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Can Yonah Cut It?

cyrana

By cyrana,
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cyrana
cyrana
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AnandTech has a first look at "Yonah," Intel's successor to the “Dothan” Pentium M and the processor rumored to be Apple’s first choice for next year’s Intel Macs. It seems that the processor is a large improvement over its predecessor in many ways, although it’s still behind AMD’s dual core offerings in terms of power.

 

From the article:

Although we didn't consider it as such here today, Yonah will be quite impressive on notebooks. The thought of having such a cool running dual core processor in a notebook is honestly amazing, and the performance difference (especially for multitaskers) over what we have today will be significant.

 

As a desktop contender, Yonah is a bit of a mixed bag. While its performance in content creation applications has definitely improved over the single core Dothan, it still falls behind the Athlon 64 X2 in a handful of areas. Intel still needs to improve their video encoding and gaming performance, but it looks like we may have to wait for Conroe and Merom for that.

 

This is very interesting news, especially considering yesterday’s rumor about an Intel based Mac PVR. If Yonah truly is slated for that Mac Mini Media Mega Monstrosity (there are so many alliterative options…), will it have enough horsepower for the multimedia aspects of the machine?

 

It seems clear that Yonah is a perfect fit for the other rumored Intel Macs in January, namely the iBook, Powerbook, iMac, PowerMac… oh, wait, we’ve heard rumors about all of them. If we believe the iBook/Powerbook story, it seems that Yonah will be the kind of low-watt, high-performance processor Steve talked about at WWDC 2005.

 

It seems that time (well, actually, just a little over a month) will tell.

 

Just a note that the 945G chipset (and similar variants) seems to be the intro platform, so if you're making a test box now, Dual Core+SSE3+NX+PAE+945(or similar) is your safest best). Also nice that the CPU seems as fast as a dual core 3.0GHz Pentium-D 830 even though it is just 2GHz, and is comparable to Athlon 64 models (most of the time, not in all tests). And, of course, it has the lowest power consumption of the CPUs tested, which makes it look nice for laptops (It IS a mobile CPU after all...)

 

But I don't know how some of that media performance will impact the "Kaleidoscope" product...perhaps its more than enough for that function, but Merom and Conroe are going to be better for media.

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domino
domino
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I'm not impressed. However, it is impressive to see lower latency and 2mb L2 cache. Lower power consumption would prolly add 20 or 30 minutes at load. I wonder how much L1 it has (too busy to research). The benchmark between Dothan is hardly an improvement and I don't even need to mention the comparison between the AMD chips. It would be interesting to see what will be used on a desktop because a notebook would not be attractive for me as far as audio and video rendering.

cyrana
cyrana
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Posted (edited)

Let me get this straight? You're not impressed with a dual-core mobile CPU that gets less power useage and is about as powerful as a dual core AMD (and it is doing this without an on-die memory controller)?

 

A dual core mobile A64 Turion isn't even out ye,. And their single cores use more power than a single core Dothan does - Turion is 21W higher at idle than a Dothan and loaded around 30W higher (they don't mention Dothan power either, sorta weird...be good for comparision), so its a bit probable that it will happen again. As they mention in the article, ""A 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle." Nice if you ask me.

 

Pretty impressive that its the first dual-core mobile CPU, it performs tolerably, and is out in 2 months. :)

Edited by cyrana
domino
domino
Posted
Posted

No, I am not impressed. The trend with Intel and AMD is that it will released a better chip 3 months after the first launch. And guess what? It will be much ligher on the wallet. So chasing the fasted and best is not of any interest to a customer. If they do use that ship for the first OSx86 rollout, can the processor be upgradable? That would be a more intersting question I would like to get answered as soon as OSX86 is launched.

macgirl
macgirl
Posted
Posted
Let me get this straight? You're not impressed with a dual-core mobile CPU that gets less power useage and is about as powerful as a dual core AMD?

 

I'm pretty impressed. I will changing my 3500+ for a X2 4200 maybe next year, but if a PowerBook has that "thing" surely I want it :)

cyrana
cyrana
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  • Author
Posted

That argument is silly, first gen is always that way. :) It doesn't mean it isn't cool or anything. :star_smile: Unless CPUs are soldered in, they are upgradeable, at least all the old G4s were (to faster models), and there was/is a good market for the upgrades.

domino
domino
Posted
Posted

I'm not trying to argue at all cyrana. Now that Apple is in the Intel realm, I would expect these kinds of discussions. And I would expect all kind of bitching and moaning about why didn't Apple/Intel do this in the first place, and why are they make me pay for a new unit when I just purchased this one 4 months ago. And more importantly, why is the TPM locked to only this type of processor?

