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

 

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 use laptops only>. I'm still looking at
the landscape, letting things settle before I plunk down hard cash.

Quote from:
http://switchtoamac.com/site/macs-a...zation-technology-increased-market-share.html

"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

 

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.

Ken

 

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

 

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.

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

 

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.

Ken

 

4/4/06 2:00 PM = http://osnews.com/ 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.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsID=5712

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.

http://www.parallels.com/

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