Nvidia 320M GPU made especially for Apple's new 13-inch MacBook Pro - Page 2

I would agree with your statement. Its hard to figure out. My guess is the 13" MBP are among the best sellers. Not sure how they stack up sales wise compared to the 15"

You're claiming a faster processor, faster IGP and 3 hours more battery for the same price as yesterday is a joke. But if they included Core i chip all of a sudden wouldn't be a joke?

As for the Sony Z, it starts at $1,899, which more than the highest priced 13" MBP. It only comes with SSDs which uses less power and produces less heat thereby making the internal engineering easier than with HDDs. Despite that it only has a 6 hour battery, not the 10 hours that Apple lists (you can trust both Apple and Sony's battery claims). SSDs certainly have their benefits, but as the only option for the Sony Z it makes this a completely different class of machine than the 13" MBP.

Also, at that price, you only get a 128MB drive, which is pretty low for even basic users with moderate multimedia needs. And don't think that price includes Blu-ray, that will cost you another $500 on top of that because thin durable Blu-ray burners aren't cheap, despite technically being able to find blu-ray drives for under $100.

The fact is, Apple has a solid focus on who they are selling these machines. They aren't trying to stuff it full of HW just so nerds can impress people with pictures uploaded to Twitter or supply geeky masturbatory spec sheet material.

Yep, I think I've got it; thanks for the primer. I feel more up to speed now. The 320M and 330M, if I follow, have much more similar names than abilities. One's a true integrated (ie, multipurpose) chip. The other is [just] a GPU. I think I got it.

And yeah, after reading about an Alienware with a swappable GPU, I've been wishing for one myself. As you say, though, we're lucky enough to have 'books with upgradable RAM and, for some, even hard drives. My upgradeable white box towers almost always outlast my laptops, which is part of the reason my laptops (conventionally already pretty closed platforms, natch) are usually my Macs.

The only real surprise to me is they went with a C2D instead of going with a higher end i3 with the 13". I was also surprised they went with an i7 on the 15" model.

However in reality I doubt anyone would notice the difference between and i3 and the current upgrade in the 13".

I'm also not sure why this article says the 320M was made for Apple. To the best of my knowledge the 320M, 330M are made for any OEM pre-build system.

Also for the 17" they got a fairly nice bump and the price I believe dropped by 200.00. They are now at 2299.00 wheren't they at 2499.00 yesterday?

The 330M isn't custom but the 320M is not available elsewhere - NVidia reported that to AI.

The 330M also isn't just a 9600M GT as the 9600M GT only has 32 cores where the 330M has 48 cores. The 330M is a rebranded 240M. The 330M is about twice the speed of a 9600M GT. The 320M is pretty much the same performance as the 9600M GT but now it's in the 13" where there used to be a 9400M.

Long story short, the GPUs are twice as fast in every model. That's a decent update IMO and loads of other manufacturers are using the 330M so it's not as if Apple is lagging behind on their own.


I think it comes down to cost though. The Sony Z-series Core i5 with 330M is £1850. The 13" Macbook is £999. Also a big factor in the speed gains from the Core i-series is turbo-boost, which the i3 doesn't support so you'd be stuck at 2.26GHz.

I did just look into that further. Looks like the 330m and 325m are available but there isn't a 320M. However I don't see this as any advantage. God forbid Apple goes with a higher end GPU like the 330m.

Apple always lags behind when it comes to hardware specs. Hell they are still using C2D in their latest 13" update and they used the 9400 gpu way too long.

Yep. Especially at that price point.

In another thread someone posted a chart that shows the performance of the Arrandale cpus relative to a T9800(2.9 ghz C2D). The i3 is pretty damn close to it(T9800). I think Apple are doing their customers a disservice to sell them C2D machines at this point except perhaps on the MB and mini. I think I read somewhere that Intel are going to phase out production of C2D cpu within the next six months. This is supposed to be a pro machine FFS. Why would anyone buy a pro machine with a cpu that is so dated?


