APC Magazine is speculating that Apple could make use of a brand new processor in Intel’s lineup in the 17-inch MacBook Pro.
The Core 2 Extreme Q9000 microprocessor features four cores running 2.0GHz with 6MB of Level 2 cache, but most importantly the processor is priced at $348 in lots of 1000.
The processor seems perfectly suited to the 17-inch MacBook Pro which is currently priced at $2799.
Back in October Apple updated the 15-inch MacBook Pro with a new sleek enclosure but gave the 17-inch only a minor speed bump. Reports that followed indicated that a 17-inch model would follow within a few months.
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Mack
31st December 2008, 14.28 pm
An option for 8GB of memory would be nice in both the 17 and 15 inch.
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Scott Falkner
1st January 2009, 20.01 pm
I doubt this for three reasons:
1. The chip is very new. Apple could not have had time to build and test a system around so new a chip. True, they sometimes announce new products that will ship later, but a 17″ Macbook Pro is not a new product. There is current demand for the 17″ upgrade, and announcing that we’ll have to wait months for the system to be built and tested will not make people happy.
2. Quad core chips don’t offer much overall performance improvement to programs not optimized to work with multiple cores. 3D rendering, some Photoshop, and video editing are the primary purposes for the chip, and most of those are done on Mac Pros. The four cores just won’t give the average user any worthwhile improvement.
3. The chip’s current maximum clock speed is 2 GHz. While many people know GHz alone is not a fair measure of a chip’s performance, those people are not in the majority. When I go online to Apple to buy a laptop, I want a fast chip. The 2.4 GHz chip is a $1400 MacBook looks 20% faster than the 2 GHz chip is a MBP that costs twice as much. That’s what people will see.
Expect the chip to start showing up in MBPs when Snow Leopard ships. Snow Leopard’s improved support for multi-core processors will make this chip more useful across the board. Until then, it’s in the lab.
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Alex Brooks
1st January 2009, 20.45 pm
Scott,
I’m inclined to believe your reasons for Apple not having this product ready yet.
Although it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple had access to a processor ahead of its release.
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Gregg
2nd January 2009, 16.52 pm
Probably won’t happen next week, but remember that the 17inch MacBook Pro is generally used by professionals and not just your average consumer or the ‘majority’. I would suggest most digital creative professionals would grasp the benefits of a quad-core processor and understand that Ghz is not the sole measure of a machine’s performance.
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