Yonah benchmarks look promising for first Mactel systems
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 28, 2005 at 1:09am
Things look promising for “Mactel” systems using Intel’s Yonah processor. As I explained in a July 5 article, Yonah is based on a mobile-optimized microarchitecture and 65nm process technology, Yonah is designed to provide power management capabilities and enhanced performance for multiple demanding applications and multi-threaded applications. Look for it to be used in Mac minis, iBooks, iMac G5s and perhaps PowerBooks (my prediction, not any official Apple position).
According to an Anandtech article (a long piece, but one well worth your time), Yonah is a “fairly strong successor” to the single core Pentium M that offers performance equal to that of AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 without an on-die memory controller (though Yonah is equipped with a full 2MB of L2 cache, whereas the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in question only had 512KB per processor). Some are some of Anandtech’s findings:
° Yonah is the most efficient dual-core processor that Anandtech has tested to date.
° While Yonah will make its debut at a maximum speed of 2.16GHz, it will actually only receive a single speed bump before Merom’s release at the end of the year. (Merom is expected to be a completely revamped dual-core product for laptops with low power consumption but 20-30 percent better performance than that of its predecessors.) That means that we’ll see a 2.33GHz Yonah after the middle of the year, but we’ll have to turn to Merom to get any higher clock speeds. (This is one reason I expect to see PowerBooks using Merom rather than Yonah.)
° When it debuts, Yonah will probably be dubbed Centrino Core Duo or Centrino Core Single, depending on whether it’s the dual or single core version (though I expect Mactel systems to all be dual core).
° Intel’s Core Duo and Solo processors both support a 667MHz FSB, which is enabled by the 945 chipset that Intel is pairing with them. The move to a 667MHz FSB is necessary, thanks to the increased bandwidth demands of a dual core processor.
° Intel’s plan for 65nm is to rely on their deeper pipelined processors (Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest) for higher clock speed, with Yonah falling below the 2.5GHz mark. “And based on what we’ve seen in the first article, a 2.33GHz Yonah would be competitive with an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, but definitely not outpacing it,” Anadtech notes. “This does bode well for Intel’s next-generation processors, especially on the desktop with Conroe.”
Expect Power Macs to use the Conroe chips. Conroe, the desktop version of the Merom, is expected to remove certain power constraints, have additional performance tweaks for extra speed, as well as support the whole breed of desktop features, including virtualization capabilities, LaGrande technology, 64-bit capability in addition to EDB, EIST and iAMT2. Go here for details.
Now the interesting question is going to be: just how fast will a low-end dual-core Mactel machine be in comparison with current single-core systems. For instance, performance-wise, how would a Centrino Duo Core iMac with a 2.16GHz processor compare with a current iMac G5? With a current Power Mac G5 with dual 2.0GHz PowerPC processors? With a Power Mac G5 Quad? After all, the dual core systems will have the equivalent of two processors on one core.
2006 is going to be a fascinating year.
Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
