Well, well, well… I was discussing this at a hallway talk today and it seems Core i7 made it into the MacBook Pro line. I’m surprised.
Surprised because Apple silently introduced these new models. No fuzz, no big announcement. In fact, I found out because I wanted to check something in the MacBook Pro specs and I saw the small Intel Core i7 graphic in the bottom of the page. Also surprised because I wonder how these new powerhouses will impact battery life.
For those who don’t know these processors, bottom line is that they’re about 30% faster than the current Core 2 Duo processors which equipped the previous generations of the 15”/17” MacBook Pro models. They also have on-die memory controllers, which provides way faster memory access than the current FSB-based architecture of the previous processors, and they also have two SMTs per core (4 threads/processor in total).
I’m really waiting to see some review of these new laptops, mainly because I’m curious about battery life. I’m also curious if they’ll update the 13” model in the future as well, since that’s the laptop for me. I need portable laptops and the 15”/17” models are too big for me. In fact, the 17” is so big that I could probably go for some body board practice on the beach. So, I’ll wait for the 13” upgrade to start thinking about replacing mine.