How much of an improvement will Penryn Make?

Just a trivial question, do you think it will make a rather "large" difference between the current processors, and the expected Penryn processors, late 2007-early 2008? I know they will be clocked to over 3GHz at the same TDP. I merely ask this question, so I will know when to purchase the MacBook Pro, either October when Leopard is released, or a bit later, when Penryn will be released for macs.

 

Small difference. The real fun's going to start when quad-cores are available in laptops. And that won't be for a while.

 

Penryn will give better battery life mostly. The Penryn Santa Rosa upgrade wont give much benefit yet. Need to wait for the new chipset in Q1-Q2 2008 to see a nice improvment.

 

P4 to P M was a big jump; and so was P M to Core. However, Core to Core 2 or Core 2 to Santa Rosa aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They provide but but nothing significant. The same goes for Prynn: you won't probably even notice the difference. As Overclocker said, Quad core CPUs are going to be the next big thing

 

Penryn is primarily a die shrink, which makes it cheaper for intel to produce the chips and allow higher clocks and lower power consumption. The noticeable difference for the average user will probably be very small.

I wouldn't expect too much of an improvement, but it's worth mentioning that a new penryn-focused platform (Montevina) will be launched in Q2 of 2008. This seems to be an evolutionary move up from Santa Rosa, so I'm not sure how many useful new additions it will bring. Santa Rosa didn't really introduce many new features, the only ones that might be noticeable from a user perspective this far is support for draft-n wireless and the X3100 GPU. Increased FSB and higher clocks gave a minor speed bump, and Turbo Memory hasn't shown any tangible benefits yet.

Always something new and shiny on the horizon, don't hold off your laptop purchase for something that might be an improvement when released in 6+ months if you need a laptop now.

 

Even the quad cores won't be a huge leap for most users. Most people can't max out the dual core they have now. Until we start getting multithreaded apps the number of cores won't make a huge difference.

As for the OP, buy when you need it. October should be fine.

 

The CPU isn't the bottleneck anymore.

The increased use of flash ram will help computers seem faster since hard drives are a real bottleneck, spin-up, access, seek, etc.

Bus speeds that get closer to desktop speeds, ie 1333MHz.

Ram speeds.

CD-ROM and DVD-ROM of course. I've long since been in the habit of leaving my DVD player empty since I hate waiting for it to spin up when doing something like accessing the finder, etc, even though what I need is not going to be on the ROM disc.

Software needs to be written to better utilize threading and cores.

The CPU seems kinda tapped. 3-4GHz seems like a pretty real barrier.

Look for more cores, co-processors, cells, GPU utilization etc. The era of the big bad CPU is likey over, it's just a part in the overall system, and arguably, it's the most developed.

Back in the era of 500MHz CPUs, it was pretty easy to peg the CPU at 100%. Now you can't do it unless you are rendering or compressing audio/video.

The rest of the computer, especially the software, are really the keys to better performance in the future.

 

I am a big CPU fan I suppose the reason I ask the question, I don't know how well the new processors will do on Mac, since I have never really used a Mac OS before, my first time. What I find rather funny is the fact that intel has been trying to reach 4GHz for such a long time, and now, that they put efficiency over speed, they are near reaching such a speed. Just my take, but I will probably wait for Christmas, gotta buy something for myself. =P