Availability of Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pros constrained ahead of redesigned models - Page 5

Yeah, it's good they are focusing on graphics though and at least bringing the IGP up to last year's dedicated GPUs. Couple it with the fact that SSD is now $1/GB and it makes for a very fast, affordable machine:

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-CT256M4SSD2/dp/B004W2JL2A/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335559934&sr=8-3

Apple tends to charge more for SSD but they could overhaul the whole lineup with SSD at $1/GB, even if they used 128GB boot drives on top of 320-512GB storage drives.

The desktop models will get the power drop and run cooler so machines like the iMac won't damage hard drives and displays with excess heat. The over-clocked chips perform very well:

http://www.techspot.com/review/523-ivy-bridge-intel-core-i7-3770k/page9.html

The 3770k that will go in the iMac breaks 10 in Cinebench at 4.9GHz. That's impressive for a quad-core, considering the 12-core Mac Pro gets 15. Hook up 2 over-clocked PCs to an iMac and it will outperform the render performance of a 12-core E5-2690.

The 15" MBP chips seem to be up to 30% faster in CPU performance:

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73720QM-Ivy-Bridge-Mobile-Processor-Review-/?page=6

and the graphics performance is close to the 6630M in the Mini and 6490M in the old 15". This is fine for the 13" models but the 15" models should keep the dedicated GPUs and going by the drivers in Mountain Lion, it points to the Radeon 7000 series, which were released this week:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/amd_launches_energy-efficient_radeon_7000m_mobile_gpu_series

The 7770M would go into the entry 15". The 6770M gets 30fps on high in Skyrim:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6770M.43955.0.html

so 36.9fps would be a minor speedup but still decent. The 7970M should go into the iMac and gets 70fps vs 40fps for the 6970M. I think the incoming updates will be good for the whole lineup - hopefully they'll put a 7730M in the Mini with a bit more VRAM this time (e.g 512MB).

I think you mis the point. The Mini will continue to use the same power class of processors into the future, any power savings due to the process shrinks just gets rolled into more performance. Apple might have a slightly lower power entry model but I would expect the processors in the future to be in the 35 to 45 watt class.

Well that is my opinion, some are actually disappointed with Ivy Bridge as in some cases it appears to use more power than Sandy Bridge. Most of that power appears to go to the GPU. At least you are getting better than normal performance increases from the GPU.

As to waiting, well I will be spending the entire year resisting the desire to get a new Mac. That won't be easy at all.

Read that Acer is going to ship laptops with the new Ivy Bridge mobile chips next week.

 

I don't think MBPs can be that far off. Don't see why they'd "wait" for WWDC - there really is no reason for that.. I would expect Apple to do a little Cupertino event for completely redesigned MBPs though so there should be invites going out ...

 

 

The mini would do well with 1GB of vram given that 1GB is becoming the standard for things like Creative Suite. This could make it a much more competitive machine. Regarding the 3770k, that's nothing new. People did this with the W3670 or 3680 to match the 12 core too. This was possible in 2010. It will not turbo boost to 4.9Ghz in the imac, and on a Mac you won't have any over-clocking options. The mobile cpus look quite good, but I'll see how they perform in a mac laptop. We'll probably see a lot of idiots whining that Apple couldn't go to a thinner design due to heat concerns or something like that. One of the bloggers will fabricate such a story if the design remains similar. Anyway I'm due for a new machine this year, but it's actually tough to determine my needs this time around. I'd actually gain quite a lot from CUDA, but that's not an easy option on a Mac.

 

 

 

 

I think that's a belter of a GPU for the next iMac.  Just a shame we don't have 'Haswell' cpu to go alongside it.

 

Still, having less heat from cpu etc to prevent eg HD damage is still a good thing.

 

Lemon Bon Bon.

CUDA is a short term play! I read somewhere that even Adobe is moving to OpenCL. There is a huge amount of momentum in the industry behind OpenCL, so what you really want to look at is hardwares ability to support OpenCL well.

As to the Mini, this is another failing platform from Apple that doesn't have to fail but Apple seems hell bent to make sure it is never configured in a reasonable way. It is nice that they wised up and put a real GPU in the box, but then the show contempt for their customers by allocating a pathetic amount of RAM for that GPU. Sometimes Apple leaves me thinking that they see their customers as idiots. Declining desktop sales on the other hand seem to indicate that people are feed up with Apples half assed configurations.

 

 

I was aware of that, but it still works better today. A lot of things are being adjusted to also run on OpenCL, but I'd like to see how their implementation looks. NVidia cards run OpenCL just fine as well. I can't find this for creative suite as a whole but this is Photoshop CS6 http://forums.adobe.com/message/4222772#4222772   This also means that the current Air wouldn't technically be supported, as the Intel HD3000 only allocates that much vram with 8GB+ installed (otherwise it allocates 288MB from main ram). It would also rule out the discrete gpu mini from being officially supported. This is somewhat of a jump in system requirements, but it's kind of ridiculous having to accept such a compromise in a stationary machine. There are some design decisions that I just dislike. As an example, you can't adjust the height of the imac without using an lcd arm. Apple probably prefers the aesthetics, but the usability is inferior. They could have done better on the card used or ram allocated to it.

 

Anyway with most applications you really don't get caught by minimum system requirements on a currently shipping system. Usually those are a concern for hardware from several years ago. See Apple's gpu selections have always been a little weak, but it's just becoming more of an issue given the increasing gpu reliance in programming.

One reason for them to wait is that the 13" can't be updated yet and they are in the same category. Also, if they turn the 15" into an Air style, it leaves the 13" sitting as the only portable with an optical drive.

When the 13" MBP loses the optical, the only difference between it and the 13" Air would be using a ULV chip. I don't see Apple selling many 13" Airs that cost $100 more when a 13" Pro with a standard chip would be almost the same form factor so they have to be merged.

The dual-core Ivy Bridge chips arrive June 5th so that leaves time to get them shipping at WWDC.

They could have a launch event before WWDC but I don't know how well Tim will carry these sort of things. It's a very difficult sell just saying to reporters that you just made a product slimmer. At least hardware helps pad out WWDC as they (hopefully) can't talk about resolution independence for an hour.

Think of the GPU the Haswell die-shrink (Broadwell) iMac will have though:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5493/amd-outlines-hsa-roadmap-unified-memory-for-cpugpu-in-2013-hsa-gpus-in-2014

This is where the compute power starts to ramp up. This year, GPUs can access CPU memory so low VRAM might not be an issue, definitely not with unified memory in 2013. Then in 2014, they get parallel processing GPUs so they'd be able to avoid GPU computation slowing down your display. These mobile chips will also outperform a GTX 580. Samsung is even putting the 7970M in a 17" laptop.

I think it's just a trend. Few people want to sit in a room at a desk to use a computer. We use computers for so much now that the desk-based design conflicts with lifestyles. Laptops just fit into life better as you buy one in a store and carry it home easily and start using it. They have great resale value, you can use them during a power outage, you can take them on holiday and you can open them up easily. If anything, I'd say Apple is doing its best to keep the desktops alive. If they were all towers, they'd be in big trouble.

Didn't Apple just released refreshed 13 and 15 inch Pros in June. Why on earth would they make that obsolete already?

 

Probably because this article is from April.

Ah, you're right. I thought that since this article was in the ticker, it was recent news.

Carry on.

 

That's apparently happening for some older articles. No idea why.