News for Tuesday, 9 May 2006

Francis, one of our readers, who had placed an order for a MacBook Pro 17" on the same day of its release, has just been informed by Apple that his machine is being shipped to its place. For once, Apple is on schedule.
Francis should receive his machine on May 18th, he will share with us his first impressions.

The Yonah, branded name Core Duo (or Solo), still has power to be unveiled!
MatBe (in French) has successfully overclocked a 2.16GHz Core Duo to 3.0GHz while using an air-based cooling system. Another user reports a massive overclock to 3.8GHz with a Pelletier-based cooling system. With such clock speed, the Core Duo is a benchmarks killer.
But the life of the Core Duo is approaching already to the end (for high-end computers), with the release of the Merom this summer; and first benchmarks of the Merom already start populating the web.
The website IamExtreme has compared a Merom to a Yonah, both CPU being clocked at 2.16GHz. According to the test, the Merom is faster than the Yonah, from couple of percentage up to 20. In addition keep in mind, the Merom will also be introduced with higher clockspeed and higher bus frequency, so performance gains might be higher than projected today.

Intel has decided to change the name of its desktop-dedicated processors, so the brand name "Pentium" is now part of history (used for over 13 years by Intel, including 4 generations of Netburst-based CPU).
Future notebook and desktop processors, respectively Merom and Conroe, will be marketed as "Core 2 Duo".

The difference between both processors will be made with code number: 4000 and 6000 series for Conroe and 5000 and 7000 series for Merom.
As reported earlier, both processors, built on Intel’s advanced 65-nanometer design and manufacturing process technology, should be available as early as July.

Aspyr has released Quake 4 version 1.2. This update (Universal Binaries), fixes some bugs, adds new maps for multi-player games, and more importantly brings multi-CPU support.
Aspyr only reports gains obtained with Core Duo-based MacIntel when using the Multi-CPU version of Quake4; but according to test run by readers of XLR8Yourmac, multi CPU G5-based machines are also benefiting of this update; FPS performance can improve up to 65% on a PMG5 Quad.
To download this update (102MB):
Quake_4_SMP.dmg