Speeds and Feeds

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI division are taking different approaches to graphics processing in the next generations of their products. Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses, and I think it's too soon to pick the eventual winner in this long-running fight.

Before I get into my analysis, I should say that Nvidia paid me to write a white paper on the implications of its new GPU architecture (code-named Fermi) for high-performance computing applications. The white paper was released as part of the Fermi launch event at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference last week.

Nvidia also paid for white papers from two other well-known microprocessor analysts, Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 and my friend and former colleague Tom Halfhill of Microprocessor Report. UC Berkeley professor David Patterson wrote a fourth white paper, and Nvidia wrote one of its own. All of these works take a different approach to the subject; all are worth reading if you need to understand what Fermi is all about.

In short, I think the Fermi architecture has been more thoroughly white-papered than any graphics chip design in history. All five of these documents are available on the Fermi home page on Nvidia's Web site, and just in case that page is moved or changed, you're welcome to take advantage of my own mirror of my white paper.

I've spent much of the last several days reading these documents plus David Kanter's excellent article on Fermi over on his Real World Technologies site. David managed to get some details on Fermi that Nvidia didn't give to the rest of us.

I've also had time to go through the coverage of ATI's recent launch of the RV870, which is what Nvidia's Fermi-based chips will be competing against. The first of Nvidia's chips bears the internal code name of GF100, and it's huge. Here's a life-size photo:

Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology--but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.

OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other GPU programming languages, such as Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) extensions for C and the Brook stream program language developed at Stanford University and included in Advanced Micro Devices' Stream Computing software development kit, but rather than choosing one of these languages, Apple chose to create a new standard independent of the big graphics vendors.

In fact, OpenCL is even independent of Apple. One of the first things Apple did was offer to hand it over to the Khronos Group, the same independent standards organization that manages the OpenGL standard for 3D rendering.

Supporters of the OpenCL standards effort at the Khronos Group include the biggest CPU and GPU makers in the industry. Apple is also involved but not shown here.

The members of the OpenCL working group turned Apple's draft specification into the released version 1.0 spec in just six months (see Brooke Crothers' "OpenCL goes beyond Apple" from last December)--and in the process, it created what may be the best solution so far to the general problem of parallel programming.

See, OpenCL isn't just for GPUs. It was designed from the beginning to get the most out of multicore processors too. After all, if you have a multicore CPU--and you probably do--why let it go to waste? OpenCL is flexible enough to support both CPU-optimized and GPU-optimized code, and smart enough to choose the right code, depending on what hardware is available in the system to run it. Most of the competing parallel-programming languages can't do that.

OpenCL can take advantage of both task-level parallelism (running many tasks at once, whether different tasks or copies of the same task) and data-level parallelism (where a single instruction within a task is applied to multiple data items at once--also known as SIMD). Some parallel-programming languages can't do that, either.

But OpenCL's biggest advantage isn't technical in nature: it's that no other parallel-programming language will be so widely supported. The support starts with Snow Leopard but will go well beyond that. AMD and Nvidia will have OpenCL drivers for their GPUs under Windows and Linux. AMD and Intel will support OpenCL on their CPUs (including Intel's Larrabee). And AMD has already shipped its first OpenCL implementation for its Athlon and Opteron processors.

Implementations for video game consoles and DSPs (digital signal processors) are also under development. I've even heard that future releases of OpenCL may be able to work with less common hardware, such as FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).

We had an excellent half-day OpenCL tutorial last weekend at Hot Chips 21. There were also some great OpenCL presentations at Siggraph 2009 earlier this month; if you'd like more detailed information, that's a good place to start.

All this support for OpenCL means that it should become the first choice of academic and commercial developers who want a good cross-platform way to develop parallel code. Expect to see OpenCL used in software for audio and video processing, cryptography, medical imaging, and many other applications--including, of course, gaming.

(Disclosure: I will be writing a technical white paper for Nvidia, one of the companies covered in this story.)

Two companies--respectively (I believe) the smallest and largest makers of graphics chips--announced on Sunday that they are developing new standard APIs (application programming interfaces) specifically for ray-traced computer graphics.

Caustic Graphics introduced CausticGL, an API designed to leverage the best aspects of OpenGL, the most widely supported 3D API on the market. CausticGL ties in with Caustic's accelerator chips and boards, which the company says can deliver some 20X the ray-tracing performance of a conventional CPU.