I'm not defending the configuration options of Sony. I brought this up only to show that Apple likely could have offered a 13" MBP with a mobile i3 or i5 cpu. I believe that Apple could offer a much more attractive 13" machine than the z series.

It would appear that their reasons for keeping the C2D cpus are just to upsell people to 15" machines which is shitty IMO. As someone who has a 15" MBP as a reference point, I find the 13" form factor very attractive. But no way am I paying that kind of money for a state of the art cpu from 2006.

YMMV, but those aren't even the fastest mobile C2D cpus available. WTF.

Are you sure this is the case? Could you elaborate on that?? Opinions seem to divert strongly here.. I've ordered the low-end 13inch to replace my 15" MBP with 9600M GT256 GPU.

To be honest, the C2D inclusion in the 13.3" MBPs was a let-down, but not a surprise. Considering the licensing agreement spat that Nvidia and Intel are in right now, we won't see any integrated Nvidia/Intel products in the iX series for a while (if at all). Part of me was hoping that they would release an i3 13.3" with a slower, dedicated graphics solution (GT 240M perhaps?). But if they did then there would be very little separating the 13.3" line from the 15" line. And so there would be even less to justify the $300 price jump from top 13.3" to bottom 15".

Also, I've been waiting to buy a new MBP for this very spec bump, but I'd be pissed if I bought a 17" yesterday and found out that a beefier version went on sale today for $200 less!

Of course they could offer a different configuration. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Apple's couldn't. I don't think they could offer Core-i5 w/ 1GB 330M for $1,199, which Apple starts the 13" MBP for.

As for "more attractive" that seems to be a personal interest, not one that that actually makes it more attractive to theor customers at large and not likely to make them more sales by offering their base MBPs at a much higher price point.

I didn't get the upgrades I wanted which means I'm likely not upgrading, but I do think a performance bump and 10 hour battery for the same price is pretty damn entertaining.


PS: I think these might be stopgap upgrade for a much more profound update next time. Just look at how many updates the MB got last year before switch to unibody.

It was a solid update all around, but underwhelming after such a long wait.

The low end 15" has disappeared marking an end to Apple's half hearted effort to offer a larger display without forcing buyers to pay for high performance. We're now firmly back to the bad old days of tying specs to screen size. Apple either cannot comprehend or simply refuse to accept that some people want small and fast while others have more limited need for speed, but want a larger display. They also continue to ignore the mobile desktop market that wants top performance but doesn't really care about battery life because the machine will spend over 99% of its time plugged in.

Apple is touting the gamut of their displays. I can't recall if they did the same for the last generation, but it would appear that their use of cheap 16-bit TN displays has officially ended. This helps account for the noticeable price difference between MBPs and most PC notebooks.

Unlike solipsism, I believe Apple is moving in the direction of just one annual update to each product. The days of getting a new MacBook every 6 months are over.

This can be a big problem for a company's cash flow. When you only update once a year there is a much stronger incentive for customers to put off late season purchases and wait for the new model. What Apple does, however, is stagger the upgrade cycle of all their products so when sales of iMacs start to dry up there's a new iPhone to make up for it. They also count on the general public to be uninformed and thus continue to buy outdated stuff at full price right up to the end.

It's an advantage in that it's the fastest integrated graphics chip in the world. Might be a gift from NVidia as a sorry for giving you defective 8600M GT/9600M GT chips. Apple possibly could have used the 330M but it's about cost. They increased the lowest 15" by $100 switching the 9400M to dedicated like the other 15" models and they would have done the same to the 13".


I don't think the Core i3 would have offered much and would force them to use the 330M dedicated chip, increasing the price. This is a problem Intel caused and I'm glad Apple found a way round it.


Apple have the only benchmarks so far:

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html

They do note that the "MacBook Pro continuously monitors system thermal and power conditions, and may adjust processor speed as needed to maintain optimal system operation" so benchmarks won't be entirely accurate. The 320M is listed as having 48 cores vs 16 cores in the 9400M. It's described as being comparable to but better than the GT310M.

