Aren't the processors in the laptops the same as the desktops?
No. The processors in the laptops have been designed to be more power efficient and give off less heat making it more portable. This means you don't have the as much power as you have in the desktop. In this blog post I hope to explain the differences between the Mobile i3, i5, i7 and their desktop counterparts. In most current laptops the current processors are the mobile chips from AMD, The dual Pentium, The Core2 Duo, i3, i5 and i7. As stated before the laptop chips are meant to be mobile so if you were to take a desktop i7 using the Socket 1156 or the 1366 socket you would have a 8" high laptop. So we give up clock speed, and for the most part the number of cores on the processor. *To be fair I am putting a disclaimer. This is my best educated guess as to the processors that Apple has selected and may actually differ from the actual processor being used in the laptop. Apple doesn't release the chip spec it has selected for it's laptops. Based on the information available this is my best guess for the actual processors inside the Macbook / Macbook Pro. If apple or anyone would like to provide the actual Macbook for disassembling, I would be happy to confirm my guess.
Below you will find a lot of technical information about the mobile CPU's and GPU's but for those of you who aren't as technically interested I'll just sum up everything here. Your best Value for a high end laptop processors would be something with the i5 540, the i7 720QM or a desktop Phenom X4. The i7 720QM is a 4 core processor and has hyper-threading. It is pretty much as good as your going to get for an i7 without completely draining the bank. If you can manage to get a Phenom X4 it's a desktop processor so your getting desktop power just remember to watch the temperature of the CPU and battery life. The i5 540 is a dual core with hyper threading and the i7 620M doesn't offer much more performance over the i5. So if I were to buy a Mac Laptop I would go with the i5 540. It's $200 cheaper, granted the GT 330M that comes with the 15" i5 only has 256MB dedicated video but for most of the Mac and windows laptop games available it should be good enough. It will play starcraft 2 really good.
As for overall value I would say if you can find a laptop with any of the following mobile processors and one of the dedicated mobile video cards, you will probably get a good deal.
Mobile Processors:
i7 720QM, i5 540, i5 450, Core2 P8600, P8700, P8800, T9000 Series. AMD Phenom Quad Core.
Mobile Graphics Cards:
ATI Cards: 5430, 5450, 5470, 5650, 5730, 5750
NVIDIA Cards: GeForce 310M, 320M, 330M, 220M, 230M, 240M, 260M
Apple Intel Processors
High End MacBook Pros
Apple has selected the i7 620M and the i5 540. Both are dual core processors and both have the Intel HD Integrated Graphics Chips in the processor. The i7 has the faster clock speed and more smart cache.
Intel® Core™ i7-620M Processor (4M Cache, 2.66 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-540M Processor (3M Cache, 2.53 GHz)
Mid-Range
For the midrange Apple more the likely slected the i5 520M because it doesn't support ECC memory. With that exception the two processors are virtually identical.
Intel® Core™ i5-520M Processor (3M Cache, 2.40 GHz) or Intel® Core™ i5-520E Processor (3M Cache, 2.40 GHz)
Entry Level / Low End
The entry level MacBook and MacBook Pro are 2.4 GHz Core2 processors and more then likely is the P8600 due to the front side bus being 1066 MHz and the Intel Trusted Execution Technology.
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T8300
or
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8600
Other more common laptop processors.
Intel® Core™ i7-720QM Processor
Intel® Core™ i7-620M Processor
Intel® Core™ i5-540M Processor
Intel® Core™ i5-520M Processor
Intel® Core™ i5-430M Processor
Intel® Core™ i3-350M Processor
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9600
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9550
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8800
Intel® Core™2 Processor P8700
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9000
Below you will find a comparison of the listed CPUs.
This table is sorted by the approximate speed of the (laptop) CPU.
Note, that there are also some desktop processors in the list (because some laptops are equiped with desktop CPUs and for comparison).
