14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most interesting rumors that we heard last year was that Apple is going to come out with an eight-core Mac Pro that was supposed to use two quad core processors from Intel. The place of this happening should have been Macworld, of course, and I was one of the disappointed ones when I found out that nothing was said about such a computer.
Well, it seems the performance freaks located on the Apple's side of the road can start the party! After two performance marks being hit in a very quick succession by Intel's 65nm processors, 5.5GHz and 8GHz, the 45nm processors have been announced. This seems to add a new nail to AMD's coffin, but I am not here to tell you about the processor wars, because I have some interesting news regarding Apple's future computers...
According to Intel, its first 45nm processors, that are also the first working processors in the world using 45nm transistors, are already up and running in their labs! These next generation Core 2 Duo processors are codenamed "Penryn" and use a new material combination of high-k gate dielectrics and metal gates, significantly improving performance and consuming less energy, and the 12 MB of second level cache are also helping a lot to achieve levels of performance unseen yet on desktop computers.
Although the 45nm processors come from the future, production being scheduled to start in the second half of this year, they are already running the operating systems of today. I have no idea how they let this slip, but Intel claims that the Penryns are running Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux.
So they are running Mac OS X at this time... and there's only one thing to think about now - how fast the Leopard is going to be when using such a processor that comes with SSE4 extensions and "a double-digit performance boost for media applications"? I don't want to estimate anything about the performance boost, but one thing I know for sure: for Apple, the future together with Intel's processors looks really bright!