -- "consumer model." How about a more expensive iMac Pro?

If macbooks and macbook pros switch to Merom, so will iMacs and Mac Minis, no need for any iMac Pro foolishness.

Intel's Core (Solo and Duo) weren't fated to live long, the goal was to get the new line started, show that intel had scrapped Netburst and make people eager to see Core 2's improvements

Re:iMac

[Vengie]

This is how I feel about the Macbook. I want my 12/13" MBP -- Apple left the 12" PBG4 crowd in the dust. I am a pro-sumer. I'm willing to pay for it, damnit. Here's to dreaming :\

Re:iMac

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Why would Apple put a Merom in an iMac? Merom's a notebook processor. Conroe I could understand... that's the desktop one, and I doubt the iMacs are ready for Xeons.

Core Duo was a notebook processor and Apple put them in the iMacs. That said, they probably did that so they can get to market quicker. Merom doesn't make so much sense when Conroe is about $100 cheaper than the Merom counterpart.

Xeon is targeted at a different market, that being workstations and servers, the iMac is definitely neither.

Re:iMac

[masklinn]

I'm not sure, because of it's form factor the iMac behaves much as a laptop and doesn't leave more room for a desktop processor's heatspreaders and all.

60+W desktop processors (Conroes) require either big heatskinks or very fast fans. The iMac doesn't have the room for a big skin, and they just can't affort fast (and loud) fans, it just wouldn't fit the iMac's image.

Now while the iMac did use G5' I'm not sure Apple will switch the current iMacs to desktop chips.

What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[Zanth_]

What are the advantages to this? I just purchased the macbook pro 2.16 in late June. Should I consider selling and buying a new Macbook Pro? Should I see
a major performance hike? I run an AMD X2 for the desktop system and I do run Ubuntu DD 64 bit, but it is often quite a pain driver-wise with little speed improvements over 32 bit. Vista Beta 64 bit is abysmal, will 64 bit Leopard really take full advantage? I'm I going to be stuck with driver problems or software hiccups?

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[__aaclcg7560]

Film at 11.

Film?! You meant "digital"? Film is so archaic.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[Ash-Fox]

Imagine intel macs being 64 bit from the start.

Okay... I can't imagine the noticable performence gain, and I don't think current laptops need over 4GB ram.

_That_ would have been a killer reason to shell out.

Then why don't so many people buy x86 64bit laptops (they do exist)?

I'm sure they're stuck running in 32 bit mode for 'compatibility' reasons.. :(

64bit CPUs still suck up a lot of power, which is why every laptop which had one, has such small battery life.

Not even the PPC laptop macs had 64bit.

I normally don't respond to trolls...

[everphilski]

... but Windows XP Pro x64 happens to work pretty damn well. All my hardware is supported by signed drivers, including gaming devices. And yea, I make use of the 64 bit capabilities (as a developer). I do dual-boot Linux as needed.

The FUD about drivers not being there is for ancient crap like winmodems - stuff that deserves to die a long, painful death.

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[wwiiol_toofless]

I wasn't trying to troll. You guys act like EVERY user should know how to dig for Win64 Drivers or deploy nix at home. I CAN but frankly I'm happy with XP's familiarity and title libraries. Win 64 is NOT totally supported yet, how does that make me a troll?

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[Anubis350]

The FUD about drivers not being there is for ancient crap like winmodems - stuff that deserves to die a long, painful death. I respectfully disagree, such things have been dying a slow and painful death. What they really need is to buried now :-P.

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[lowe0]

While I'm going to stop far short of calling you a troll, I disagree with your assertion that 64-bit systems aren't well-supported. Things aren't perfect, not by a long shot, but there are a whole two pieces of hardware that I'd like to use that aren't supported, and I expect that'll change when Vista comes out. I've got a Visioneer scanner that doesn't work, and I've been eyeing a HDTV tuner card that doesn't have drivers yet.

Not that it'll stop me from buying a new MacBook as soon as Merom hits....

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[everphilski]

I didn't respond to you ... and don't take things so personally. This is slashdot.

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[everphilski]

I've got a Visioneer scanner that doesn't work, and I've been eyeing a HDTV tuner card that doesn't have drivers yet.

Moral of the story: don't buy cheap ass hardware. It goes the same way for the linux guys ...

And there are several HDTV tuner cards well supported, for example this one comes recommended. No reason to pay the Apple Tax...

Re:I normally don't respond to trolls...

[lowe0]

"Moral of the story: don't buy cheap ass hardware."

It came with the wife. You don't suggest I return her, do you?

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[timeOday]

I disagree - the "duo" (dual core) version of core 1 was the first major step in laptop CPU performance in a long, long time.

I also disagree with those who say, "now is always the time to buy, because there will always be something better coming along." I disagree because progress (and price drops) are not uniform over time. Look what happened when Core 2 hit the desktop.

