Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 06 June 2007 02:02
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Apple have finally updated their flagship MacBook Pro line to sport the
latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, LED screens, bigger hard drives, a
full HD screen option – but the ‘Robson’ Turbo cache seems missing.
If you’ve been waiting for
Apple to release updated MacBook Pro models, the wait is finally over as Apple finally launches Intel’s “Santa Rosa” enhanced Core 2 Duo, allowing the claim that the new MacBook Pro is 50% faster than the original ‘Core Duo’ model.
Sporting the same classic MacBook design we’ve now been familiar with for years, the one-inch thin MacBook Pro has undergone some serious internal upgrading, including a new ‘mercury-free, power-efficient LED-backlit display’ that helps Apple get closer to their ‘green’ goals.
Philips Schiller, Apple’s Senior Veep of Worldwide Product Marketing said that: “With Intel Core 2 Duo performance, more memory and state-of-the-art graphics, this MacBook Pro is a portable powerhouse for creative and professional users".
Schiller continued that: "Apple’s notebooks have always led the industry in innovation with features like built-in 802.11 and the MagSafe Power Adapter, and now the industry’s first 15-inch LED-backlit display is another step toward completely eliminating mercury from our displays.”
Santa Rosa is the code name Intel gave to its new Core 2 Duo platform, which in the PC world is known as Centrino Duo.
Benefits include the Core 2 Duo processor now coming with a 4MB L2 cache, an 800 Mhz frontside bus, up to 4GB of memory (with 2GB installed as standard) along with support for 667Mhz DDR2 memory and support for an internal hard drive up to 250Gb in size, but sadly, no mention of Intel’s ‘Turbo Cache’, previously code named Robson, is mentioned in Apple’s press release or can be seen after closely investigation the MacBook Pro’s product pages and tech spec sheet.
In Intel demonstrations, two identically confirgured Lenovo PCs saw the unit equipped with 1Gb of Turbo Cache perform a graphically intense operation in 79 seconds, while the unit without the Turbo Cache but otherwise identical took around 260 seconds to complete the very same task. Given the demonstrable speed boost of using on-board flash memory to speed up hard disk operations by caching the most commonly used operations on very fast cache, the apparent omission is a tad disappointing.
But on the plus side, what else is included in the new Apple MacBook Pro? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion!
