Forthcoming Windows notebooks hint at next-gen MacBook Pro CPUs

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch is the worst piece of technology I've ever had in my possession. I had to get this laptop replaced 3 (THREE) times within in a month because of internal hardware malfunctions. I am still having the same problem with screen distortion and safari constantly shutting down because of a 10.6 plug-in excuse. No one at Apple knows what they are doing because every technical suggestion fails. I'd
recommend not purchasing an Apple computer. They cannot deliver.
http://www.applereviewed.net/tag/macbook-pro

Umm, name any applications you know of that take advantage of OpenCL. Nice idea on paper, but developers will never take the leap.

Not a problem if SandyBridge is not OpenCL compliant.

Umm, name any applications you know of that take advantage of OpenCL. Nice idea on paper, but developers will never take the leap.

Not a problem if SandyBridge is not OpenCL compliant.

I am pretty sure the 2009 and 2010 MacBook Pro differs from the 2008 MacBook Pro with regards to design.

For starters the early 2008 MacBook Pro were not unibody and the late 2008 MacBook Pro had a removable battery, neither the 2009 or 2010 MacBook Pro has that.

"The Sandy Bridge chips also feature a new integrated graphics core that may match the horsepower of the dedicated GPUs"

No. Someone reviewed the 12EU version of SandyBridge and that performed reasonably - but it turns out most shipping SandyBridge CPUs only have 6 EUs active in the GPU. It'll perform worse than the NVIDIA 9400M in the real world.

On the other hand, it is apparently a massive improvement for Intel over their previous offerings.

I expect Apple will utilise some of the space obtained by dropping the optical drive in the 13" MBP to add in a discrete GPU in the next revision.

I have to agree a poorly written article. There are to many assumptions and half truths. Sandy Bridge is a major overhaul from Intel this much is true. But we need to realize that some of this overhaul is taking place to reduce power consumption. The new out of order mechanism is one such fix.

As has already been pointed out a new out of order mechanism has little to do with threads running on other processors. It may help single thread performance and may even help SMT on a core a bit. But read carefully here I said may help not will help there is that large mass of real world legacy code out there to way lay the best of intentions.

As to the math improvements those are welcomed of course but the improvements are rather minor compared to code that runs well on a GPU. Which brings me to a big unknown, if the GPU doesn't support OpenCL we will likely hear a big fart coming from Apple. Of course it isn't clear what the GPU will do yet OpenCL wise but even if it dies work it is still running on a intel GPU. Interesting too this GPU is supposedly a brand new core, that is a new implementation, so we are really in the dark here. Historically intel GPUs have been crap where a good portion of the features never worked correctly. Sadly we really won't know how good or bad the GPU is until months after it's debut.

Even worst is the offered up clock rates, Apple can't be thrilled about a 2GHz click rate even if the instructions per clock improve. Some apps just need the clock rate to work well. The only thing really interesting here is the power demand which now becomes a huge point load. The overall system power levels might be manageable though, it will be very interesting to see whole system power power demands.

Given all of that I'm still wondering if AMD has a play inplace at Apple. The chips should look attractive to Apple if for nothing else due to a more balanced and rational approach to GPU usage.

There's more keeping the laptops as thick as they are besides processors.

The optical drive, the HD slot and the ports.

The ports are already pretty narrow, but the HD and optical drive still stand in their way. And while the optical drive may go first, I don't want to be restricted to only being able to buy a MBP with a fixed size expensive custom solid state flash stick like the Air's. I need storage. I'd rather have lighter laptops than thinner ones. They could easily shave a half inch off of all four sides of the MBP's and still keep the same screen size. Just don't remove my ability to put a 12.5mm HDD in my laptop unless you're gonna offer a cheap 1.5TB Flash option.... didn't think so. They could probably make the screen thinner if they really want to get it thinner overall.

I'd sacrifice the following in a low-end MBP as long as the speed and power is maintained:
Optical drive (Rarely use it except to install OS X and we've seen that has a new method available)
FireWire (Don't use it)
One USB port (I have a hub)
Ethernet (The thickest port of them all. I have wireless, and if I had to I'd buy a USB-based Ethernet adapter.)
Possibly SD slot if it had to go, but then again it's the thinnest port on there.

Intel really should have continued development of Larabee.
A chip containing 2 Core i7 cores plus 6 or so Larabee cores to handle GPU tasks (and also computing of the kind that can better be done with the things Larabee provides) would have been perfect for various Apple computers.

Looks like you can't do less than signs whoops. If someone would delete those last two attempts, that would be great. Here it finally is.

Please do some more research before posting something like this in the future.

"The new chips will also likely improve out-of-order execution performance, which is critical to getting a real world boost on these multi-core processors with multi-threaded applications."

Oh, is it the 80s again? Because in the 2010s, out-of-order execution has gotten so good (or as good as it's ever going to get), that the largest speedup you'll ever see with Sandy Bridge (from it) is less than 0.1%.
Second of all, out-of-order execution has absolutely nothing to do with multi-core or multi-threading. In fact, out-of-order will most likely give more of a boost to non-threaded than to threaded applications.

"Having a high-performance integrated GPU would allow Apple to simplify the internals of the MacBook Pro and migrate the line to a new slimmer form factor similar to the MacBook Air."

This is probably the least important reason that Apple would consider using the Sandy Bridge. Having the GPU on die would mean some pretty epic bandwidth gains, and some latency loss as well. And at this point, Intel has to do this if they want to stay in business another 10 years, not even because of size, speed, bandwidth, etc. Because the GPU is taking over. Lower clock rate=lower power consumption, add to that the 16+ cores GPU's have, and SMT, and it becomes pretty clear why Intel is scared. AMD has ATI, NVidia has NVidia, but Intel has no one. Basically, if Intel didn't make this move, Apple would probably switch to ARM full-time or AMD.

Not quite sure why my comment get shortened... Here's the whole thing

Please do some more research before posting something like this in the future.

"The new chips will also likely improve out-of-order execution performance, which is critical to getting a real world boost on these multi-core processors with multi-threaded applications."

Oh, is it the 80s again? Because in the 2010s, out-of-order execution has gotten so good (or as good as it's ever going to get), that the largest speedup you'll ever see with Sandy Bridge (from it) is