19 comments

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  Trent

  1 year ago

  I'm thinking that Quad Cores in a laptop would definetely drain the battery life more and that a laptop has limited cappabillites with expansion, they should just stick to dual cores.
  
  Trent
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  William Shaw

  1 year ago

  Bizarre article. I use a cluster of Macs to do mathematical work with GridMathematica and the sooner one of these comes out the better - that way I can travel and do demos of parallel computation applications without replying on a local setup. I rarely work off batteries, and the benefits of four processors massively outweigh slightly faster clock speed. Can't wait for quad myself!
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  Devindra

  1 year ago

  William, it'll certainly be useful for users like yourself, my point is that it's not that wise of a release among general computer users. Most laptops today already run obscenely hot, and battery life hasn't been improved much recently, on dual core chips.
  
  Unless significant changes occur to quad core chip architecture, they won't be a good addition to laptops. I'm sure it will happen eventually, just not sure if that will be this year.
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  pete23

  11 months ago

  mmmf. ableton live has good multicore support - there's always room for more CPU power for VSTs...
  
  i think that you're neglecting an important usecase for laptops - that of the portable desktop replacement. my laptop probably spends 90%+ of its time connected to the mains.
  
  general computer users can live with a macbook. the pro is for people who need the extra welly.
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  Robert

  11 months ago

  Macbook pro with quad is going to bi like a dream for users like me who uses it for a workstation with logic 8. and by the way: don't you think apple will make it possible to disable at least two of the cores when it runs on battery? it certainly would be smart.
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  William Shaw

  11 months ago

  Robert: The option of running in 2-core or even 1-core mode while under batteries is a very good idea. Somebody tell Apple. I can read/compose e-mail off-line on a long flight on 1-core cycled down to 1 GHz, and do HPC demos at full tilt plugged in when I arrive.
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  Guy

  10 months ago

  well....If the speeds going to be the Increased...and well due to the 45nm changes the benefits would be: Faster speeds...Downsides: The heat is around the same and well the Battery Life would be around the same...Pointless argument....Improve one part leave the other two around about the same...It's a win win situation....
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  ChaosInMind

  9 months ago

  Seriously? I'm tired of hearing "quad core processors are un-needed at this time"
  #1) You don't think the fully 64bit Unix based operating system by Apple is capable of using 4 cores? The OS itself will see benefits from the extra power!
  #2) This is probably going into their Pro series because people that buy the pro usually do high end graphics work or digital audio production, not to mention the price of such a system.
  #3) This would be a mobile quad core chip, not a desktop chip. This means it can probably disable unused cores and throttle back speed depending on use and power state.
  #4) Can you say, Solid State Harddrive, 4gb DDR2 Memory, Quad Core CPU... Oh no, we don't need all that to see performance gains, just throw it away and pick up a Powerbook G3.
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  John M

  9 months ago

  There is a perfectly valid use for quad core on a laptop, where the software can use all of the cores: virtualization. I use VMware every day on the job. I am a systems engineer that needs to keep multiple, separate environments running on my laptop.
  
  On a daily basis I run Mac OS X with a separate Windows XP VM for my work stuff. When I go out to a customer I will generally have 3 VMs running on top of OS X:
  * An Oracle database running under Linux
  * WebLogic Server running under Linux
  * Eclipse and other development tools running under Windows XP
  
  Some of those virtual machines could really use more than one core as well. When I demo all of these at once I require a LOT of RAM and a LOT of processor power.
  
  Perhaps I am a power user, but I know thousands of people within just my company that could use every ounce of that quad-core!
  
  One note though: if you are going to put a quad-core processor in a laptop, the processor should be smart enough to only fire up the cores that it needs at the time. For example, if I am just cruising the web on OS X, I only need one or two cores at most. If I start firing up virtual machines under VMware, it should allocate a core to each VM until all four cores are in use. That would help with the battery life immensely.
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  Peter Morris

  9 months ago

  quad core is not about running a single application faster (at least for me).
  
