I wanted to know if the new Macbook Pro's (April 2010) are quad core or dual core processors? I've poked around on the intel.com site and I can't tell. Thanks!
Below are some notes-to-self that I made back in January when I was researching laptop purchases for friends and family. It includes the best information I found; unfortunately, the non-HN links in the below are in German.
Summarizing the linked content: It's been a while, but my impression of the best choice was the 520M. The 540M gave a bit more performance, but depending on price bump wouldn't be worth it. The 620M actually degrades when running 3D rendering on the integrated graphics (maybe not an issue in the new Macbooks with their dedicated graphics switchover); speculation was that it was hitting its thermal envelope and stepping down.
Integrated graphics on the 3xx are significantly slower. IG on the 4xx are a bit slower. However, it's only at the 5xx level that hardware support for 256 bit AES, and a few other things, get turned on.
This is from memory; I may have mis-remembered something.
Also, speculation was that the next revision would be out in summer and that there was a good deal of room for improvement in efficiency / power reduction. (I think this last may have been speculated at anandtech.com (or maybe elsewhere), in an article I don't have linked below.)
all the i5/i7 macbooks seem to be running on the Arrandale line, so that would make them all dual core.
it looks like the top i7 macbook is using the Intel Core i7-620M processor. the two i5 models are the Intel Core i5-520M (2.4GHz) and the Intel Core i5-540M (2.53GHz).
Summarizing the linked content: It's been a while, but my impression of the best choice was the 520M. The 540M gave a bit more performance, but depending on price bump wouldn't be worth it. The 620M actually degrades when running 3D rendering on the integrated graphics (maybe not an issue in the new Macbooks with their dedicated graphics switchover); speculation was that it was hitting its thermal envelope and stepping down.
Integrated graphics on the 3xx are significantly slower. IG on the 4xx are a bit slower. However, it's only at the 5xx level that hardware support for 256 bit AES, and a few other things, get turned on.
This is from memory; I may have mis-remembered something.
Also, speculation was that the next revision would be out in summer and that there was a good deal of room for improvement in efficiency / power reduction. (I think this last may have been speculated at anandtech.com (or maybe elsewhere), in an article I don't have linked below.)
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1/21/2010 1:14:27 PM
http://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-Intel-Core-i3-i5-i7-Prozes...
via
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066938
1/24/2010 12:54:01 PM
The notebookcheck article cites these further articles:
NBC vor Ort: Intel stellt neues Prozessoren-Line-up vor http://www.notebookcheck.com/NBC-vor-Ort-Intel-stellt-neues-...
Test Dell Studio 1558 Notebook http://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-Dell-Studio-1558-Notebook....