"The fastest, most powerful MacBook Pro ever. Times three." starting at $1199 USD states Apple.com's website. The new dual core Core i5 and i7 are available on the 15 and 17 inche MacBook Pro claim to boost performance up to 50 percent.
The performance boost of the i5 and i7 lines come from Intel's integrated memory control on the chip. As apple explains, "this cuts out the middleman... each core gets right to work on your data". Intel re-introduces Hyper-Threading which allows two simultaneous tasks to run side-by-side on each core. This essentially doubles the amount of work each processing core and do, and consequently appears as two separate cores to the operating system.
Another technological benefit of the i5 and i7 cores is the Turbo Boost feature which can dramatically and dynamically boost the clock frequency of individual cores from 2.66GHz to 3.33GHz when applications need the extra performance.
The most amazing aspect of the new MacBook Pros is the ten hours of battery life on their 13 inch model and a whopping 8 hours on the 15 and 17 inch models. This is accomplished by sophisticated algorithms in the latest version of OSX and the ability to dynamically switch between the powerful Nvidia GeForce GT 330M and the low power integrated Intel HD Graphics. Automatic graphics switching dramatically increases battery life for when you're just reading email or surfing the web.
New Nvidida graphics bring a 1.5 times improvement to the MacBook Pro line with the GeForce GT 330M discrete graphics processor with 48 processing cores and 512 MB of dedicated video memory. The advances in graphics comes from the fact it is over 30 percent more energy efficient and is helped out by an integrated Intel HD Graphics package.
MacBook Pro refresh comes with the top of the line Intel Processors. The Core i5 is integrated with the most advanced Intel technologies:
Interesting to note that the Core i7 is less capable than the i5 in a number of important advanced technologies including: Intel Trusted Execution Technology, AES New Instructions, Intel Demand Based Switching and Thermal Monitoring Technolgies. However, the i7 does allow for greater Maximum Memory Bandwidth thanks to an increase in the total number of memory channels. It is still interesting to note that the i5 is more feature packed. Sources: Apple.com MacBook Pro Intel.com Core i5-540, Core i7-960 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