 

Solder points don't keep me from desoldering them, unless of course the TPM :), if i'm not mistaken.

 

Regards

jegabla
jegabla
Posted
Posted

What I don't see is any mention if this has any sort of virtulization technology (Vanderpool) which would be one of the interesting points.

 

Also interesting that Yonah processor features are almost the same as those on Prescott cores, so at least these should be compatible with OSx86 final release. I see why Apple is happily compiling builds for SSE3, NX and such.

cyrana
cyrana
Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

I think the next Pentium-M successor, Merom (and Conroe I think?), is the one with Vanderpool in it (64bit too?), it definitely isn't in Yonah. I've heard rumours that Merom is the core Apple wants to start with, but if thats true, nothing in January...

Edited by cyrana
jegabla
jegabla
Posted
Posted

Strange... rumour says 10.5 will be using virtualization technologies and this would mean that such build would break compatibility with a theoretical Yonah-based MacIntel if virtualization is mandatory for 10.5. mmm... who knows... I'd be the first one to be happy if they are available in January! :(

cyrana
cyrana
Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Odd, I could have sworn Yonah didn't have VT, but you're right, (although the 'ultra low voltage versions supposedly don't have VT) a bunch of searches claim it does (as well as LaGrande Security). Cool stuff then. Thanks for the link.

 

The Pentium D 900 series also has VT on it, so buy one in january if you want a possible functioning desktop hehe. :(

Edited by cyrana
cyris ng
cyris ng
Posted
Posted
Odd, I could have sworn Yonah didn't have VT, but you're right, (although the 'ultra low voltage versions supposedly don't have VT) a bunch of searches claim it does (as well as LaGrande Security). Cool stuff then. Thanks for the link.

 

The Pentium D 900 series also has VT on it, so buy one in january if you want a possible functioning desktop hehe. :(

Wikipedia is known to be in error once in awhile. Reading Anand's review and the more plausable release of a cheaper & faster iBook makes me want to sell my 12" 1.33GHz iBook G4 bought a couple of months ago middle of December.

 

I'm so confused now... sell my iBook in 2 weeks time and be portable-less for 1-2 months or hang on to it and buy a Mactel laptop with Mac OS X 10.5.x. Being greedy sucks sometimes.

Swad
Swad
Posted
Posted

I just wrote a Front Page story on this:

 

AnandTech has a first look at "Yonah," Intel's successor to the “Dothan” Pentium M and the processor rumored to be Apple’s first choice for next year’s Intel Macs. It seems that the processor is a large improvement over its predecessor in many ways, although it’s still behind AMD’s dual core offerings in terms of power.

 

From the article:

Although we didn't consider it as such here today, Yonah will be quite impressive on notebooks. The thought of having such a cool running dual core processor in a notebook is honestly amazing, and the performance difference (especially for multitaskers) over what we have today will be significant.

 

As a desktop contender, Yonah is a bit of a mixed bag. While its performance in content creation applications has definitely improved over the single core Dothan, it still falls behind the Athlon 64 X2 in a handful of areas. Intel still needs to improve their video encoding and gaming performance, but it looks like we may have to wait for Conroe and Merom for that.

 

This is very interesting news, especially considering yesterday’s rumor about an Intel based Mac PVR. If Dothan truly is slated for that Mac Mini Media Mega Monstrosity (there are so many alliterative options…), will it have enough horsepower for the multimedia aspects of the machine?

 

It seems clear that Yonah is a perfect fit for the other rumored Intel Macs in January, namely the iBook, Powerbook, iMac, PowerMac… oh, wait, we’ve heard rumors about all of them. If we believe the iBook/Powerbook story, it seems that Yonah will be the kind of low-watt, high-performance processor Steve talked about at WWDC 2005.

 

It seems that time (well, actually, just a little over a month) will tell.

cyrana
cyrana
Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)
This cpu is not 64 bit 32 bit only and didn't apple make a big thing about g5 being 64 bit?

Yes they did, but OS X isn't fully 64bit or anything, and the only real benefit in 10.4 is access to more memory (which makes sense on the high-end). The only app using anything 64bit is Mathematica (not sure quite how, I think there is a background math engine), and normal GUI apps can't even be 64bit right now. Hence, the powermacs will be the last to move to Intel, when Conroe or Merom comes out (most likely).

 

This is a great article (well, linking to one page in it) at arstechnica about this:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/4

Edited by cyrana
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