Nvidia offered OptiX (pronounced like "optics"), a name designed to resonate with PhysX, the physics API acquired last year when Nvidia bought Ageia, a company that was developing both the software API as well as a companion accelerator chip. (Nvidia doesn't have a Web page on OptiX yet; I'll update this post when one appears.) (The OptiX page is now online.)

James McCombe (founder and CTO of start-up Caustic Graphics) and Austin Robison (a research scientist with Nvidia) made their announcements in presentations during the Hot3D session I chaired at the High Performance Graphics conference in New Orleans over the weekend. The big Siggraph 2009 conference opens here this week.

The third presentation in the session was from Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer with Intel, who described new details of how Intel is optimizing 3D-rendering software for its forthcoming Larrabee GPU.

I'll have more analysis of these announcements later, but I didn't want to miss this chance to break some significant industry news.

I spent Tuesday at Nvidia headquarters, attending the company's annual Analyst Day.

I've been to most of Nvidia's analyst events over the last decade or so, since I covered Nvidia almost from its inception while working as the graphics analyst at Microprocessor Report. These meetings are always a good way to get an update on the company's business operations, and sometimes--like this time--one provides exceptionally good insight into larger industry trends.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 graphics chip

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia has had a rough couple of quarters in the market, which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang blamed in part on a bad strategic call in early 2008: to place orders for large quantities of new chips to be delivered later in the year. When the recession hit, these orders turned into about six months of inventory, much of which simply couldn't be sold at the usual markup.

In response, Nvidia CFO David White outlined measures the company plans to take to increase revenue, sell a more valuable mix of products, reduce the cost of goods sold, and cut back on Nvidia's operating expenses.

Three things stood out for me in this presentation:

Nvidia is planning an aggressive transition to state-of-the-art ASIC fabrication technology at TSMC, the company's manufacturing partner. Within "two to three quarters," White said, about two-thirds of the chips Nvidia sells will be made using 40-nanometer process technology. (The first of these chips were announced Tuesday.)

White also acknowledged something that I've long assumed to be true: Nvidia receives "preferential allocation" on advanced process technology at TSMC. It's logical that Nvidia should get the red-carpet treatment, having been TSMC's best customer for many years, but I don't recall hearing Nvidia or TSMC put this fact on the record before.

The third notable point from White's presentation: the gross margins for Nvidia's Tegra, an ARM-based application processor--which Nvidia's Mike Rayfield, general manager of the Tegra division, says has already garnered 42 design wins at 27 companies--are much higher than I'd have guessed--at "over 45 percent." That's quite excellent for an ARM-based SoC; it's a very competitive market.

More surprises
The technical sessions at the event contained their own surprises.

For example, Nvidia effectively seized control of an old Intel marketing buzzword: "balanced."

For years, Intel used to talk about ... Read more

Apple's announcements this week expanded the range of the MacBook Pro product line, which now covers starting prices from $1,199 to $2,499.

In effect, the Pro line has absorbed the aluminum-cased models from the MacBook line, which is now reduced to a single model with a white plastic case, a look that debuted over three years ago.

Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

Some "Pro" models now have features that used to be hallmarks of the basic MacBook notebooks: integrated graphics and no ExpressCard slot. I think of these as consumer-oriented choices, and I'll throw in the standard glossy screen finish on the 13-inch and 15-inch models. A glossy screen looks better for movies, but it's unacceptable for some professional users.

Consumers should be happy to migrate to the MacBook Pro line, since they can now get features and options never before offered on MacBooks: FireWire 800, for example, and support for up to 8GB of DRAM.

Professional users, on the other hand, are now reduced to just one good choice: the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which includes an ExpressCard slot and can be ordered with an antiglare screen.

So in a way, Apple's newly expanded notebook line is narrower than it used to be -- there's room both above and below, especially if the plastic MacBook is allowed to fade gracefully into history.

... Read more

Last week, I attended a press event in Los Angeles hosted by Hewlett-Packard's workstation business unit. Hewlett-Packard was preparing for this week's announcement of three new Z-series workstation models: the Z400, Z600, and Z800.

HP briefed the reporters and analysts with all the key details of the products (the speeds and feeds, as we say), took us to visit a couple of HP's key customers in the area, and hosted presentations by software partners and more customers.

The new HP Z-Series workstations.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The workstations are very nice, especially the Z600 and Z800: high-quality dual-processor systems based on Intel's newest Xeon 5500-series processors with specific adaptations to distinguish them from ordinary PCs. Even the Z400, though based on a more basic PC-like design, uses a single Xeon processor and provides two 16-lane PCI Express Gen2 slots.

