David Flynn26 September 2009, 1:49 PM
Apple is primed to launch a revamped iMac in the coming weeks, and the latest reports suggest a quad-core processor might find its way into the slim aluminium chassis.
Rumours of a new iMac don’t appear to enjoy
quite the same frisson of excitement as the scuttlebut surrounding new iPods, MacBooks or of course the iPhone.
But with Apple gearing up for its last major product launch of the year – and with that launch tipped to be just weeks away – there’s a growing buzz about what’s in store.
The centrepiece is expected to be a refresh to the iMac. Talk is of a slick new design with a slimmer chassis (because the current iMac is clearly
way too fat), an inbuilt SD card reader and a lower price tag, with Apple hoping that Christmas sales can trump a faltering economy.
A more technical tidbit was added to the gossip mix overnight, however, with French site
Mac4Ever reporting that a quad-core processor would find its way into the new iMac.
Could the Core i5 be the powerplant of a new and possibly higher-end iMac?
All current iMacs use Core 2 Duo processors, and specifically those from the mobile rather than desktop lines.
In any previous years such a rumour would have been scoffed at, because quad-core chips were the stuff of heavy-duty systems and the most demanding applications. Oh, and they cost a packet.
But in the past month that equation has changed, with Intel rolling out a pair of quad-core powerplants – the desktop-class
Core i5 plus the first
Core i7 mobile processors.
While the Core i7 is more advanced than the Core i5 – it supports hyperthreading, Intel’s QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) pipeline and cut back the number of DDR3 memory from three channels to two – the Core i5 has a very appealing price tag.
The ‘entry level’ 2.66GHz Core i5-750 – which can rather up to 3.2GHz in ‘turbo mode’ – sells for US$196.
(That’s the official list price per-thousand price to a manufacturer such as Apple, but of course doesn’t allow for any discounts or other compensations which Intel may offer to its highly-prized ‘trophy OEM’.)
That’s almost 20% cheaper than the $241 list price for the 2.66GHz P8800 Core 2 Duo which appears in Apple’s cheapest iMac – the 20 inch model with an AU$1,999 price tag.
Or will the new iMac pack the oven-fresh Core i7 mobile processor launched at last week's
Intel Developer Forum (and seen here in the hand of Intel mobility chief Mooly Eden)?
However, as a desktop processor the Core i5 is engineered for larger chassis with superior airflow to defeat higher thermals when compared to processors like the new mobile Core i7, which are intended for laptops.
If Apple
is moving to a slimmer enclosure for the new iMac then it’s hard to see how anything but a ‘made for mobile’ chip could be on the cards.
Intel’s fresh-baked Core i7-8200M mobile processor runs at 1.73GHz and ramps up to 3.06GHz, while the i7-7200M has a nominal speed of 1.6GHz but redlines at an impressive 2.8GHz.
It’s always possible that Apple could stick with a Core 2 Duo for its entry-level systems and drop a Core i7 mobile chip into a higher-spec version of the iMac such as a model with a larger screen than the base version.