The 310M is here (3DMark05 7149):
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...M.22439.0.html
and the 9600M GT is here (3DMark05 9592):
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...GT.9449.0.html

The listed game benchmarks come pretty close so if NVidia says the 320M is better than the 310M then I'd say that means it'll be fairly close to the 9600M GT performance. As it says on Apple's site though, if they've got heavy-handed thermal optimizations, they may be holding back the performance to get longer battery life and cooler operation. We'll have to wait and see when they ship. Given that it's a new GPU, they may have to adjust the drivers over time.

I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment, I just think this update could be seen as a stopgap for a much bigger release spectacle with a case redesign in a shorter time frame than usual. Basically, the Arrandale delay and Intel v. Nvidia issue aren't Apple's fault so I think the next update could very well come much sooner than we would expect due to the delay this time.

One thing to note is that the lengthening update cycles is the MacBook being updated 3x in 2009, in January, May and October.

You didn't show that it was possible. You showed that it was possible if Apple charged more. The base price of the 15" MBP went up because they added discreet graphics to the base model. The same would hold true if the the 13" models were updated to include an i3/i5 and nvidias integrated solution was no longer an option.

Thanks for enlightening me, Marvin! This is great, as I will still be able to play MW2 and PES2010 decently, the only games I really play from time to time

I'm sure even the lowest model will play Portal 2 when it's released for Steam on Mac.

It would add probably $100 to the cost.

Fine I'm willing to bear it. for the performance increase one would see it looks like a good value to me.

For those who are more price sensitive there's always the MacBook.

You base this assumption on what? The fact that Intel seriously had supply issues and couldn't meet demand, or the fact that Apple couldn't use integrated NVIDIA in a Core i chipset? The lengthy delay of these updates is clearly due to the aforementioned facts that Apple had no control over.

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This thread is full of hilarious misinformation, as usual, like the idea that laptop i5/i7 processors are QUAD-core, and that the 1066MHz Penryn Core 2 Duo chips in the new 13" MBP are from "2007."

We are all disappointed with the 13" CPUs, but don't make up nonsense to justify your emotions, people.

...and stop comparing $1900 laptops to the $1200 MBP.

First of all it's just my opinion. Each reader is free to agree/disagree/ignore opinions.

At the consumer level I believe computers are very quickly becoming CE devices like televisions. They last for years and do not change significantly enough for the average facebook user to sell their old one and buy the latest model.

For the average consumer there are few compelling reasons to upgrade computers any more frequently than they upgrade their televison or car. My wife recently purchased a used 2007 MacBook. It's plenty fast for what she does and will likely remain that way long after Apple has stopped supporting it with OS X upgrades.

Apple already sells millions of "computers" that receive only an annual upgrade: the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, and the upgrade cycle on the Mac Pro is longer than a year. There's little need for them to update the rest of the product line any more frequently than Intel releases new chips and that's essentially once a year.

The problem that annual updates bring is front loaded demand. I already stated that Apple is equipped to handle diminished sales numbers in one product with a refresh of a different product, but it doesn't address the fact that manufacturing needs time to ramp up capacity and that works against meeting heavy initial demand, particularly for a secretive company like Apple. That's really the only good reason to update more frequently and it's balanced by higher inventory, manufacturing and marketing costs associated with any spec change.

As a consumer I'd like to see Apple update their products and/or cut prices every time one of their suppliers releases an improved component, but that would be uneconomical and make their product line confusing so they don't do it.

I agree with you that "average consumers" really do not need computer upgrades every year, and clearly, we have reached a point in CPU updates where performance improvements are no longer dependent on clock speed. Intel and AMD can only add more cores and instructions (and threads) per processor, but software cannot catch up with the hardware right now. Windows 7 and OS X cannot take enormous advantage of 12-core CPUs.

