Merom vs. Yonah

[Swad]

If you are or have been considering a MacBook (Pro) recently, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Do I need this now or should I wait for Merom?” It’s always tough with Apple to remain content with your last generation hardware, but there is some good news. While Merom is indeed an improvement over Yonah, it’s not enough to make you throw yourself from a Cupertino building for buying the older hardware. Anandtech slapped a Core 2 Duo (Merom) chip inside a Core Duo (Yonah) based ASUS Z96Js and analyzed the results. The verdict?

While Core 2 Duo does look nice, as long as you've got a good notebook today you'll probably want to wait until Santa Rosa before upgrading (at the earliest). With Santa Rosa, clock speeds will go up slightly but more importantly we'll get access to a faster FSB. Unfortunately a side-effect of keeping Core 2 Duo fed with a faster FSB is that while performance may go up, battery life may go down. It'll be interesting to see what Intel can pull off with the new platform; one of the funny things about performance and battery life is that if you can complete a task quickly enough thus returning your CPU to an idle state faster, battery life will grow even though instantaneous power consumption may be higher.

 

For Apple users this means that early adopters of the new MacBook or MacBook Pro won't be too pressured to upgrade again by the end of this year. Of course Apple has this way of making incremental changes irresistible.

 

Overall, Merom may not be as big of an upgrade to Yonah as Conroe was to NetBurst, but the bottom line is that you get equal or better performance in every test without increasing cost or decreasing battery life. Owners of Core Duo laptops really have no reason to worry about upgrading for now, and waiting for the Santa Rosa platform before your next laptop upgrade seems reasonable. Those looking to purchase a new notebook on the other hand have no reason to avoid Core 2 Duo models, assuming pricing is consistent with what Intel is promising. There will be a delay of at least a few more weeks as we await availability, and testing and validation by laptop manufacturers may delay things a bit more, but within the next month or so you should be able to get a Core 2 laptop.

[ZepFloyd]

Iv swapped out my Core Duo Yonah on my Dell D620 to Core 2 Duo Merom following

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/syst...u.htm#wp1084976 . Dell has also pushed through the A03 BIOS on 8/1 which adds support for it. All is good but I would concur that the difference doesnt cause a 'wow effect' but still nice. Being stuck with the lousy GMA 950, while nice for OS X tinkering, isnt great in windows for testing the processor power on useful things.

[munky]

Hear hear mash - now bite the bullet and get yourself a macbook !