Re:Linux is the best OS for 64 bit

[alcmaeon]

"On Linux, however, most software is now 64 bit clean, since it has been running 64 bit for about a decade now."

Yeah, a couple of years ago I built an Athlon 64 machine specifically to run 64 bit Linux. SuSE would install but crashed on boot every single time. I never got it fixed. After 20-25 hours spent over 3 days, Gentoo would still not compile.

I ended up installing 32 bit Windows on it and playing games.

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[drinkypoo]

Um keep in mind that Core 1 is a mild upgrade from the Pentium M. So buying into it was like "wow, this exact same orange looks slightly different."

Maybe that's true of Core Uno or whatever they called it. It's not true of Core Duo. Going from a single core to dual cores with shared cache is more than a mild upgrade.

Re:What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[Overly Critical Guy]

You shouldn't be that concerned, since XCode produces Universal Binaries not only for different architectures but for 32-bit and 64-bit. That said, if you're so concerned about upgrading to Core 2 Duo, wait until next year anyway, because Intel will be releasing a new chipset in Q1 2007 codenamed Santa Rosa that will replace the Napa used today on the Core Duo. It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs. :) I say June of next year.

Re:dust + settle

[pkulak]

Yea, I'm really pissed that I bought my Core 1 MacBook. As soon as the Core 2 ones come out, I'll have to live with the fact that the new ones... uh... encode video faster. How exactly will the new processor affect the performance of the machine again? Oh yea, that's right, except on paper, probably not at all.

Re:Linux is the best OS for 64 bit

[zeath]

I have ran Debian amd64 unstable since I built the box in February of last year. The only issue it had was with grub and the drive numbering scheme (using SATA as primary gave issues with the Asus K8V Deluxe SE board, which would have happened regardless of the arch I was using). Other than that, it ran perfectly, and, short of hiccups here and there due to the unstable nature of the distribution, it has continued running well to this day. That is, of course, except for the last few weeks where the box has sat in Windows to feed my World of Warcraft addiction.

On the other hand, I just bought a new dual 64bit Xeon RAID system for work, and I installed a 32bit Debian stable yesterday. Granted it is irrelevant when discussing an amd64 distribution, but even if I had bought an amd64 server (which I wouldn't) I would be using 32bit to maximize stability.

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.

What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[NSIM]

Anybody know if Apple will have the same issue of having to get all drivers rewritten for the fully 64-bit Leopard. I know from being at the initial Win64 kickoff (back in '98 for God's sake :-) that MS made a conscious decision to not offer any backward compatibility with 32 bit driver code.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[znu]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/64bit.html

"Leopard takes 64-bit computing to the next level, while maintaining full performance and compatibility for your existing 32-bit applications and drivers."

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[wootest]

Every 32-bit program will run on the respective 64-bit architecture (ppc will run on ppc64 and i386 will run on x86_64) directly without any emulation as far as I've heard. If that's true, that eliminates the Windows x64-style issues.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[NSIM]

Applicaitons and drivers are two entirely different things (at least for Win64), 32-bit applications run just fine on Win64 platforms, it's drivers that don't work.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[wootest]

Sure, but if I recall correctly, the apps run under some sort of emulation app. If I get the material from Apple straight, the big idea with 64 on ppc64 and x86_64 on OS X is that those shenanigans aren't needed, and so any kind of executable - be they a driver or an application - would run natively.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[NSIM]

There is a layer used to interface 32-bit code to 64-bit APIs in Win64 I beleive.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[rm69990]

I have used PPC drivers for both my printer and scanner on my Intel Mac Mini with no problems whatsoever through rosetta. I'm sure x86 to x86_64 won't be a big issue.

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[wootest]

That sounds like it'd make sense, but it doesn't describe why normal applications and, say, drivers work differently (which is why I'm betting that Windows has some sort of "portal executable").

Re:What about 32bit vs. 64bit drivers

[NSIM]

I beleive it's called wow32 or Windows On Windows. I think part of the MS problem is that the original design work on 64-bit Windows was targeted at Itanic which was of course a very different beast, that was known to suck performance wise, particularly when running 32bit code which had to be done through emulation since it was a completely different instruction set. With that in mind it makes sense to simple design a new 64-bit driver layer for win64 becuase there is no way that you can run 32bit x86 drivers. Then along comes the 64bit extensions to x86 and you've got a 64bit driver layer that isn't designed to handle 32bit drivers, doh! I can't help wondering if the new hardware virtualization stuff in the current generation of CPUs might offer some ways around this.

Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[Soong]

Right now the thing stopping me from buying a MacBook is its weak 3d graphics abilities. Putting an awesome new CPU in it might almost overcome that, dunno.

Or maybe this is the way Apple wants it. I guess there's supposed to be some reason to go with the Pro model.

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[Quila]

The graphics are weak compared to dedicated ATI or nVidia, but don't judge it on how bad previous Intel graphics chipsets were. The new Intel GMA 950 chipset is fully capable of running all the OpenGL-accelerated bells and whistles of OS X.

