Yonah, It’s More Than Just A Silly Name

If you navigate over to anandtech.com you can read their review of a prerelease version of Intel’s new “Yonah” chipset. It makes for an interesting read, assuming of course that you are really into learning about processors. However, if, on the off chance that isn’t your specialty I will summarize some of the more relevant points and try to explain how this news is important to Apple and ultimately to you.

The old processor that is currently in use for laptops is the Pentium M (code name Dothan). This is a single core architecture that, while functional, can’t really compete with the Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD chips. Yonah, the replacement for the Pentium M processor, will have two cores instead of one and a revamped system for dealing with memory. This is not just two Pentium Ms welded together, instead this is two cores that have be created to share memory more effectively in addition to lowering power consumption. Now that we have the technical details out of the way, how does this affect you?

Apple Laptops
Chances are very good that the first Mac to be powered by an Intel chip will be a laptop (and of the two models the iBook looks most likely to receive the new chip). To really make the computer effective it needs to excel at three things, speed of performance, multimedia rendering and power consumption.

The speed factor is the most obvious requirement. If the new iBooks aren’t noticeably faster than the old G4 iBooks then sales will slump because consumers won’t see a compelling reason to switch. However, if the new iBooks are running a chip that can hold its own alongside the fastest PC laptops (and thus run faster than the older iBooks as well) then Jobs will have some very nice numbers to show off during his keynote presentation. In short, the speed factor has to be compelling so that Job’s statements from June can be realized as something more than just hype.

The next promising aspect of Yonah is its approach to graphics. The Pentium M had somewhat lackluster performance in this area. Of course, that really didn’t matter too much to your average consumer because Windows doesn’t need too much power in that department. Unless you were a multimedia developer or an avid laptop gamer chances are the Pentium M was good enough. However that isn’t the case for OS X users. We have become quite use to the beautiful Altivec enhanced eye candy of Tiger and have no desire to give it up. What’s more, Leopard will feature even more graphic intensive tricks to dazzle us and that will require a good deal of processing power as well. So once again Yonah looks promising because with this new processor Intel is moving towards making graphic processing a more important feature.

Last we have power consumption. If you will recall Jobs was quick to announce that the benchmark would be changing in the coming years. No longer was the clock speed all important, instead a new standard was to be used based on power and efficiency. For him to really sell that it would be helpful to have a chip that followed that methodology and once again we have Yonah to the rescue.

So, it appears that Yonah is going to be a very promising, very powerful processor. This is good news to anyone who was thinking about purchasing an iBook or Powerbook after the switch to Intel. And, of course, this chipset could be used in the new Mac Mini since a media hum would have several of the same requirements that a laptop would have. Thus I offer this last word of advice, before the next Mac Expo I would suggest buying some stock in Apple. Lots of stock.