Somewhat off-topic, but I trust the judgement of those here. I'm in the market to buy one of these. I was wondering whether current owners feel the extra 2MB of L3 cache justifies the price-bump of the 2.3GHz processor.
Depends on whether the code you're running will use the extra cache. In some HPC and gaming circumstances, people write in assembler to make sure a code loop or the data structure being worked on fits totally within the L1 or L2 cache of the processor, which can provide a huge performance improvement.
But, for standard use without such specialized workloads, $250 a minor clockspeed and cache improvement doesn't make much sense.
You'd probably get a much bigger boost from adding a SSD or going up to 8GB of RAM in the machine. I'd buy these aftermarket - RAM especially is a good deal as you can get 8GB of DDR3-1333 for less than $90 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...
Definitely second getting an SSD instead. It's the single biggest upgrade you can do to a PC today, especially for laptops. If you can live with 128gb of storage, a RealSSD C300, the current performance king (although check Anandtech for updates, this is changing all the time) is $264 from Newegg:
I would actually give the SandForce drives a try. They have better garbage collection. TRIM is coming in Snow Leopard, but it is always nice to have good garbage collection on the hardware.
SandForce wins right now in $/gb, and 4K writes. It loses in anything that is limited by the SATA2 bus, such as sequential transfers.
The stories about TRIM coming in Lion also pointed out that so far it was only supported on Apple's own SSDs.
Also, the major problem with Sandforce drives on Macs is that their firmware can only be updated a) under Windows, in Boot Camp, and b) with an MBR-formatted disk. That is bullshit.
Totally depends on what you do:
I have a 2.6ghz 2010 MBP with an Intel SSD that has been the screamer at our office for quite a while now.
My office mate just got a 2011, and even though he has yet to get an SSD in it yet, he runs our integration test suite ( java JUnit stuff, heavy mix of cpu and disk io ) in half the time I can ( thats 7 minutes vs 14 ), and where my cpus stay at 75-90% the whole time, his never breaks 15. Now, on the compile target that I run 10-20 times a day, my machine is still a second or two faster, but I suspect that advantage will evaporate once he has that SSD.
In my own tests compiling and building code I found that the OS X disk cache is very efficient and so the SSD advantage disappears after the first run.
Still the best bang for the buck upgrade by far but for the purpose of compiling much less difference than I had expected.
I'll have to get him to run successive compiles and see.
The other advantage of this model is that it is upgradable to 16GB RAM, according to OWC and others [1]. The upgrade is a ridiculous cost right now, but it can likely only go down.
Actually it is not a good idea to upgrade from Apple store. It is much more expensive, it does not make sense, you can buy those from anywhere else.
Yet, there are some stuff you could only get from the Apple store like CPU upgrade.
As others mentioned, SSD upgrade makes more sense than RAM upgrade. Although you can buy the SSD from elsewhere, this time it makes a bit sense to buy it from Apple store because TRIM support is already out there for the disks you buy from Apple store in Mac OS X 10.6.6. The other SSDs are not supported yet.