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[TheStonepedo]

Apple is trying to give you the function it deems useful along with the form for which it is known. If you want a gaming machine, Alienware is supposed to have some decent models. If you want a workstation with really powerful 3-D graphics you might need to get a desktop. There are powerful notebooks available, but I'm not sure Apple is aiming so much for powerful as practical; if you look at Apple's customer base, you'll see quite a lot more folks who care about battery life than 3-D performance.

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[Capitalisten]

One word: Aperture

MacBook is small enough to be a great tool for photographers in the field but cannot run Aperture due to the GMA graphis - for that you'll need the MacBook Pro which is larger and heavier.

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[BrainInAJar]

maybe Professionals should consider the Macbook Pro...

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[GrahamCox]

its weak 3d graphics abilities

To put this in perspective, I just bought a new Macbook (2GHz). Running XBench it actually benchmarks on the Open GL tests (and most graphics tests) 250% faster than the "baseline" G5 system that XBench currently uses as its 100% rating. Sure, for hardcore gamers this is still probably not fast enough, but it's very respectable. 99% of the uses to which a Mac is good for it's entirely adequate. I was initially a bit leery of the integrated graphics chipset after what I'd read on the web, but in practice I couldn't be happier (though I'm not a gamer). Seems to me it's a bit like those who knock the Ferrari for "only" doing 190mph when the Jaguar M220 can do 220mph - it's entirely academic for what you'll use it for in the real world.

Re:Merom MacBook neat, but Graphics?

[Capitalisten]

It's not a question of professional or not - it's weight and volume in your bag I'm talking about. The old 12" PowerBook was used by a lot of photographers in the field because it was so small and lightweight but since it's been discontinued, the 15" is the smallest Intel-based alternative if you want to use Aperture in the field.

Re:What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[jellomizer]

Probably not. You will probably not notice the speed change, for a while. As most of OS X stuff is mostly 32bit anyways, and they will support 32bit OS's for a while, when they stop your Laptop will be to old to run most new software anyways. Getting the next one may last you an aditional year of useful use but that is about it.

Any predictions about the next Mini Bump?

[weston]

The power in the average desktop PC is starting to rise, rendering them less effective as a "switch" option....

Re:dust + settle

[masklinn]

You'll be able to run 64bits OS/softwares on Core2 macbooks too.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[drinkypoo]

64bit CPUs still suck up a lot of power, which is why every laptop which had one, has such small battery life.

The first time I looked - it's probably not true any more - the Athlon 64 Mobile plus its chipset had lower power consumption than a Pentium M plus its chipset.

What about Merom itself?

[reldruH]

While I'm interested in when Apple will start selling Meroms, they're not known for being on the cutting edge of technology. When will Meroms start being available from every computer seller? I heard Intel's been shipping them for a while but I can't find anywhere to buy one and I'm getting to the point where I can't wait any longer. Santa Rosa's out of the question for me, but if somebody would hurry up and start selling laptops with Merom in them I'd love to get one.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[Guy Harris]

Imagine intel macs being 64 bit from the start.

That would either mean that they'd be running Tiger, in which case you'd have the same limitations as on the G5 machines (no GUI in 64-bit code, so you'd have to split the app between a 32-bit front end and a 64-bit back end), or Leopard, in which case "the start" would have been Spring 2007.

As it is, I'm sure they're stuck running in 32 bit mode for 'compatibility' reasons.

If you're "sure", presumably you just got your Mac Pro and tried building a 64-bit app and checking whether it had a >4G address space and 8 more registers to play with, and found the answer was "no", right? (Otherwise, you can't be "sure" - you're just guessing.)

Re:What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What are the advantages to this? I just purchased the macbook pro 2.16 in late June. Should I consider selling and buying a new Macbook Pro? Should I see a major performance hike?

Are you using your laptop as a video processing workstation or a 3-D graphics platform? If not, then most of the differences between the chips are irrelevant to you. Casual gaming is GPU bound, not CPU bound. For most applications, the Core 2 Duo and the Core Duo perform almost identically at the same speed. The Core 2 Duo provides a wider range of Mhz ratings and can support a faster front side bus and slightly more on chip cache. So basically, newer laptops with newer chips will be slightly faster than old ones. While this moves from 32 bit to 64 bit, from the average end-user perspective this is a minor speed bump, not a huge architectural change.

Vista Beta 64 bit is abysmal, will 64 bit Leopard really take full advantage? I'm I going to be stuck with driver problems or software hiccups?

Leopard and increasingly OS X apps will be re-architected to take full advantage of 64 bit chips. There should not be any driver issues. Still, 64 bit architectures are really not significantly better unless you need to address huge amounts of RAM in a single thread or you are performing certain kinds of heavy duty computation.

