Soup of the Day

Apple goes Duo Core (Again!)

Yesterday, speaking at the Macworld ‘06, Steve Jobs delivered his annual keynote speech to Macintosh fans in the crowd and listening around the world. Up until recently, Apple streamed these events live to the world across the internet. Now, the world audience has to wait up to a full hour before they can participate in the action. I assume the system was changed to cut costs of supporting millions of live streaming connections, especially as probably over 50% of the requests would be for a stream of at least 350Kpbs. However, it also gives Apple the added oppertunity to edit the show, should a problem occur on stage - At least Steve would only have messed up in front of five thousand people, rather than five million.

Steve started by telling the audiance how well retail was doing - and it is doing very well - before moving onto equally how well iPod sales were doing. Then that was it for business updates, onto the action with the Macintosh - this is Macworld afterall. Oh wait, what’s this? Software, iLife, iWork and .Mac have all had major updates… yawn, never would have guessed. I use iLife and iWork all the time. I think they’re both great products. I don’t need to be told for an hour how good they are, especially as they seem to be have increasing synergy with the .Mac service. Never mind, what’s next?

Well, finally hardware came into the agenda and with it Apple’s initial adoption of Intel processors. The first two machines rolling out of Cork (for European customers) will be a new iMac configuration and a brand new MacBook Pro - The ‘Power’ has been dropped now the CPU is no longer a PowerPC - both new machines sporting the new Intel Duo Core processor. These new machines were quite a suprise, much of the internet was awash with rumours that the MacMini and iBooks would be the first to get the Intel treatment.

The MacBook Pro interested me more than the iMac. PowerBook’s have been stuck with the G4 processor for almost five years, a very long time in the computing world. Now the MacBook Pro is powered by Intel’s Duo Core, yes that is a dual-core processor, a much needed power boost has been given to (probably) the most desirably laptop on the market today. But it also means that the old PowerBook line can now live up to its bigger desktop sister, the PowerMac G5, by also sporting dual core processing. For more about all the new announcements and to watch the keynote, visit Apple.com.

However, this dual core announcement that Steve was so proud about is a little out of date. Only this summer the dual core, dual processor PowerMac G5’s were being proudly presented. This machine effectively sports four cores and more importantly (to me personally), the processors are 64-bit rather than 32-bit.

I am pretty confident in saying that the PowerMac’s will probably not be crossing to Intel until Intel can provide a 64-bit Dual Core, Dual Processor option for Apple thus negating an apparent downgrade - of course some clever Apple marketing can always try and hide such a fact, but I personally would like to maintain a four core machine as long as possible, and I am certainly not keen to give up my 64-bit processors for anything other than 128-bit or greater!

Watch the Apple/Intel advert here