The customer visits were well chosen: one at BMW Designworks and another at DreamWorks, the movie studio that just released Monsters vs. Aliens.

BMW Designworks actually assisted with the industrial design of the new HP workstations. They're handsome machines, but not exactly pretty--certainly not in the way Apple's Mac Pro is.

More importantly, however, the HP-BMW design is functionally superior. In about the same case size as the Mac Pro, HP's Z800 has room for more RAM, more expansion cards, and more disk drives. BMW also worked handles into the design, and they work better than Apple's.

The difference in RAM is quite substantial. It isn't just about the slots (eight in the Mac Pro, twelve in the Z800)--but even more in the fact that HP supports 16GB dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs), while Apple's machine goes only up to 4GB per slot. That's 192GB for the HP and 32GB for the Mac.

To be fair, HP is merely promising to offer 16GB DIMMs by the end of 2009; you can't get them today. Apple rarely preannounces anything, so it's possible that the Mac Pro will support more RAM by then, but HP's advantage in slot count should keep it on top.

More RAM can often give more performance than a faster CPU, especially in memory-hungry engineering applications. If the software overflows the physical memory and must start using virtual memory, performance can plummet.

These are very nice machines. But they're also expensive. The Z800 starts at less than $2,000 (actually a good bit cheaper than the Mac Pro's entry price), but most buyers will aim higher. In fact, it's no big deal to spend $10,000 or more on a high-end workstation.

Does that seem like a lot of money to spend on a PC for business use at a time when many businesses are struggling? Quite the opposite, I think.

The truth is, the cost of a superior PC is almost trivial, compared with the value it can generate in the hands of a highly skilled designer.

HP tried to make this point in its presentations at the event, but it was very conservative in its figures. First, it assumed that the total cost per employee (including salary, benefits, office space, management overhead, etc.) was just $60 per hour, which is very low. Second, it shouldn't have been using a cost model at all!

The more useful basis for this analysis is revenue per employee, which can easily exceed $250 per hour for the kind of workers who can make effective use of a high-price workstation.

For an employee generating this kind of value, a $10,000 workstation justifies its purchase remarkably quickly. Even if the employee's productivity improves just 10 percent, the payback period is a mere 10 weeks.

It's worth thinking about what it takes to generate a 10 percent improvement in overall productivity. It isn't just a matter of computer performance, but performance helps. These new HP workstations are much faster than the older models, due to the combination of the faster CPUs, faster and more RAM, and a new generation of professional graphics cards from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI.

Performance relates to productivity, in terms of how much time the user spends waiting for the computer, so that's what to look for. Assuming that the software is working as well as it can, and the user's work habits are reasonable, processing delays for engineering visualizations, animation previews, circuit simulations, and similar tasks can really add up.

So it's no surprise to me that there's still a market for pricey dual-processor workstations.

What does surprise me is that there aren't more companies trying to rebuild the market for super high-end workstations.

SGI, in its glory days, used to be able to sell some pretty amazing machines for professional users. I have an SGI Octane workstation that originally sold for over $50,000. That seems like crazy money, but even a $50,000 workstation in the right hands could still pay for itself in less than a year, a reasonable return on investment.

Alas, SGI went bankrupt again this week and then promptly sold itself to Rackable Systems for $25 million plus the assumption of SGI's debts.

I'm sad that SGI is gone, but it wasn't the workstation business that killed the company, and the numbers show that market niche still exists. HP could occupy that niche, if it chose, as could any company that makes four- and eight-processor servers, which share most of the same engineering issues.

Some small companies, such as Boxx Technologies (which I wrote about last summer in "Boxx fills in for a failing SGI") and HPC Systems, make bigger workstations, but both of these vendors' product lines are stuck with AMD Opteron processors at the moment, which are no longer performance-competitive with the new Xeons.

Later this year, new multiprocessor-capable Xeon processors will arrive that could reinvigorate the super-workstation market, and I hope that some of these companies step up to the challenge. I believe that there's some good money to be made there, and the rest of the world economy will benefit at the same time.

I honestly don't know whether Om Malik's blog site, GigaOM, is intended to be informative or merely entertaining. I pointed out a previous example of the overwrought rhetoric that permeates that site last September (in the context of Comcast's then-new usage cap policy), but generally, I try to ignore the nonsense there for the same reasons that I ignore talk radio.