I wouldn't worry about your chip being obsolete anytime soon.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[Guy Harris]

The reason people are stuck with in 32-bit mode is lack of software support, and 64-bit intel macs from the start would have changed that..

From your use of "would have", I presume you mean "64-bit Intel Macs running Tiger" rather than "64-bit Intel Macs running Leopard". Are there a lot of 64-bit apps for the PowerMac G5 and Xserve G5? (Tiger doesn't support 64-bit apps using much more than libSystem; no 64-bit GUI code, for example.)

Newsworthyness? BAH!

[uberjoe]

is this news?

You must be new here.

Poetry

[mnemonic_]

And it was beautiful.

Re:Poetry

[gardyloo]

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.

>And it was beautiful.



    Uh huh.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[masklinn]

64bit CPUs still suck up a lot of power, which is why every laptop which had one, has such small battery life.

Duh... no it doesn't, the only reason why 64bits laptop had a small battery life is that they used desktop processor instead of notebook processors

Not even the PPC laptop macs had 64bit.

The reason for that may be ... I don't know... that PPC laptops used G4s and 64bit was only available on G5 chips?

Re:dust + settle

[masklinn]

How exactly will the new processor affect the performance of the machine again? Oh yea, that's right, except on paper, probably not at all.

While this may be paper for you, Anandech found Core 2 Duos to perform 10 to 15% better than Core Duos on average with exactly the same power draw (and therefore autonomy)

Apple *always* has a plan.

[gklinger]

As it stands, there is very little difference between the MacBook and MacBook Pro so I believe that Apple will try to further differentiate the product lines by using the Core Duo in the MacBook and the Core 2 Duo in the MacBook Pro. A MacBook Pro with a 64 bit CPU, a larger display and a proper GPU would justify the higher price and be more appealing to those doing graphic and/or video work. For the average consumer who spends most of their time browsing the web, reading/writing email and running productivity-type software, a MacBook will be more than enough. The true benefit of Apple's switch to Intel processors is flexibility and I suspect Apple is going to make the most of the situation. As a Mac user, I'm looking forward to the possibility of having more options at various price points.

Re:Apple *always* has a plan.

[Mistah Blue]

This makes a lot of sense, given that Xeons went in to the Mac Pro and Xserve.

Re:Apple *always* has a plan.

[ronanbear]

They might even put the core 2 duo into the black macbook. I mean having a black laptop and a slightly larger harddrive is nice but some people seem to think that it's not worth $300 more. This would differentiate it a little more.

Re:Apple *always* has a plan.

[theshibboleth]

The cost of the black MacBook is $1499. The cost of the white one with an 80 GB hard drive is $1349. So, really, you're paying $150 for a different color plastic.

Re:Apple *always* has a plan.

[dfghjk]

"A MacBook Pro with a 64 bit CPU, a larger display and a proper GPU would justify the higher price and be more appealing to those doing graphic and/or video work."

You mean as opposed to a MacBook Pro with a larger display and a proper GPU? Yeah that 64-bit is really gonna make the difference, especially to the zero apps that support and benefit it. Just what graphics or video work will see the difference?

Face it, Merom is faster than Yonah. 64-bit is of unproven relevance.

Re:dust + settle

[Anonymous Coward]

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,

This is such complete bullshit. At least when I was buying a PowerPC based Mac I could know that there would be 4-5 years between PowerPC generations, but now with this Intel crap my computer is obsolete the minute it rolls off the assembly line. Bring back the PowerPC!!!

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[sootman]

Yup. That's two 32-bit cores so they're, like, already 64 bit. Right? Thought so. I don't see what the big deal is about this announcement.

(To answer the "is he kidding or dumb?" questions: I may be dumb, but right now I'm definitely kidding.)

On a serious note, I'm also very happy with my dual-core MacBook. 64 bits are great and all, but they just aren't that compelling for most users right now, nor will they be soon. Will they ever? Sure. But buying a 64-bit laptop in Spring '08 because maaaybe there will be worthwhile 64-bit apps in 2 or 3 years is dumb--why not wait until the apps you want are out, then buy hardware at that time, by which time the hardware will be better, faster, cheaper, and have more features?

Looking back, which was the better move for Windows users: buying an expensive 32-bit computer (a 386) when they first came out, or buying a similarly-priced, if not cheaper, Pentium (with much more RAM and a larger HDD) once Win95 was out?

Assuming you buy a computer to run software, and assuming you don't NEED to have hardware laying around so you can install new software the very first day it's released, doesn't it make sense to let your software needs dictate your hardware buying? Especially when there's no firm date on when the software would be out. For example: if Adobe said today that CS3 would be screamingly fast on 64-bit hardware, but didn't announce a date, why would you buy a 64-bit Mac in September? If Adobe releases CS3 in April or June, there's a very good chance that there would be another rev of Apple hardware (even if it's just a speed bump) in that time.

Re:dust + settle

[pkulak]

Print that article out, and it will be on paper. ;)

Re:What are the advantages? Should I sell my 2.16?

