[dowNNshift]

So the rumor is Penryns could be in Macs as soon as next week...

Kinda cool, but I just bought a Merom based MacBook Pro. Yeah, yeah I know... I should have patience, MacWorld is next week.

Now I don't think Penryn is going to make Meroms obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, but in all honesty though, how much performance difference should be expected vs the Merom?

From everything I've read, the key features are 6 megs of cache, a lower 1.15 voltage of the core saving battery life, and SSE4 instructions. Has anyone heard if SSE4 will add any benefit to applications utilizing virtualization (i.e. Parallels / Fusion)?

What are yall's thoughts?

[Dark Goob]

Well I bought the Merom back in June, the day they came out. Honestly I have been very unhappy with this computer's performance.

First of all, Apple's graphics card drivers for the NVIDIA 8600M GT are basically crap compared to the Windows Vista drivers. On Windows Vista, there is an NVIDIA Control Panel that lets you force anti-aliasing to be on, even in games that don't support it. This makes Second Life look great, for example. Also, games run way better on Vista on the same hardware. What's even worse, all the Mac people on these boards always just say, "Macs aren't for gaming" and crap like that. Well, why does it have an NVIDIA 8600M GT in it then??

As well, disk performance just isn't that great on this computer. The hard drive is extremely difficult to replace.

Even though I bought the AppleCare, I'm highly considering upgrading this computer to whatever comes out in a week or two. I'll likely sell this thing and then get whatever they replace it with, which I PRAY TO GOD has an ATI chip in it, since Apple does not seem to be able to write a driver that takes any kind of advantage of the NVIDIA chip.

-=DG=-

[Simon]

Originally Posted by dowNNshift 

Now I don't think Penryn is going to make Meroms obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, but in all honesty though, how much performance difference should be expected vs the Merom?

Penryn by itself won't be a reason to ditch your Merom MBP. In everyday tasks Penryn will at best offer 10% performance advantage and roughly 15min more battery time on an otherwise equal MBP.


In terms of performance the real question is how quickly we'll see apps make use of the SSE4 instruction set. That's where the biggest speed improvements are to be expected.


In terms of battery life I guess whatever gains Penryn will give, might be used up by the GPU if Apple decides to use a more powerful GPU or to underclock the current GPU less like they have done in the past with new 15" MBP revisions.

Of course Penryn will not be the only new thing in the next MBP revision. Penryn by itself won't be a reason to upgrade, but a faster/better GPU, larger and faster HDDs (maybe also an SSD option?), and possibly a new case design might be a reason to replace a current Merom MBP with the new MBP. We'll know in exactly a week from today.

[MacosNerd]

I have the June MBP and I'll counter Goob's issue and state that I've been very pleased with the performance. I will say that I don't use bootcamp/windows so I cannot comment on performance in that arena.

Photoshop, Aperture, Dreamweaver all pretty good performance wise. Could it be better, sure, I'll always want a faster machine but the MBP's performance is good.

How will my MBP fair against the next generation of MBP's who knows but I'm content with the performance I now have.

[dowNNshift]

I saw that same write up Simon and I agree with you that it will be interesting to see how Leopard integrates with SSE4 instructions. The current batteries are technologically leaps and bounds ahead of those even 2 years ago, so its good to see Intel trying to make strides too.

Eh, I'm not worried at all on upgrading my hard drive as I'm an Apple Certified Tech. I've opened these machines up so many times, I have it memorized. I ordered the base model and purchased aftermarket 4GB of RAM and one of those new 7200RPM 160GB Hitachi drives with 16 megs of cache. I'm really excited about it.

The main thing I'm worried about missing out on is the chance that SSE4 will optimize virtualization. I was looking on Wikipedia trying to analyze those details, but I'm a hardware tech not a software engineer ...heh

It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles if an upgrade does truly happen.

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

I have the June MBP and I'll counter Goob's issue and state that I've been very pleased with the performance. I will say that I don't use bootcamp/windows so I cannot comment on performance in that arena.

Photoshop, Aperture, Dreamweaver all pretty good performance wise. Could it be better, sure, I'll always want a faster machine but the MBP's performance is good.

How will my MBP fair against the next generation of MBP's who knows but I'm content with the performance I now have.

Oh yeah, for any 2D or music applications this computer is a dream. I've been extremely pleased with the performance of virtual instruments while recording, in particular. Much better than my G4 for that. Photoshop already ran very very well on my G4 however so I can't say that this computer is substantially better than the 1.67 G4 for the type of Photoshop tasks I do. Bridge runs spectacular on it though; the new version of Bridge is the best image management program I've ever used and is phenomenal on this computer.

But you have to realize, a lot of us bought this computer for the NVIDIA 8600M GT processor. If you intend to do 3D work like Second Life with your computer, or gaming, then I highly recommend to just buy a PC. Because Apple is just crap for that right now -- their drivers suck and have no features at all (no NVIDIA Control Panel).

And this is particularly sad, because Apple really has no excuse for lacking in this area. Look. I am well aware of Microsoft's dominance in the gaming arena. But you have to realize that in the next five to 10 years, 3D internet applications involving virtual reality will become very commonplace. Also gaming is not "just for kids" or "just for distraction" anymore -- the game industry is now bigger than Hollywood. So computer game _development_ is a major business. So tell me, why would Apple concentrate sooo hard on applications for creative development like Final Cut Pro Studio and Aperture and Logic, but not focus at all on the 3D creative development areas such as Second Life or gaming?

Personally I think that the Mac platform is in serious jeopardy if Apple can't get their act together in the 3D realm...

-=DG=-

[tinkered]

DG,

First, thanks for digressing this thread away from the CPU and redirected towards the GPU.

Second, Apple doesn't write graphics drivers, just like Microsoft doesn't write graphics drivers. The GPU maker writes the drivers. Both NVIDIA and ATI have decided it is a low priority to create a control panel for macs. Frankly, if you want full control over your GPU you should be running windows with omega drivers, which can force all sorts of things, as well as over-clock on the fly.

Third, I completely agree with you that 3D gaming is really lacking on Macs. This is Apple's fault to some extent, in that they neglected to really engage game developers in a dialogue for quite sometime now. Still, that is just part of the problem. There is also the problem that OpenGL is not as popular as DirectX, which means most games are made for windows and DirectX and then ported to Mac and OpenGL. This porting often results in less than optimal performance. Only a few game developers have really tried to optimize for Macs in the same way they do for Windows. In fact, NVIDIA drivers for windows have real issues when it comes to OpenGL; in many ways I'd blame NVIDIA for not knowing how to optimize a driver for OpenGL.

[MacosNerd]

Originally Posted by Dark Goob 

Personally I think that the Mac platform is in serious jeopardy if Apple can't get their act together in the 3D realm...
-=DG=-

Oh please people have been saying apple is doomed since they incorporated.

While I do not play games, I do know people who do and they're pleased with the performance. Please do not infer your experience to a blanket statement. I'm not saying MBP's are perfect but I'm happy with my experience, I've not seen or heard any complaints about game performance. Are people unhappy with the 3d performance I'm sure there are as you cannot please everyone

Since this thread isn't the place to discuss GPUs or 3d performance, no need to hijack this thread further. I'll circle back and say I'm looking forward to seeing what apple may release next week. Of course since my MBP is 6 months old, there's no way I'm going to buy another laptop.