Apple ( News - Alert) has increased the speed of its MacBook laptops by shifting to Intel's Santa Rosa chipset.
The original MacBook was built around the Intel ( News - Alert) Core Duo chip. Earlier updates to the MacBook line included an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an updated AirPort Extreme (with wireless-N capability) and faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, more memory and higher capacity hard drives.
Also, for an additional $250, MacBook Pros, which have had Intel's latest mobile platform since June, are available with a faster 2.6-GHz CPU . The MacBook Pros with the less-expensive 2.2- and 2.4-GHz chips are still available and Apple's top-of-the-line notebook is also available with a 250-Gbyte hard drive.
As the MacBook shifts to Intel’s Santa Rosa, they will also get a video upgrade to Intel's GMA X3100 graphics processor, built into the chipset. Also, Santa Rosa has what Intel calls a Turbo Memory feature that boosts hard-drive performance with a flash-based cache. Earlier, MacBooks ran on Intel's slower GMA 950 processor.
The new MacBooks will include a 2.0-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and an 80-Gbyte hard drive and the starting price will be $1,099. A more powerful MacBook with a 2.2-GHz processor and 160 Gbytes of storage will require an additional $400.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Central Processing Unit (CPU) | X | CPUs provide software for Floating Point Unit Non-integers, Vector Processing Unit Graphics Accelerator, Arithmetic Logic Unit, Memory Management (cache memory), Add-divide/multiply as well as provide...more |
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