[Professor_UNIX]

It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs. :) I say June of next year.

I have a hunch that Intel may be releasing EVEN FASTER chipsets and CPUs by Q2 2008 so I'd recommend waiting until at lease then to buy a new Mac. Then again, if you can wait that long I'd recommend waiting a year longer and getting the next generation after that which will undoubtably blow away anything you'll be able to get in Q2 2008! :-)

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[tomstdenis]

Bah, TurionX2.

I'm more interested in the new core. I've been dual-coring since the beginning of last year. Nothing new here.

But the new ALU and FPU of Core 2 intrigues me more as an implementor of software it's a new architecture to play with.

Tom

How is it not 100% native?

[YesIAmAScript]

If it's not 100% native, what would have to be changed to make it 100% native?

I do hear some operations are slower (can't tell if it's just a rumor though), but that doesn't make it not 100% native.

If you say AMD doesn't slow down to run 64-bit code unlike Intel, perhaps you're just thinking of it the wrong way. Maybe both AMD and Intel are 100% 64-bit native but AMD is only 80% 32-bit native? Thus the Intel runs 32-bit code much faster than the AMD, but 64-bit somewhat less faster.

Re:How is it not 100% native?

[gnuman99]

s/native/efficient/

AMD is more efficient than Intel on the 64-bit end. Intel seems more efficient on the 32-bit end.

No kidding

[grappler]

"If you want to see where the computer industry is going, you often have to watch the computer component manufacturers"

Well we knew that

32-bit drivers and 64-bit apps works for PPC

[mbessey]

The PowerPC version of Mac OS X 10.4 has 32 bit drivers and kernel, and supports running both 32 and 64-bit applications seamlessly. I expect that theat level of support was a minimum requirement for Intel 64-bit support on Leopard. I don't know enough about the addressing mode differences in the Intel world to know if the same strategy would work there.

Re:32-bit drivers and 64-bit apps works for PPC

[NSIM]

32-bit drivers and a 32-bit kernel is a very different problem to allowing 32-bit drivers in a 64-bit kernel.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[Ash-Fox]

Duh... no it doesn't, the only reason why 64bits laptop had a small battery life is that they used desktop processor instead of notebook processors

Perhaps. Although desktop processors do have CPUFreq these days much like mobile processors (desktop processors do generate more heat however).

The reason for that may be ... I don't know... that PPC laptops used G4s and 64bit was only available on G5 chips?

Much like many (not all) other vendors don't like putting 64bit processors in laptops currently.

I still do not see the advantage in having a 64bit laptop, most of us don't even need 2GB, nevermind beyond 4GB.

I run with less

[cappadocius]

I run Tiger with 384 Mb of RAM (128+256). I'm not saying all the eye-candy works like it does in a SteveNote, but it runs without problems.

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[Ash-Fox]

The first time I looked - it's probably not true any more - the Athlon 64 Mobile plus its chipset had lower power consumption than a Pentium M plus its chipset.

Ah, I wasn't aware of Athlon64 mobile technology, I'll have to look into that (I'm interested in the performance more-so than 64bit though). =)

Re:Apple, read this please !!!

[geekoid]

The same thid was said about intel chips.

Re:dust + settle

[Onan]

The threshold of being noticeably faster is generally held to be around 30%. Below that and you mostly don't notice unless you're really looking for it.

(Exceptions abound, of course.)

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[modmans2ndcoming]

uhh....

Nice!! I can get 2 cores in the lower priced MacBooks! Now all I have to do is wait for Leopard...

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[modmans2ndcoming]

Let me rephrase that in a way that makes sense typographically:

Uhh...

Nice!! I can get 2 cores in the lower priced MacBooks! Now all I have to do is wait for Leopard...

Either you can't read your you are dumb.

Re:Apple, read this please !!!

[riversky]

Apple wants games developers....In fact I would not be surprised if they someday make some sort of console that ties future iPods, iPhones, the Mac and media to it. Apple is more and more a digital consumer company that sells, iPods, music (someday movies) and since the game industry is bigger than either one it will sell to that. Apple is a digital media company. Most people around the world when you say Apple, think iPod. Not Mac.

Re:dust + settle

[GWBasic]

If you keep waiting, you'll never buy anything!

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[drinkypoo]

If what you're looking for is peak performance, then your best bet is probably Core Duo (sadly enough.) Especially if what you want is TDP. This is likely to be true until AMD does their process shrink, which I think is coming up soon?

Re:dust + settle

[Anonymous Coward]

Merom inside, Moron outside?

Apple's Aperture

[falconwolf]

Boot time isn't such a big deal (unless you're running Windows 98). The 2GB in my MBP is really nice for Aperture though.

With all the changes Aperture saves I'd bet it will take all that 2GB and ask for more. I'd like to turn pro in photography and have been wondering about getting Aperture when I get a MacBook Pro, but I'm wondering if I'll actually use it enough to justify the price, afterall I could get Adobe's Lighthouse when they release the next version of PSCS.

