Apple`s Intels, Changing Macs Forever - Waiting for Multimedia to Come
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One of the main reasons for businesses and corporations to opt for Macs as part of their systems, aside from reliability and security, is the power of multimedia applications. Additionally, while most of the programmers I know use Windows-based PCs, all of the creative professionals—graphic designers, music producers etc—I know use Apple Macs. It seems surprising then that it has been hinted at that it may take six months or more before some of the more serious applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, are going to be compatible with the Intel Macs.
This is surely going to prevent many creative professionals from investing in the new platform, and must be as bad news to Apple as it is to the artists and designers that have to wait.
The new generation of Mac computers are going to seem a hell of a lot faster than their PowerPC predecessors, not just because of the higher clock-speeds, but also because of the fact that the Intel processors are dual core chips that feature an intelligent L2 cache that is dynamically accessible to each processor core. Apple have used dual-core chips before, in the Power Mac G5 range, but these had a 1 MB L2 cache for each core rather than the 2MB dynamic shard L2 cache that the new ones contain. These chips are going to be more robust, faster and much more efficient in terms of power consumption, heat generation and computational power.
One recent announcement that is sure to please anyone intending to purchase one of the new-style Macs is that they are going to ship with faster processor speeds than was previously thought. The lower-priced notebook machines will ship with a 1.83 GHz clock-speed instead of the previously advertised 1.67 GHz speed, and the high-end models shipping with either 2 GHz or 2.16 GHz processor speeds. This may or may not be a cunning ploy to offset the Rosetta effect slightly, but at the end of the day, an increase in speed for nothing isn’t something many people are going to complain about.
Next: Changes to the Mac Lineup >>
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