  My (aging and aged, first gen) macbookpro is my main development workhorse, and at any time it will be running a couple of different db servers, a web server or 3, development tools, mail, irc, skype, web browser, twitter, neo office, itunes etc. That situation would benefit from quad cores very well.
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  John Sawyer

  8 months ago

  Even the somewhat average person doing somewhat average web browsing might benefit from four processors--on a dual core, with just one or two dozen browser windows open, and many of those windows running stupid slow Javascripts, the entire computer can slow to a crawl. Yes, I know the "prudent" user should just bookmark and close some of those browser windows, but what if they don't want to?
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  da bishop

  6 months ago

  What a bunch of N00bery! Of course apps under OSX are heavily multithreaded, and the OS is seriously multitasking. Most apps written since 2002 behave this way, anything written in Cocoa. If there was no performance gain from multicore, why would the mac pros with 8 cores sell? Believe me, they really do run faster.
  
  Adobe are slack enough to still be running OS9 era code, but even that is multithreaded! Photoshop has been multithreading on the mac since the days of daystar.
  
  In addition, apple are moving to a technology called Grand Central, which unifies all of the threads to a scheduler, which spreads them across the available resources, including the GPU doing compute tasks via OpenCL. Grand Central will make all apps behave in a fully multithreaded manner.
  
  The multithreading performance tax is something that belongs in the Windows field of debate. The mac is fully multithreading. My CPU meters prove it. Hit an app hard, and all the cores jump to it.
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  da bishop

  6 months ago

  Oh yeah, and what's more, pro laptops live plugged into the mains for the most part. Running my macbook pro on "toned down" settings I can get 3 to 4 hours for emailing on the move, but to use it on full blast, it's the mains adapter every time.
  
  All of the core chips have the ability to power down cores to save some amps, or if they start getting a bit too hot. It's called dynamic throttling, and it's the shared cache that makes that possible.
  
  Seriously, if somebody bought a quad core 17 inch desktop replacement macbook pro, what do you think they'll be found using it for? Minesweeper?
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  da bishop

  6 months ago

  However, should apple release these machines (which it's very likely they will in the first quarters of 2009) I'm going to buy one. Just not the very first generation, it's likely that there'll be some sort of melting/burning scenario. That's how come they didn't come out with the rest of the unibody machines.
  
  I can't wait for a more powerful laptop. My macbook pro is the first laptop which has been a good workhorse. It's a G5 in a bag! The mac pro has got very neglected indeed.
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  jon

  5 months ago

  I want a 4 core , 16gb mac simply to run 3 or 4 vm machines at a time ( my mac, my work windows laptop image, and a development image of linux) Yes you are correct people who right articles on websites don't need a powerful mac. In fact in some situations they use a pen, paper and crayons :-)
  
  Give me more POWER !!!
  
  Jon
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  Ben Robinson

  5 months ago

  I really think this is all kinda silly!! A Quad Core macbook pro would be excellent for audio production on the go! Then a studio can record in very different locations and have great chances to come up with tons of new music. A quad core is hotter, but with a revised heatsink those problems can be avoided. I believe that if apple makes a quad core laptop, first of all it would be extremely expensive, and it will take a while because right now they are pushing the new macbooks battery life which is cool but they will have to do optimize the batteries for the quad core laptops quite a bit.
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  mervyn

  4 months ago

  I believe that the Quad Core is the answer for apple. (1)Power. The new 17" battery is good, but
  apple can make a half inch battery with a 17" diameter as extra,that will give the labtop 8 hours running time (2) Heat. A miniature Liquid cooling system, that will help the heating problem.
  So with the new battery now runs at 8 to 7 hours. With the Quad Core will run at 3 to 4 hours,
  Add on a half inch battery at a 17" inch diameter as extra will give you 8 hours on top. So what do you think about that idea.
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  Franky Boy

  3 months ago

  1stp Aprilk 2009, still no quad-core Macbook's ;-)
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  R Kuntz

  1 month ago

  You missed an important application for multi-core laptops: virtualization. Many Mac users run Microsoft operating systems in virtual machines and they would benefit from more than two cores.
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