Falcon

Re:Apple's Aperture

[ceoyoyo]

Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

What it does suck memory for is caching. Doing most or all of the processing on the video card, the majority of the time is taken loading images from the disk so Aperture caches aggressively. The SLR photos Aperture is designed to work on are big too.

I use Aperture pretty much exclusively, only opening up Photoshop when I need to do something special. I've heard Lightroom is good too though. I didn't realize they were including it with CS3.

Re:Apple's Aperture

[falconwolf]

Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

I didn't know that, I thought Aperture saved changes themselves, ie took a snapshot, and not just saved instructions for changes. Thanks.

I've heard Lightroom is good too though. I didn't realize they were including it with CS3.

Oops, I made a mistake. You're right Adobe's offering is Lightroom not Lighthouse. I don't know but I'd expect Lightroom to be bundled with the compleat CS suite. However for now at least I'll try GIMP, Blender and/or POV-Ray. I'd rather not have to pay the price for PS CS3 when it comes out.

Falcon

Re:Apple's Aperture

[ceoyoyo]

The cool thing about Aperture is that it never saves any modified version of your image. It uses shader programs on the video card to apply any changes in realtime. It saved me a LOT of disk space when I went from Photoshop to Aperture.

I think there are some shareware or freeware (or at least free demos) that use Core Image for realtime filtering if you want to try it out.

If work didn't have a license for Photoshop I'd be using the GIMP too. $600 is too much for software you don't use professionally.

Mac vs Windows

[falconwolf]

I'm personally sitting at a compaq nw9440, which has pretty much all the same trimmings.

I'm typing this on an HP Pavilion and when I replace it I'll replace it with a MBP. I am sick and tired of all the hassles I've had with pcs and windows. I have Norton System Works installed on it and it's supposed to give notice when something is wrong and yet it never does yet my computer frequently freezes and I have to reboot. And for a while now my mouse hasn't worked properly, the pointer constantly stops moving then it starts flashing all over the screen. Then two days ago I ran Norton's hardware diagnostics and it said my ram was bad. Well I've already had to replace ram twice so yesterday was the third tyme. After replacing the ram Diagnostic told me the ram was still bad. And this was after having to replace the motherboard once, harddisk twice, and reinstalling Windows a few tymes.

Falcon

Re:Mac vs Windows

[Zerathdune]

I feel like I should note that these days, the MBP is not exaclty the first notebook to go to for reliablity. generally speaking, yeah, Apple has a good track record, but with their current laptop line, they've been having some definite quality control issuses. my personal reccomendation would be to look elsewhere if you're planning on getting a notebook in the near future. Of course, you should look at how things have changed once you do decide to replace it.

Re:Mac vs Windows

[falconwolf]

Apple has a good track record, but with their current laptop line, they've been having some definite quality control issuses. my personal reccomendation would be to look elsewhere if you're planning on getting a notebook in the near future. Of course, you should look at how things have changed once you do decide to replace it.

I've heard users should wait until Apple releases their second or third generation of a new product and I'd wait a year and a half or more before I got a MBP but I can't if I want a working computer. The HP I'm using now is a few years old and I fully expect it to die at anytime now. I will not get a WinTel as a replacement so it's either get a used/remanufactured Powerbook or a new MBP. The Powerbooks are slower than I'd like to get and if I buy a used one I may be buying someone else's headaches. There may be problems with them but there can't be anymore problems with them than with the PC I'm using now.

Falcon

Re:Mac vs Windows

[Zerathdune]

Well, from what I've heard, this is a bit more than first gen jitters, but as long as you know what you're getting yourself into :)

Re:Too bad they didn't wait..

[masklinn]

Much like many (not all) other vendors don't like putting 64bit processors in laptops currently.

God, how can you be so dense and keep on breathing? Have you realized that the only 64bits laptop processor available is AMD's Turion64, and that Intel and the Centrino platform have most of the laptop market share by a frigging huge margin?

And yet you can find dozens of Turion64 based laptops.

The only reason why most laptops use 32bits CPU is that Intel won't have 64bits mobile offerings before they release their Merom chips.

Vendors don't give a flying fuck about chips being 32 or 64bits (hell, if anything 64bits give them more marketting arguments), and they especially don't care if the new 64bits-able chip has at least equivalent perfs and at most equivalent power draw.

It's not a matter of them "not liking 64bits", it's a matter of them not being able to buy 64bits chips in the first place

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

He could be a distant relative of e.e. cummings ?

FX!32,

[falconwolf]

As far as I'm concerned DEC's FX!32 isn't any good. I bought an Alpha computer from Microway some year back and almost every program I tried to install FX!32 gave me the message it couldn't install the program. I found it rather ironic the only commercial app I was able to install was Borland's C++ Powerbuilder. Other than that I was only able to install some free/shareware. Because I haven't been able to use it much, and not at all in the past few years, my Alpha was a waste of money to me. I'm hoping to change that, after I replace the HP PC I'm using now with a MacBook Pro, I'm hoping to be able to find an up to date version of Linux to install on the Alpha.

