Dell M90 & M65 Laptops Are Up

Dell put the pages up and the M90 starts @ $2k, but of course by the time I add it all up with options I would order, it comes to just over $4000.

No ship dates are noted yet.

Bo

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Bo
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The side issue for me, a long term Mac user, is that my new Mac may be the best PC I've ever owned . I'm still looking at the landscape, letting things settle before I plunk down hard cash.

Quote from:

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"New data and benchmarks demonstrating that the Intel powered MacBook Pros and iMacs run Windows faster than today's PCs dismiss the myths that Macs are slower, behind the technology curve, and are more costly. The point I'd like to make is that the Intel based Macs were designed and engineered to be Macs that run OS X, not Windows. The fact that they run Windows XP faster than WinTel machines proves that Apple's hardware engineering, innovation, and quality surpasses its competitors."

There are Facts, Biased Tests, and then Politician's opinions with a world between them, and likewise I won't attempt to personally describe speeds of various laptops as "fastest", since that is so debatable.

What is coming to the forefront, though, is the ability finally to run both Mac OSX and Windows on a single machine.

It is about time.

Bo

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Bo

But what graphics adapter does the Mac use? If it is not NVIDIA Quadro or ATI FireGL, then it is not certified to run any engineering OpenGL apps and therefore won't have the proper driver support.

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Reply to
Ken

Are they comparing the new Intel Macs against PCs with the same processor, or is it Core Duo vs Pentium M?

Even cooler will be the ability to run them at the same time. The latest generations of multi-core processors from Intel and AMD both support virtualization, which means they can pretend to be more than one computer at the same time. I don't know when this will be available to non-server hardware, but the idea of running SW by itself in XP, and everything else in a more stable and secure OS (almost anything but XP) on the same machine sounds pretty good.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

The MacBookPro uses a high end ATI laptop card in 2 versions:

"ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor, dual link DVI support,

128MB of GDDR3 on 1.83GHz configuration. (or 256MB GDDR3 on 2.0GHz configuration)". OpenGL hardware support has been on the Macs for a long time.

I would suspect the Mac engineers are NOT going to miss a chance to run their favorite CAD applications by specifying a card which was not compatible.

My whole point was just convey that I may just be able to get one new laptop this year, rather than two, as both of them are now nearing 3 years old.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

The Radeon line is a consumer level card and is not considered "high end" for workstation use and is therefore not recommended or supported by most of the 3D engineering apps (in fact it is not supported by ATI for use with those apps either). The ATI FireGL line on the other hand is, so it looks like Macs do not have the driver/hardware support for the engineering 3D OpenGL apps.

Reply to
Ken
256 megs of VRAM is quite a bit for consumer level work.

The Desktop Workstations will let users install whatever video card they desire, so that will work.

The question will be whether one of the plugin laptop video cards will be replaceable in the MacBooks or offered at some point?

We will see - Bo

Reply to
Bo

It's not about the memory, it is about the higher end OpenGL features that are only "enabled" on the workstation class cards and supported by the driver, which in turn, are depended upon by the workstation applications. Things like Overlay Planes and multi-OpenGL window support among other things. You can typically "dumb-down" the application to run on the consumer cards were these features are absent, but performance and the user experience can suffer as a result, and frequent crashing can occur.

Reply to
Ken
4/4/06 2:00 PM =
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reports that the rumor is Mac OSX 10.5 due at the end of this year will support virtualization techniques including partitions for Linux and MS Vista.

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This article, separately above, notes that Parallels will release a virtualization software for MacOSX that will allow MS Windows and Linux to run easily on MacOSX at high speed later this week.

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That doesn't mean all is perfect to run SolidWorks on a Mac just yet, but it is getting closer. Video cards obviously need to be approved to avoid problems.

Still, it is encouraging, that a company is reacting this fast to changes in the market.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

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