I do not agree that the average consumer does not care about updated specs though. It is all about marketing, and when HP and Dell tout about the "latest Intel Core i7 processors" and other advancements that most of us do not even need, many buyers will be persuaded regardless. Joe Schmoe at Best Buy is going to see the fancy "2010" stickers on HP laptops and will probably buy one over a 13" MacBook with "2009" Core 2 Duo processors.

Tech geeks constantly deride Macs as overpriced and as usually having outdated hardware, but we aren't talking about specs geeks anyway.

Personally, as a user on a budget, and one who does not demand more than my current MBP already gives, I can live with my laptop for another 2+ years. I do not need or even care about quad-core laptops. My quad tower PC will blow away any i7 laptop chip anyway. However, it would be nice to have Apple update the specs of its machines about 2 times annually (which has been the trend since the Intel switch). I envision Apple continuing to do so. This past update was just so late because of limited chip supplies and Intel/NVIDIA lawsuit.

re read the specs
the 2.66 ghz chops can clock up to and over 3,2ghz when needed
also 2.66 means your mbp 13in does not become obsolete as fast
always buy the highest end
always its like 30 cents a day more
unless you buy a laptop every 2 yrs
instead of every 4 yrs or 5

512 MB graphics card? 1 GB ones have been out for some time now. Come on Apple, get with it!

great post
great info
thanks dude
>>>my 2 cts

to me the lowset end mac is more power than most people on the planet will ever need
way more juice
except for gamers and photo shop type needs
the plastic mb would be fine for most who post here
>>>
>>the new MBP 13in highend model should last 5 or 6 yrs of daily daily use
that is the real amazing news for me
one dollar a day or less
virus free
and screen res to amaze all who wander by


9

Hmm. Physician heal thyself. WTF is a 1066 Penryn Core 2 Duo if you don't mind me asking?

Are you referring to the FSB? BTW the cpus in the new 13" MBPs first debuted in Q3 2008.

But core 2 duos came out in 2006 and have only received minor architectural changes. The speeds have gone up as the fab process has shrunk, but yeah,IMO, that's 2006 technology. It was great in the day but the new stuff is better. If you disagree then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

While it may be an upgrade to the existing Macbook Pro 13", it still is pretty bad. For god sakes, the next-generation ATI Radon 5000 series having been out for ~6 months. The mobile parts haven't been out as long, but still it's been quite a while, and easily enough time for Apple to have switched to them for their laptops.

Apple should have tossed Nvidia and their old technology (These "new" 320/330M chips are basically a tweak/re-brand of the "200M" series, which was itself a re-brand of the 9000M series which was actually a die-shrink of the 8000 series. The actual core architecture (compatible with DirectX10) is ancient in GPU terms.)

The newer ATI Radeon Mobility 5000 series is more advanced, more power efficient, and
supports new software standards like DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, etc.

I'm not an AMD/ATI partisan, but this time they clearly are the forerunners in terms of performance, architecture, feature support, power efficiency, etc.

Not to mention Nvidia's (heavily delayed) next-generation "Fermi" desktop GPU was just released last week and nearly produces the same heat as a nuclear reactor, consuming an enormous amount of power. It will never see a mobile version, certainly nothing that can be used in a Mac.

Consider each model though:

The 13" has to hit a price point of $999. Apple can't seem to build a laptop with dedicated graphics at this price. If they go integrated, they can't use ATI because their IGPs aren't that fast. They can't stick with 9400M as that means no update. They could have used 9400M with Core i5 but Intel blocked them from doing this. They had to update them in either the CPU or GPU so they got NVidia to build a new chip and this prevented them from using the Core i-series chips so they just bumped up the clock speed.

The 15" could have had the ATI 5-series but I don't think they have the same tech to turn off the GPU entirely and drop to the integrated chip inside the CPU. Given that Apple already made headway with the 9600M + 9400M chips, they probably just furthered their driver development. Switching to ATI would have been harder to do.

While ATI looks like a better bet for performance and compatibility with DirectX, Apple were probably focused more on power consumption as per usual.

