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Jan
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Ok this is a bit off topic, but I recently got a 15in i7 macbook pro to replace both my core2duo MBP from 09 and my Mac Pro tower from 07. Here are some interesting tidbits of information in no order.
The i7 is roughly 5-10 times faster than the core2duo at video encoding. It’s twice as fast as my 2 x 2.66 core2duo Mac Pro.
I have the 6770m graphics card and most games run faster on it than my Mac Pro with the 4870 in it, except SC2 and Crysis which run significantly better on the 4870. (all tests done in 1080p)
Battery life in my Core2Duo was waaaaaay better. Of course, it had integrated graphics though. The new 15in has integrated Intel 3000 graphics as well as the 6770m and is suppose to intelligently switch between the two. Problem is, opening some things like firefox makes it use the beefier card. Just so you know, battery life on integrated about = 6 hours, 6770m is about 2-3.
So solve this issue, there is a little program called GFXCardStatus that lets you manually force the integrated graphics card when you want better battery life. This works great for most things, but in order to use an external monitor or projector (which us teachers use everyday) you HAVE to use the 6770m. This of course means that My laptop won’t make it through 2 classes without needing to be plugged in, where my core2duo would last through 4.
So I guess there are tradeoffs between power and portability. I almost got the 13in i7, but decided not to because it doesn’t have quad core yet. Since the i7′s have hyperthreading, my 4 cores turn into 8 so video encodes super fast. A duel core i7 would only give me 4 virtual cores.
Of course all this theory was thrown out the window today when encoding episode 15. I noticed that my 8 virtual cores of awesomeness totally cause my 5400 RPM hard drive to bottleneck. So unless I get a 7200 RPM drive or an SSD (not likely) I can’t take advantage of all that power. In fact I only used 60% of my processor during the whole encoding process.
Theoretically this means that having 4 cores maxed on a 13in MBP would be about equal to having 8 cores half way maxed on a 15in. Sooo. Anyone want a 15in Mbp?
January 29th, 2012 at 8:56 PM
Hey Charlie, Thanks for the great videos. I love them and have turned a number of my students on to your blog. One thing worth mentioning about your video rendering with your new core i7 that may be similar to what I later discovered with mine is that the amount of RAM in a laptop is not sufficient for the computer to be able to push all 8 cores past a certain moderate threshold. In other words, the bottleneck that I found with regard to having a similar problem was that my 6GB of memory wasn’t enough to satisfy 8 cores. The guru’s at Creative Cow told me that ideally 2GB per core at least was recommended or else my cores would definitely idle a bit because the ram will be maxed out. And when I look at my cpu/ram performance monitor while rendering that’s pretty much what I’m seeing. Again, may or may not be the case with your situation but I thought I’d give it a mention since you situation sounds similar to mine.
Again, love the blog. Keep up the excellent work!
January 29th, 2012 at 9:06 PM
Thanks for the nice words! I have 4 cores and 8 gigs of ram. I’m not familiar with the 2 gig per core rule, but if that counts for virtual cores then I suppose I would need 16 gigs of ram
January 29th, 2012 at 9:57 PM
So Cody from GFXCardStatus replied to an email of mine and said that the next release will have an option to automatically change over to the beefy card when a monitor is plugged in !!!!! So awesome. Less clicking for me. But alas, won’t change my battery life while at school.
February 7th, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Thanks for the info. I plan to buy a MacBook Pro later this year. I am going to look at upgrading the RAM and HD.