According to
Fudzilla, Intel should dramatically cut the price of its current Core 2 Duo Mobile CPU during the second quarter. Those CPUs are currently powering unibody MacBook models. It the high-end 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo could be up to 200 USD cheaper, offering to Apple the possibility to either decrease the price of its notebook models, or upgrade current models with faster CPU or larger HD without modifying the price tags. This should also allow Apple to wait for the Nehalem Mobile CPU that should only arrive during Q4 2009.
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (IESSCC) published the
planning of the forthcoming sessions which will take place from February 8th to 12th, 2009
Interestingly, Intel will unveil an Octo core Xeon, featuring 2.3 billions transistors and 3 levels of cache on a QPI bus offering a bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s. The CPU will support hyperthreading so 16 logical cores will then be available. With such processor in a Mac Pro, users would then have 16 physicals cores and 32 logical cores, if you associate them with some NVidia GeForce GTX to run Snow Leopard, it must be a really amazing work station
Samsung announced to have developed the first DDR3 memory chip with a capacity of 512 MB. Engraved in 50 nm, it has a consumption much lower than two chips of 256 MB.
The manufacturers of memory cards will thus have the choice between manufacturing cards of lower power consumption, and also the possibility of manufacturing with higher densities. Thus, by using these chips, one could produce cards for desktop machines of 32 GB or 8 GB for the portables.
Of course, it will take some time yet before these capacities are offered to the general public, but one should already clearly see a price reduction of the 4 GB cards intended for the portables.
PS to the attention of Apple: new MacBook Pro 17" will accept 8 GB whereas the 15" and MacBook Unibody have a bug that slows down these machines fitted with 8 GB. It would be great if you could offer an update in order to regulate this problem.
