santa rosa posts

Personally, I crave speed. No, not the kind that can often be purchased on some local street corner in that part of town on the wrong side of the tracks. No, I'm referring to processors, front side buses, RAM and other factors that go into calculating the raw, unbridled, number-crunching power of the latest and greatest Macs.

No doubt you are aware that Apple recently released an updated version of its flagship prosumer desktop iMac as well as an updated Mac Mini too. The new iMacs feature changes both external and internal with increases to the clock speed of its Intel Core Duo 2 processors as well as a switch to the faster Santa Rosa chipset. Yes, that all sounds great but what does it mean in terms of the new iMac's ability to crunch those numbers?

Well, according to Primate Labs' tests on the new 24" iMac, as featured at Apple Insider, it doesn't help a great deal unless you're using one of those math-intensive apps like Photoshop or Aperture. In that case, according to the article: "If you're running memory-intensive applications you'll certainly notice an increase in performance with the new 24-inch iMac. Heck, the fact that the new 24-inch iMac supports 4GB of RAM while the old 24-inch iMac supports 3GB of RAM might be enough to convince you to get one." Good point. More RAM is a good thing.

Ken at Mac Daddy World confirmed an interesting discovery with a friend recently. Namely, the Santa Rosa MacBook Pros don't feature the same iSight as the previous MBP model

Pictured at right is a snapshot from System Profiler on my own MBP (a 2.0 GHz Core Duo), above, and Ken's (a Santa Rosa model), below. As you can see, the manufacturer has been changed from "Micron" to "Apple, Inc." Plus, the product ID has changed from "0x8501" to "0x8502."

But wait, there's more. While Ken was able to produce a VGA (640×480) image with an "older" MacBook Pro featuring the original iSight, the Santa Rosa model produced a much larger 1.3 MP (1280×1024) image (you can see both images at Mac Daddy World). Pretty cool.

Thanks, Ken!

I'm the new guy on staff here at TUAW, and from what I've been told, I get to lay claim to something none of these other guys want to: I'm a die-hard gamer, and while playing games on a Mac might be like performing Shakespeare in Russian, I do it as much as I can (the play games on the Mac thing, not the Russian thing).

So you can expect to hear about more stuff like this: the good folks over at Bare Feats ran the new MacBook Pros (with the Santa Rosa chipset) through the benchmarking gears and found what you might expect: they're pretty darn fast. Not quite as fast as the Mac Pro with a Radeon X1900 XT in the video card slot, but the new MBP did beat out the quad core Mac Pro running with the Geforce 7300 GT in 4 of the 5 tests they did-- gaming like that on a laptop is very, very nice.

The new MacBook didn't fare quite as well-- the integrated video chip in that one, says Bare Feats, is "un-optimized" for 3D, even if it's fine for movie playback. Unfortunately, none of the Apple rigs tested come even close to Alienware's standard PC box (the Mac Pro ran at 83 fps on Quake 4, and the Area-51 7500 ran at... ummm... 135.7), but if you, like me, want to frag a few noobs in between, y'know, working with a UI that actually makes sense, the new MacBook Pro will do you right.

[ via Inside Mac Games ]

Our sister blog Engadget has the goods on Intel's newest notebook chipset which was released yesterday and is called "Santa Rosa." This chipset is the followup to earlier notebook chipsets which are presently powering the MacBook and MacBook Pro. This presumably means new and faster Mac portables sometime down the road. However, given that there was a delay of a couple of months between the first Windows PCs with the "Merom" Core 2 Duo and the first MacBook Pros sporting that processor, this doesn't mean that there will be new Macs in the immediate future. Whenever they do drop expect the top of the line to increase to 2.4 GHz (though it will remain a Merom Core 2 Duo chip), with front side bus speed increasing to 800 MHz over the 667 MHz of today. There's also a more powerful Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip, which should definitely help performance on a new MacBook or Mac mini. The chipset also supports more wireless networking standards, but of course there's no guarantee that Apple will use them.