Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros today which incorporate the new 45nm Penryn processors, an upgrade from the older 65nm Merom processors. The jump from Merom to Penryn is not a dramatic one as previous benchmarks demonstrate.
Penryn Advantages
Overall, the high end Penryn’s may have marginal improvements in performance due to higher L2 cache (6MB vs 4MB), though the low-end Penryns (2.1GHz and 2.4GHz) actually have less L2 cache (3MB vs 4MB) than their Merom counterparts. Whether this results in any real world difference is unclear. Early benchmarks of the new Penryn 2.4GHz MacBook Pro reveals a comparable GeekBench score (3086) to the older Merom 2.4GHz MacBook Pro (3094) despite this L2 cache difference.
One new feature all Penryn processors share is the SSE4 instruction set. Similar to the PowerPC’s Altivec instruction set, SSE4 can provide dramatic speed increases (40% faster) for applications specifically written for it.
- The new MacBook Pros have a Multitouch trackpad, but the MacBook does not.
- The Apple Remote control is no longer included, and must be purchased separately ($19).
- Teardown photos of the new MacBook Pro.
- BestBuy’s inventory system incorrectly reported the MacBook part numbers as MacBook Pros, leading to some confusion about the planned updates. For future reference, BestBuy may be fed part numbers ahead of time, but has no actual knowledge of specs or price points, and clearly used placeholder information in this instance.
- Unboxing of new MacBook Pro