Yonah & New ThinkPads

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longfellow · #1 Post by **longfellow** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 4:37 am

Hi Guys, I am really surprised after searching this forum for hints of new ThinkPads to learn that no one is talking about it. Nor excited. Especially when Yonah launch is around the corner and Mac users are rumoring about new iBooks featuring Yonah....Why I dont feel the excitement in our forum. I read posts saying still guys are waiting for the delivery of T43ps ordered in mid Nov. Whats going on guys?

christopher_wolf · #2 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 4:44 am

Well; I don't really know. Yonah is indeed exciting. Yet I thought that the Intel Powerbooks will feature the 90nm Technology at the start. There are some threads about it on here though.

#3 Post by **GomJabbar** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 5:59 am

A search on this site pulled up 69 threads on Yonah (68 if you don't count your's). So there is some interest.

I would imagine that Mac users would find this much more newsworthy since this is a complete change of platform for them (to Intel).

defjux · #4 Post by **defjux** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 4:44 pm

Are you really surprised? A quick browse around these forums shows the Thinkpad user as a peculiar animal, often unwilling to even fathom an unnecessary system upgrade when his T23 or 770 is still plugging away just fine. However, most of the Mac votaries I've encountered (and this is a lot, being in college) suffer chronic upgraditis. I found a dorm mate's iMac in the garbage after he got his G5, I kid you not.

smugiri · #5 Post by **smugiri** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 5:06 pm

Are you really surprised? A quick browse around these forums shows the Thinkpad user as a peculiar animal, often unwilling to even fathom an unnecessary system upgrade when his T23 or 770 is still plugging away just fine

I concur completely, I think I would still be happy using my old R31 if my wife had not taken it away ( but do not think for a second that you can take my current machine away and replace it with one now ... )

Another part of this I think is that many of the people you find on this site think of themselves as thinkpad affectionados and I suspect that many are waiting to see how the marriage between the thinkpad line and it's new ownerwill play out. Consider the Z60, which, in spite of being a departure from the old ibm mantra of "you can have any color as long as it it black" seems to be 100% traditional thinkpad in every other sense. At this point, it seems to me that its a wait and see game. I want to think that users of this forum probably wont early adopt the next release in as large numbers as would be expected as they wait to see how design/reliability/customer service play out with the current and next linage of machines. I know I would'nt.

christopher_wolf · #6 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 5:13 pm

Well; that is a big reason that Apple is still going strong. Users update quickly after something comes out. Simply a business strategy that Apple has put to good use.

#7 Post by **RonS** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 7:41 pm

I was excited about Sonoma, and it turned out to be a dud.

christopher_wolf · #8 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 9:00 pm

How did Sonoma turn out to be a dud? It seems to be doing great to me.

StarTraveller · #9 Post by **StarTraveller** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 9:28 pm

Maybe RonS compares the Dothan and the Sonoma. If that's the case then another code name didn't offer all that much.

I went from a Banias to a Sonoma and didn't experience anything revolutionary other than a 50 % increase in clock speed, which of course provides an almost proportional increase in performance, but unfortunately it also brought with it a near proportional increase in heat and power consumption.

It has taken me quite a bit of work to tweak things to compensate for the latter.

#10 Post by **RonS** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 4:20 pm

StarTraveller wrote:Maybe RonS compares the Dothan and the Sonoma. If that's the case then another code name didn't offer all that much.

Exactly. Requires more power and generates more heat, but Sonoma provides very little real-word performance benefit over Dothan.

christopher_wolf · #11 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 5:00 pm

Well, I would tend to believe that if I haven't used my T43 in an actual, demanding environment...But I have. I can just about beat all the other laptops, this includes slightly lower spec Thinkpads and Powerbooks, in the Lab at many calculations. I even suprised my Lab PI by doing a *very* intensive computation, completing is, and inserting it into my presentation before anybody else got even halfway through it (majority of the systems there were T42s, 3 T40s, and some iBooks and they were using a BioSimulator Program I had coded previously) some did; this is not an insignificant performance we are talking about here. It is not what the difference in performance is per price, but how tangible that is for what you are going to apply it to. Since I was going to be using my Thinkpad for serious lab work, rendering, and numerical computations it made sense to get a system with a higher spec; was the (cost differential)/(performance differential) worrth it in this case? Yes it was. Would it be worth it if you are using it for email/web browsing/etc? Maybe not. It isn't just how much more you get for your buck, but how much you plan to apply it; it isn't a disposable resource, but rather, a long term investment. You can also come up with curves describing that over time; 3D surfaces if you consider TCO and upgrades over time.

It also depends on how "volatile" the subject you are working on is; if it changes rapidly, it would suit you perfectly to have a system that can make it up in other areas with sheer compute power and not be locked into a situation where you have to "upgrade" or otherwise modify your system to get it to perform a task to your satisfaction. In this case, I would rather have a thin and portable system that has tremendous compute power yet can also be flexible enough to have it applied in other situations with little to no loss of expected performance vs. actual performance on the task at hand. In this sense, the T Series is a Hybrid between an R Series and an X Series. It is more like an engineering problem; one that is helped greatly by using the right tool for the right situation and apply it correctly.

rocketman · #12 Post by **rocketman** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:34 pm

Dell is already selling Yonah based notebboks on their site. Hopefully Lenovo will be selling Thinkpads with Yonah soon:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/ ... 05S1&s=dhs

christopher_wolf · #13 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:54 pm

NEC shipped out the first Yonah based Notebook as well; the specs actually put the NEC laptop in the mid-range classification which, I think, is strange if you go to the hassle of putting something like Yonah in a laptop.

smugiri · #14 Post by **smugiri** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:59 pm

They already did: check out this thread.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=18963

Yonah & New ThinkPads

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