Falcon

Re:Both MacBook and MacBook Pro?

[smart.id]

I wish there was a "-1, Irony" mod. Read your post.

not that roadmap, the other roadmap

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Jobs was only mildly interested in the performance roadmap. The fuss about it is a smokescreen.

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[Baikala]

Going from a single core to dual cores with shared cache is more than a mild upgrade.

And we're talking of a 4 times bigger L2 cache here. Going from 1MB to 4MB cache size will bring fenomenal performance improvements. You had to pay a lot more in the past for a motherboard that supported the much much more expensive Xeon chips with supportet 2Mb+ caches.

bad is good

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

32 bits of address and a decent architecture let all sorts of products get blown out of proportion in the design phase on the 68K.

Those 64K segments forced product managers to remain focused. I mean, it gave them an excuse to tell both margeting and their engineers to put that wonderful new feature on the back burner until time to start the next version.

Re:bad is good

[LWATCDR]

As someone that had to work on the 8088 and the 286 I can clearly say baloney. Everyone kept screaming for new features and we had to keep trying to find new ways to work around the bloody segments. Of course I worked at a small software company where we didn't have marketing to worry about. We just had to figure out how to get around the stinking hardware limits.

Re:bad is good

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Hey, I fought with the segment registers, too. I hate them. I still refuse to buy iNTEL processors because of the scars.

But I personally watched a number of projects on 68K go down the tubes as management and engineering kept adding features to apps before they were running at all, just because the 68K, being the better processor, should have been able to support the extra features. Disciplined engineers would not fall into such traps, but since when has management been disciplined? Since when has ascetism been a popular goal with marketing?

Re:bad is good

[LWATCDR]

I guess I had the reverse issue. I was working on a system that required HUGE documents sizes, a very high speed database, a very complex editor, and serial communications, multi-tasking and it had to run on an MS-DOS machine! Even when we got a 386 it was a pain. Of course the sad thing was both myself and the other developer had Amiga's at the time. The problem was that the market wouldn't support the Amiga as a platform so we where stuck with the "standard".

Re:bad is good

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Yeah, that happened, too.

Particularly because the 386, being supposedly equivalent to the 68020 or 68030 or 68040 or something, was thought by a lot of PHBs to be sufficient, not realizing that the OS would either get in the way or fail to support the project at a critical time (requiring preparation to get around).

Which is all part of the reason Linus's little project exploded.

Microprocessor CPUs were finally getting "good enough", and Linus provided the kernel and GNU provided the tools.

(68Ks without MMUs were not really good enough, either, and even the current crop are just barely good enough, only partially covering the deficiencies with speed. W^X and the like are bringing us closer. The next step is, not surprisingly, to separate the call/return stack and its address space from the paramater stack and its address space, and there are about two more separations that have to occur before anyone can really trust a CPU to execute only the program fed and nothing else -- which really is not what TPM is all about, either. I'm rambling.)

Re:bad is good

[LWATCDR]

The bad thing was those where the requirements of the task at hand. We had to write a virtual memory system for the document structure, a really mutant hash system for the database, and our own simple event handler for multi-tasking. Of course when we went to Windows 95 we had the fun of Microsofts idea of threads and I don't even want to mention the joy that is TAPI.

The famous not-Bill Gates quote

[Money for Nothin']

"640k should be enough for anybody".

Re:Linux is the best OS for 64 bit

[FreeBSD evangelist]

Shulda loaded the AM64 FreeBSD build. I've had one running on and Athlon 64 for about two years now.

I think you missed my point...

[mbessey]

What makes you think Mac OS X 10.5 is going to have a 64-bit kernel? Again, the currently shipping version of Mac OS X supports 64-bit applications just fine with a 32-bit* kernel and drivers.

-Mark

* Okay, so there's a *very small* part of the kernel that's aware of the expanded address space. But the kernel itself runs in a 32-bit memory space, in 32-bit mode.

Re:I think you missed my point...

[NSIM]

And judging buy what Apple said about Leopard, it will be fully 64-bit.

Re:dust + settle

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure if it was the linked article (and I am too lazy to click), but one review I read a couple of days ago said that the Core 2 had a 7% better battery life while running performance-intensive benchmarks. That alone would make it interesting, but the fact it is 64-bit makes it very important to me (I live in the HPC world, and I like being able to test my code on my laptop before I deploy it).

Re:dust + settle

[peektwice]

You have to decide which features you want at what price point and buy it at those marks.
If you wait for the next widget that has 127 tera-bungles of printing prowess or whatever the fuck they say it has, you'll always be waiting. Set a benchmark and when the product hits it, buy it.

