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Apple's Conroe Plans

by David Ross on 8 March 2006, 16:16

Tags: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

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Oh these are juicy....

There is no doubt that Apple was impressed when they were shown the expected performance of Conroe - and this is likely one of the reasons why they picked Intel as their new CPU provider for their machine line-up. However, it looks as if Apple are going to have very distinct boundaries with the Intel CPUs. With the old SKUs of Apple products (iBook, PowerBook, Power Mac) they used the same CPUs across the board, just at the different clock frequencies and in different numbers. Apple are using Yonah within the iMac, MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini - as they have already shown.

The plans for the iMac and the MacBook are to have Merom in them (Intel's next-generation mobile processor) but it looks like the Mac Mini will just see clock increases for the time being.

Apple plan to use Conroe purely for their high-end PowerMac workstation systems, replacing the G5. While we can understand this, and see the business sense (upsell) we are not sure how consumers will see it, since before they enjoyed the fact each Mac had pretty much the same CPU inside, but at different clock speeds. They don't plan to bring a Xeon (Woodcrest) based SKU to the PowerMac

With this being the case, how will Apple get performance? The move from a Dual 2.7GHz (Dual Core) to a Single (Dual Core) Conroe? We know that Intel likes Apple but surely not enough to open up the Conroe to run in Multi CPU configuration - meaning Dell wouldn't be too happy right? Currently the only solution open to Apple is to use a Xeon CPU - thus they may need to take WoodCrest and put it in the PowerMac even if they don't want to, Multi-core is too far away.

So, this will give clearer distinction between products; some for the Consumer, some for Prosumer, and some for high performance.

Currently Apple are not planning to use any of the Core Xeon CPUs within their non server line-ups.

Another rumour which has been muttered is that Apple are looking in to multi-GPU solutions, but not for the consumer, rather purely for the professional content creation/workstation market.

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Posted by kapowaz - Thu 09 Mar 2006 12:32
Apple plan to use Conroe purely for their high-end PowerMac workstation systems, replacing the G5. While we can understand this, and see the business sense (upsell) we are not sure how consumers will see it, since before they enjoyed the fact each Mac had pretty much the same CPU inside, but at different clock speeds.

Eh? The PowerPC era Mac range has always been fragmented; prior to the introduction of the G5, the high-end machines had G4 processors, and the lower end (iBooks, notably) had G3s. Once the G5 was released, this gradually shifted so that the lower end were G4-based and the high end were G5 based, although ultimately the iMac also gained a G5. And this is before you even consider the various different permuatations of the G3, G4 and G5 processors that Apple released inside their hardware; there have been many different revisions of each, even at the same clockspeed, with different cache size and FSB.

I don't see any major difference between this and Apple using the Core Solo/Duo in mainstream/lower end machines and Conroe (whatever it gets called) in the PowerMac and potentially Xserve too.