The problem I have is not so much the choice of NVidia as I like their GPUs (I know they are old but they work well and are very compatible with software), the problem I have is the prices. When it's clear that Apple has delayed the update and used lowered powered hardware, the prices should drop. There was no redesign of the enclosure, no extra peripherals and they've milked the old lineup long enough that profits should be higher than usual.

I wanted to see the end of the white Macbook and bring the aluminum model in at that price, even if it had an external optical drive in the entry model or all the 13" models. Then lower the entry point of the 15".

I think the four MacBook upgrades in a 54 week time frame, finally ending with a rigid plastic unibody MacBook indicates that the MB is here to stay. As Appel grows diseconomy of scale is going to make it harder for Apple to maintain their small, boutique-like product line. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 15" plastic unibody MacBook, similar to how they had two sizes of the iBook, in 12" and 14".

For the next 13" MBP I think they'll have to move to Core-i and a discrete GPU. I do hope that means the removal of the ODD to keep it at that price point.

According to Engadget, the new 15" Macbook ran for just over 5 hours in their battery test. The Vaio Z was within 30 minutes of that time.


I genuinely thought I had seen every possible level of fanboyism on this forum, but this takes it to entire new levels. I don't even know what to say...


You honestly think that removing the optical drive (which cannot possibly cost more than $25 for Apple) is going to somehow make a difference in the price of the machine? And as for the 13"... Apple has shown over the years that the smallest Powerbook/Macbook Pro always gets the short end of the stick with graphics cards. From way back with the 12" Powerbook having ancient graphics with a quarter the video memory of the 15" Powerbooks to now with the 13" being stuck with integrated graphics. Their actions have made it abundantly clear that they don't want to make fully featured small machines. That's why I didn't buy one this time, and I don't regret my decision.

Really? It "can't possibly cost more than $25"? Do you have anything to back it up? If I look at the retail price, subtract for typical replacement part markup and then account for bulk purchases it would seem that it could be around $25 or more for that component.

By now you're probably thinking that since you can buy a Blu-ray player for your TV for under $100 that it can't possibly be that much for a CD/DVD burner, especially one that is only 8x speed. According to iSuppli last year the Pioneer DVR-K06 in last year's Mac mini cost $32. That is the same speed as the drives used in unibody MB/MBPs (save for the 17" MBP) but it looks to be the 12.7mm drive, not the 9.5mm UJ857 drive they appear to be using now. Taking that much off the thickness while maintaining speed costs money.

BTW, that is without even considering the cost of engineering needed to include a component that looks to take up 25% of the internal space of a 13" MB/MBP. No, not just adding a SATA controller to plug into, but the entire cost from engineering to warranty. You don't think Apple shipping boxes to customers overnight, fixing and shipping overnight again doesn't cost money? It's one of the few components left with moving parts, not to mention one that is not completely sealed by design.

So when I say that removing the ODD could potentially offer a faster machine with better cooling, a larger battery, GPU instead of an IGP, while allowing for more ports and reducing the footprint and weight, while also keeping the price in check that is exactly what I mean. At the very least it a subset of those items could definitely occur. Do a google image search for MacBook x-ray to see just how much space it takes up.

Some initial benchmarks have been done with the 320M here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=897364

It shows the 320M is a little slower but close to the 9600M GT - almost double the 9400M as expected.

The 330M only came out 40% faster than the 9600M GT though.

These tests are done under Windows where the 320M won't be controlled by Apple's optimizations so the Mac side could be slower.

So overall it would seem the low-end update is the better of the two in the GPU department but obviously CPU-wise, the 15"/17" had better updates.

This means the whole lineup is decent for any kind of 3D tasks now but could have been better in some areas. When the machines ship with 4GB RAM, they could have setup the GPUs with 512MB VRAM across the lineup and on the higher end, the GPU performance is lacking somewhat for the price.

Seems one could also argue that a slightly slower CPU and a slightly smaller hard drive is not much to give up for a £250 price reduction!