The table below is a list of all currently common video graphic cards in laptops / notebooks including benchmarks and specs. The list is ranked by the aproximate speed of the GPU (may differ with some 3DMark values).
| 1 | ATI | Mobility Radeon HD 5870 | Broadway-XT | 800 | 700 | 700 | 1000 | 128 | 11 | 40 | 17932 | 12711 | 7860 | 7584 | 5836 | | 48 |
| 2* | NVIDIA | GeForce GTX 460M | GF106 | 192 | 675 | 1350 | 1250 | | 11 | 40 | | | | | | | |
| 3 | ATI | Mobility Radeon HD 4870 | M98-XT | 800 | 550 | 550 | 888 | 256 | 10.1 | 55 | 16349 | 10655 | 6631 | 6139 | 5190 | | 43 |
| 4 | NVIDIA | GeForce GTX 280M | N10E-GTX | 128 | 585 | 1463 | 950 | 256 | 10 | 55 | 18414 | 12569 | 6328 | 5243 | 5846 | 105 | 45 |
| 5 | NVIDIA | GeForce GTX 260M | N10E-GT | 112 | 550 | 1375 | 950 | 256 | 10 | 55 | 14773 | 10167 | 4953 | 4316 | 3966 | 120 | 35 |
| 6* | NVIDIA | GeForce GTS 260M | N10E-GS | 96 | 550 | 1375 | 1800 | 128 | 10.1 | 40 | | | | | | | |
| 7* | ATI | Mobility Radeon HD 5750 | Madison-XT | 400 | 550 | 550 | 1600 | 128 | 11 | 40 | | | | | | | |
| 8* | ATI | Mobility Radeon HD 5730 | Madison | 400 | 650 | 650 | 800 | 128 | 11 | 40 | 14020 | 7258 | 3812 | 3 Posted via email from The OptionKey Blog
 There has been lot's of pressure is being put on RIM the manufacture of the popular BlackBerry platform about making their system less secure and giving governments access to the data on RIM's Servers. This will be a huge loss to consumers rights and privacy if RIM allows this. Is doing business in oppressive counties worth the hit to RIM's reputation as a secure way to transmit important communications in the name of "National Security"? Governments use this excuse to justify anything that will violate and/or take way a persons rights that are granted to citizen by their respective nations constitutions, in Canada the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Governments say they have to do this to stop terrorists; well I would argue wouldn't it be easier to track or restrict the purchasing of products that can be used to create harmful weapons or discourage these kind of plans be easier (i.e. banning and prohibiting the sale of large knives, guns and materials that can be made into explosives). Granted materials such as fertilizer can be used to make explosives, but you can uses security checks when people who what large and/or highly pure quantities of the material. In a age of hyper paranoia by our governments; a "Big Brother" approach from George Orwell's 1984 seems to be the approach our so called "elected officials" like to take all in the name of protecting our national security. What I find interesting that even according to RIM's own website RIM it's self can't access the messages on their own servers due to their security policy "The operators of the BlackBerry Infrastructure don’t have access to the customer keys and therefore can’t see the content of any of the messages." There was a time like during the "cold war era" where technology like this was banned from being in so called unfriendly countries. So if security is such a concern why do we give these unfriendly countries this kind of technology? Wouldn't be easier to ban it? Where is the corporate responsibility to our own private security? Where is our "elected" governments responsibility to our "privacy". Why do they allow this kind of allow the trade of this kind of technology with people who want to supposedly destroy us? Are we as a people willing to allow the loss of our Freedoms for short term financial gain? Are we so blinded and uninterested in our own political process that those who are elected get a free pass to do what they want with little or no question? At what point are will people say enough is enough. In Canada there are plans to scrap the long form census, the government feels it's a violation of your privacy, but they'll go to facebook and demand your personal information if they think they need it. Is it hypocritical or is it just the way things are? Over the last 20 years the world has changed dramatically, where we go from here is up to us. These issues with RIM and The United Arab Emirates, Google and China are just the beginning. I don't know about you but I'm going to be watching our Federal and Provincial governments very closely for changes like this. Here in Canada your innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. Unless we favor kangaroo courts like the ones being played out in Guantanamo Bay and in William Shakepeare's The Winters Tale. Then they will want to "kill all the lawyers". - (Shakespeare's King Henry VI; Act IV, Scene II) where the laws will be made by the few elite in a mocked up "democracy" that will not have any benefit for anyone but the rich. There are two ways we can go, one where laws are made fair for everyone or not at all. If we lose what we have then we become no better then those who would want to destroy us.
Posted via email from The OptionKey Blog
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USB 3 introduced earlier this year has been hailed as the latest greatest thing to come to peripherals since USB 2. Unlike USB 2 it is not suppose to stuffer from the bandwidth and burst issues USB 2 has had where you can't get a consistent through put. That being said USB 3 is great to bad I don't think it will be around for long. Let me introduce you to Light Peak. Light Peak is intended as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI. Intended to remove some of the problems in the computer industry that are now apparent such as the limited transfer speeds and the maximum length of electrical cables (5 meters for a standard USB 2.0 cable).