Aperture, GIMP, Lightroom, and Photoshop

[falconwolf]

It saved me a LOT of disk space when I went from Photoshop to Aperture.

Why switch to Aperture from Photoshop, they are for different types of work. Those I've talked to who use Aperture still use PS. If they want a quick printout or some such they'll use Aperture to make some simple adjustments but they still use PS when they edit more than this.

If work didn't have a license for Photoshop I'd be using the GIMP too. $600 is too much for software you don't use professionally.

A few years back I used gimp some but not much as I also had Paint Shop Pro from Jasc, before Corel bought it. I've been trying think of a way to get Photoshop without having to pay the full price and think I thought of how. Every few months or so there's a computer show somewhere in the area where dealers sale old and outdated software at low prices. Adobe like many other software companies sale new versions of programs at a discount for either upgrading old versions or for swithing from another program. So what I was thinking was go to one and buy one of those that is eligible for upgrade pricing.

Falcon

Re:Aperture, GIMP, Lightroom, and Photoshop

[ceoyoyo]

I used to use Photoshop for organization and basic editing as well as what it's meant to do.

People complain about Aperture being slow but it's nothing compared to the browser in Photoshop CS1. Then, if you do any editing other than the very basics you have to save a TIFF, which takes up a LOT of space... far more than the original RAW file because it's de-Bayered. If you want to keep a couple of different versions, that's a couple of different TIFFs.

What I do now is let Aperture do the organization (which it's very good at) and do all the basic and intermediate editing in Aperture. If I've got a particular picture I want to do some more advanced editing on I'll ask Aperture to fire up Photoshop for editing, then the result gets put back in Aperture's library. Only in that case do you end up with a second file.

Re:dust + settle

[darthmyopius]

The core duos are sterilizing machines: if you place it on your lap you run the risk of roasting your jewels due to the extreme heat of these babies. Merom will run at half the power for the same bang, so you can actually try using the new laptop on your lap (if you already have children, that is).

Re:Technology dust doesn't ever really settle

[Aqua OS X]

Gen 1: Core, Core Duo, etc
Gen 2: Core 2, Core 2 Duo, etc

Re:Apple, read this please !!!

[Weedlekin]

"and if you are wandering why a gamer macbook when there is so little mac games, remember that you can just install winxp... hell, apple could even bundle winxp with this machine..."

They could leave OS X out, and put a pair of super original, innovative glowing alien eyes in the middle of the Apple logo to make it look all cool and sinister. Gee, a Windows gaming laptop with a special case -- I wonder why nobody else has thought of that?

Re:dust + settle

[pkulak]

Everything I have read says that Merom draws the exact same power as Core 1.

Sept release.. Nope

[Foo2rama]

Nope, Apple product cycles are 3 and 6 month. So maybe November... The bigger problem is the macbook is still 6 months old, it will run for at least a year and expect a speed bump before a new architecture. The Pro on the other hand is ready for an update most likly in November. It may get the Core 2, and I can pretty much bet it will get the better touchpad in all 3 pro models, that the current macbook has.

Re:dust + settle

[Zerathdune]

Maybe in the macbooks, but it's certainly possible to keep them cool. My Dell XPS m1210 has a 2 ghz core duo, and while I haven't measured internal temps, it's qutie cool on my lap. Hell, it's basically the same temp as when the machine is off.

Not holding my breath on the MacBook

[IntergalacticWalrus]

I'm currently waiting for a Merom MacBook, but knowing Apple it most likely won't happen. They'll probably upgrade only the MacBook Pro and iMac lineups, giving them an excuse to increase the gap between their models so they won't cannibalize each other's sale figures. Sigh...

Re:dust + settle

[_damnit_]

With Apple there is always a cutoff for OS support. It usually lands on significant architecture inflections such as Macs having a G3, USB Macs, or in this case a 64bit x86 Mac. It is conceivable that in 3 years Apple could discontinue ongoing OS support for 32 bit systems. It would actually seem pretty reasonable if they were to go completely 64bit. The first round of Core Solo/Duo models are 32 bit chips. It might then be better to wait a month for 64 bit Core 2 Solo/Duo systems for performance and supportability concerns going forward.

However, if you don't foresee keeping your Macbook for over 3 years, don't worry. It might affect resale value, but that's your call. There is always a brief timespan where it is best to wait for the coming rev release. The same thing happened to me back when MMX pentiums were released. I had an order for 12 systems into a local VAR. I spec'd MMX CPUs at 200Mhz I think. Anyway, the VAR knew nothing of MMX. I told him to stall the order for two weeks as the chips should be released and available by then. We both waited. I got MMX CPUs two weeks later for the same price. I then played the one or two MMX enabled games available for an hour and got bored. Still, I got something for nothing except patience.

YMMV. Apple could do nothing for 6 months! I am waiting though. I really want a new Macbook. I just need to replace the stupid touchpad button with a two sider.