[Orion27]

The Release of Centrino Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa bodes well for speed increases and energy management. Will we see it in the new MacBook Pro's

[mduell]

800Mhz FSB and 4GB RAM are marginal improvements; nice, but not huge deals.

Robson (flash memory accelerator) is the hot new thing. Google for some of the demos Intel has provided at various shows/conventions. You're looking at reducing boot time (OS and apps) by 50%.

[Orion27]

Originally Posted by mduell 

800Mhz FSB and 4GB RAM are marginal improvements; nice, but not huge deals.

Robson (flash memory accelerator) is the hot new thing. Google for some of the demos Intel has provided at various shows/conventions. You're looking at reducing boot time (OS and apps) by 50%.

Flash of couse is the holy grail but the cost is prohibitive. I'd hold out for the the Santa Rosa chipset if I could gain an hour of battery time. Is the energy management of the new chipset worth
the wait? Are we looking at the second of third quarter of 2007 or longer?

[mduell]

Santa Rosa is going to have 512MB-1GB flash at launch; that's $18-35, far from cost prohibitive in a $2000+ laptop.
I don't see anything coming that's going to increase the battery life by 33%; closer to 10% would be realistic.
The latest I've seen says 1H 2007 for the Santa Rosa launch.

[Simon]

IMHO the 800 MHz FSB and the >3GB RAM limit are the really interesting things for Mac users. Robson's reduced boot times might be useful for PC users that boot often (Windows, anyone?) or have long boot time (my Linux PC for example). But on a Mac the boot process is usually very fast and more importantly, you don't boot often.

However, being able to actually use 4 GB RAM will be of interest to people running professional apps (CS3, scientific computing, etc.). And finally, making use of Merom's full potential without the 667MHz FSB bottleneck should be a nice improvement.

OTOH I'm wondering if Robson technology will offer other benefits. I'm anxiously awaiting to see what kind of apps will gain from this flash caching. And I'm certain we'll see considerable improvements further down the road once developers adapt their code.

[SEkker]

Maybe Apple could use part of the trimmed down Mac OSX developed for iPhone to put into flash storage. That might speed up not only boot times, but any application dependent on reading the hard drive.

[Javizun]

667MHz-800MHz=133MHz diffrence

Sure on paper and looking at the numbers wow 800 is alot but is it worth the wait or any type of hype?
Me personally i think not-whats more attractive is the 4gb ram on a laptop NOW that makes a world of diffrence is actually 1gb more then what we currenlty can have on our macbooks pro and a Gigabyte (GB) is 1,024 Megabytes
On paper is way more attractive then 133 increase and in performance that means a HUGE perfomance boost.

Flash is attractive as well to be able to reduce boot time is extremely attractive.

I see that for the next 2-3 years i will be fine with my macbook pro-till then laptops
will up to par with desktops and extremely slim and mobile with many options.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Simon 

IMHO the 800 MHz FSB and the >3GB RAM limit are the really interesting things for Mac users. Robson's reduced boot times might be useful for PC users that boot often (Windows, anyone?) or have long boot time (my Linux PC for example). But on a Mac the boot process is usually very fast and more importantly, you don't boot often.

However, being able to actually use 4 GB RAM will be of interest to people running professional apps (CS3, scientific computing, etc.). And finally, making use of Merom's full potential without the 667MHz FSB bottleneck should be a nice improvement.

OTOH I'm wondering if Robson technology will offer other benefits. I'm anxiously awaiting to see what kind of apps will gain from this flash caching. And I'm certain we'll see considerable improvements further down the road once developers adapt their code.

Mac users may not be booting often (unless they switch between Windows and OSX), but Mac laptop users are sleeping/hibernating and waking a lot; Robson helps there too (Intel says it cuts the wake time in half). And it cuts the application load time in half, an important factor on those memory-starved Macs. Robson also adds an estimated 20 minutes to laptop battery life.

General info and performance estimates: Overcoming Disk Drive Access Bottlenecks with Intel® Robson Technology
More explanation and some actual results: AnandTech: Fall IDF 2006 - Day 1: Laser FSBs, more Alan Wake, Flash in Vista & DDR3

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Javizun 

667MHz-800MHz=133MHz diffrence

Sure on paper and looking at the numbers wow 800 is alot but is it worth the wait or any type of hype?

It depends on what you do. The 133 MHz per se isn't the big issue, but bus starvation of the CPU is. Some applications do not benefit as much as they could from Merom due to bus saturation. Benchmarks have shown that there are certain areas where Merom offers no improvement over Yonah due to bus limitation. If you have such tasks, Santa Rosa's FSB unleashing Merom's full potential will be a welcome improvement.

[Simon]

Mac users may not be booting often (unless they switch between Windows and OSX), but Mac laptop users are sleeping/hibernating and waking a lot; Robson helps there too (Intel says it cuts the wake time in half).

Of course if you disable safe sleep your sleep/wake time is virtually zero and Robson won't change anything about that. IMHO the application load time reduction is much more interesting. I'm anxious to see how much we'll gain and especially how it will be implemented in the OS. It must be done smarter than just simple caching if there's supposed to be a considerable improvement even when launching an app for the first time.

Good stuff coming up.

[AppleOptionFour]

My question is...when will Penryn be in a MacBook?

[Simon]

Originally Posted by AppleOptionFour 

My question is...when will Penryn be in a MacBook?

Penryn is slated for Q4/07 so I'm guessing a Penryn MBP could be announced at MWSF 08. That would likely make it the next MBP after the Santa Rosa generation (which we will hopefully see in Spring).

[AppleOptionFour]

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