Brian's Brain

Continued from 'Apple: Writing the (Mac)Book on Laptop Design'....

Second-generation MacBooks offer one other key enhancement over their first-gen predecessors; an upgraded CPU. The terminology is somewhat confusing, so hang with me over the next few sentences. First-generation MacBooks contain a Pentium M-derived CPU with the project name 'Yonah', which Apple and Intel's marketing materials refer to as the Core Solo (single-core) and Core Duo (dual-core, in all MacBooks). With me so far? Second-generation MacBooks contain the mobile variant of Intel's first CPUs based on its Core microarchitecture, known by its project name 'Merom' and by its marketing names Core 2 Solo (single-core) and Core 2 Duo (dual-core, again in all MacBooks). So Pentium M (microarchitecture) = Core (product), and Core (microarchitecture) = Core 2 (product). Capiche? Phew! From now on, I'll refer to the CPUs by their product names to avoid confusion.

Although the server-tuned variant of Yonah, called Sossaman, offers 64-bit support, Intel decided (likely for marketing reasons, to avoid slowing the subsequent conversion to Core 2) to not enable 64-bit support on Yonah. So, by going with a first-gen MacBook, I knowingly gave up any ability to run a 64-bit Apple or Microsoft O/S, now or in the future. Not a big deal, in my opinion; the primary benefit of 64-bit support is its expanded address range, but MacBooks only handle up to 2 GBytes of DRAM. And by the time third-party driver support for the 64-bit spin of Windows Vista is sufficiently robust, I'll probably be ready for my next laptop. Admittedly, Core 2's 2x larger cache and other enhancements would deliver notable benefit on CPU-intensive tasks, but benchmarks like these suggest there's little system performance boost under normal usage environments. And although Core 2-based systems are reportedly slightly cooler in operation than their predecessors, third-party utilities like CoolBook, iCyclone and smcFanControl can help bridge that gap.

One important feature that both Core Duo and Core 2 Duo provide is hardware support for Intel Virtualization Technology, which Parallels Workstation for Mac heavily leverages, and which provided added EDN-tailored incentive for me to pursue the MacBook upgrade. Hold that thought for a bit, however, as I first want to cover my Boot Camp experiences. Boot Camp consists of several primary components, outlined here. My first challenge was to find a SATA-compatible 2.5" external enclosure, so I could clone my original HDD. This was harder than it might sound at first glance; most 2.5" enclosures at retail are PATA-tailored. I eventually went with an Apricorn unit, whose included Windows backup software obviously wasn't of any use!

In the past, I'd had good backup-and-duplication luck with a donation-ware program called Carbon Copy Cloner. It's not yet available in a Universal version but it seemed to run fine under Rosetta; I mirrored and expanded the contents of the 60 GByte source HDD to the 160 GByte replacement, then swapped the two drives. Although the system subsequently booted just fine, Boot Camp's partitioning software wouldn't run, complaining about an invalid HFS+ partition (although OS X's Disk Utility reported no problems). Fortunately, I didn't have to re-swap drives; instead, I put the 60 GByte drive in the Apricorn enclosure, booted the system off that and, via an excellent program called SuperDuper, was able to successfully complete the second mirroring attempt.

I subsequently created a 60 GByte NTFS partition via Boot Camp (note, I used beta v1.1.2), leaving the remaining 100 GBytes on the HDD for OS 10.4. The XP Pro SP2 installation was glitch-free; the driver CD that Boot Camp generates covered nearly all of the system's components. How about some photo proof? Here's XP fully booted; isn't it eerie seeing a Windows operating system running on a Mac? Here's Device Manager; I'm pretty sure that the driver-less peripheral is the infrared receiver that works in conjunction with the Apple Remote. And here are the 64 operating system updates that awaited me after XP SP2 installed (sigh). rEFIt lets me selectively boot OS X or Windows on initial startup.

Pretty much every Windows key has an Apple built-in keyboard equivalent, with a few notable exceptions (no Print Screen, folks?) Tethered external Apple keyboards further expand the compatibility list, and you can also connect a Windows USB keyboard. There's no right touchpad button, of course, but by putting two fingers on the touchpad while clicking, you can simulate the right-button function. And an external two-button mouse, preferably also with a scrolling wheel, is better still. I was even able to Bluetooth-pair the Windows-running MacBook to my Bluetake mouse by following these instructions.

Now for Parallels. As I've written before, encouraging multi-display usage is one means by which GPU manufacturers attempt to cultivate demand for their latest-generation graphics accelerators. Simplistically speaking, you can view CPU suppliers' advocacy of O/S virtualization in the same vein; if one operating system and its application suite isn't enough to keep all those transistors occupied, how about tossing a few more O/S images at them?

Continued with 'Virtualization: Keeping the Processor Occupied'....

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