New Airs Announced (1 Viewer)

[Michael_K_Sr]

Macworld with the goods before the store was even back up. i5's and i7's! Only question...how fast can I get one??

 

[Carlo_M]

Macworld with the goods before the store was even back up. i5's and i7's! Only question...how fast can I get one??

Apparently it ships in 24 hours according to the site. I bet the Apple stores either have them today or within 1-2 days max. The new MInis look very capable as well. I still am holding out hope for a new Mac Pro soon. I still think that a Mac Pro with internal RAID setup (not buying the extra RAID card, just using the native OSX RAID support) is better than a Mini with a Promise Thunderbolt RAID array. A maxed out Mini + Promise RAID = $2500, I think I'd rather have a stock Pro at about the same price and stick in three HDs into the empty bays.

 

[Sam Posten]

In store tomorrow. I'll report back if I can. If I'm not seen by thursday send the dogs out after me!

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Even thoubi have a maxed out 2010 13" air I,ve wanted an 11" so I ordered the $1199 model. It should be he Friday but I,m currently on vacation in Wildwood NJ so I won't be around to get it

 

[Sam Posten]

Haven't been able to get to a store yet but I'm having second thoughts. For two reasons: -Glossy. -I already have a working laptop and really want to upgrade the Mac Pro first. Will see if I survive the trip to the store or not.

 

[DaveF]

If, like The Doctor, you live in non-sequential time, you can buy your MacBook Air tomorrow second, so long as you make a note to buy a Mac Pro first at some later date...


Just trying to help out.

 

[KeithAP]

FYI, Barefeats has a few benchmarks up on the new Airs.


http://www.barefeats.com/mba11_02.html


-KeithP

 

[DaveF]

They missed the obvious takeaway in their summary: their benchmarks are basically GPU tests, as the 2.3 GHz i7 crushes the 2.7 GHz i7 in every test. I did learn that Handbrake offloads to the video card; that's new to me.

 

[KeithAP]

Certainly anything that is GPU accelerated will perform better on the 15" MBP. However, the 2.7 GHz i7 in the 13" model is a dual core chip with 4MB L3 cache. The 2.3 GHz i7 available on the 15" is a quad core chip with 8MB L3 cache (the Air CPUs are also dual core chips).


Any app/benchmark that makes use of those two extra cores is going to perform better on the 2.3. Also, I don't believe the 2.7 has Intel's turbo boost, although I could be wrong about that, so if the app isn't pushing all cores the speed on the 2.3 will bump up to a possible maximum of 3.4 Ghz giving it an edge as well.


-KeithP

 

[DaveF]

The only differentiator I saw was the GPU (emphasis added). Is it implicit that that the 2.7GHz is a lower-cache 13" model compared to the 2.3 GHz?

[COLOR= rgb(204, 0, 0)]2011 MBP 2.3 Core i7[/COLOR][COLOR= rgb(204, 0, 0)] = 2011 MacBook Pro 2.3GHz quad-Core i7 with 8G of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM and AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU with 1G DDR5 memory[/COLOR]
[COLOR= rgb(204, 0, 0)]2011 MBP 2.7 Core i7[/COLOR][COLOR= rgb(204, 0, 0)] = 2011 MacBook Pro 2.7GHz dual-Core i7 with 8G of 1333MHz DDR3 and Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU that "borrows" 384M of main memory[/COLOR]

 

[KeithAP]

Assuming wikipedia is accurate...


The 2.7 is this chip:

http://ark.intel.com/products/52231/Intel-Core-i7-2620M-Processor-(4M-Cache-2_70-GHz)

(this does feature turbo boost as it turns out)


and the 2.3 is this chip:

http://ark.intel.com/products/52227/Intel-Core-i7-2820QM-Processor-(8M-Cache-2_30-GHz)


So they both have the same max turbo boost frequency, 3.4Ghz. The big differences seem be the cache, 8M vs 4M, and the cores, 4 cores/8 threads vs 2 cores/4 threads.


-KeithP

 

[DaveF]

Thanks for the additional info. With that and other conversations elsewhere about the i7 chip, my impression is you really got to do some homework before buying an i7-system, since performance can vary greatly depending on which variant you get.