But like it or not, GigaOM is widely read, and sometimes when a post there bears directly on a market that's important to me, I can't bear to let it go. This is one of those times.

On Thursday, a GigaOM staffer wrote a piece titled "Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?"

A slide from Fred Weber's keynote presentation at Microprocessor Forum 2003 showing how x86 will evolve into systems from big servers down to handheld consumer devices.

(Credit: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)

The headline is preposterous from beginning to end. It has two implications just in the eight words of the title: that Intel's ability to "thrive" faces any imminent threats, and that the importance of the x86 architecture is declining.

In January, the same staffer wrote a piece titled "Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing" which reached the fantastic conclusion that Netbooks would "destroy the hegemony of x86 machines for personal computing."

Well, as I pointed out just a few weeks later (in "The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook!"), when the Netbook phenomenon ran up against the dominance of Intel and Microsoft in the PC market, it was the Netbook that died instead. Even at a $300 price point, people still want full PC compatibility.

Yes, there are companies like Freescale (the subject of the January post on GigaOM) and Nvidia that are looking to push the ARM architecture into the Netbook space. But that idea never made much sense, and now that Intel and TSMC are working together to get Intel's Atom x86 core into lower-cost SoC (system on chip) products, the ARM architecture will eventually have to retreat into the shrinking niche for supersmall, supercheap phones and consumer electronics gizmos for which x86 compatibility is of negligible value.

See, we learned a long time ago--those of us who cover this industry professionally, not just as a random assignment for some random blog--that the instruction set architecture (ISA), per se, doesn't matter any more.

The choice of ISA was a big deal in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the extra complexity of an x86 instruction decoder was a large fraction of the total complexity of a microprocessor. That's where the conflict between RISC and CISC came from.

But by the turn of the century, ISA complexity was almost a dead issue, and that coffin's final nail was pounded in by the keynote speech of then-Advanced Micro Devices CTO Fred Weber at Microprocessor Forum 2003, an event I had the honor of hosting.

In his talk, "Towards Instruction Set Consolidation," Weber made a simple point: "Technology has passed the point where instruction set costs are at all relevant."

Even then, three generations of process technology ago, the "x86 penalty" was down to a couple square millimeters of silicon. Today, the comparable figure is about 0.25 square millimeters. Not zero, certainly, but not a significant concern for chips that are a hundred times larger.

In short, ARM chips aren't cheaper or more power-efficient because of their instruction sets; they're like that because they're designed to be. And anything that an ARM chip can do to save cost or power can also be done by an x86 chip.

So there can't ever be a time when the world moves beyond x86. That's 1980s thinking, just plain ignorance of what may be the most important trend in the microprocessor industry.

The rest of Thursday's GigaOM post is a hopelessly self-contradictory muddle that fails to reach any clear conclusions. I'll just quote one more line near the end: "But the PC will be just one small (and shrinking) battleground to keep x86 relevant, amid a more mobile, visual, and power-sensitive world."

Current economic woes aside, the PC market is hardly shrinking. You know what's shrinking? The PC! As the PC shrinks, the PC market will grow. The MID (mobile Internet device) market isn't much to speak of right now, for example, but once MID makers figure out what to build, MIDs will become more popular.

And seriously, is anyone really not clear on the fact that the Apple iPhone is a computer? It isn't an embedded system. An embedded system is one in which the presence of a microprocessor is functionally irrelevant to the user. When a gizmo exposes its programmability to the user, it's a computer.

What else is the App Store but the visible manifestation of the iPhone's programmability?

Now, ARM isn't dead yet. The iPhone uses an ARM processor because there's no x86 processor that would work as well in that system. ARM processors will probably see at least two more generations in cell phones just because there's so much ARM-based software out there (including all the software on the App Store).

But somewhere around 2012, we're going to see x86 chips poking into that space. The value of instruction set compatibility with the PC market will persuade developers of new cell phone platforms to go with x86 chips, and eventually even established systems like the iPhone will switch over.

So not only are x86 chips selling into a growing PC market, they'll eventually start eating into ARM's own strongholds. That can't be bad for Intel.

And that's why the GigaOM piece was preposterous.

Don't get me wrong-- I think the Intel-TSMC alliance announced earlier this week is a good thing for both companies.

But the official explanation, that Intel wants TSMC's help to make Atom processor cores more widely available to the industry, just doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason for the deal.

Intel hardly needs TSMC's help to make SoCs (systems on a chip). Intel has been making highly integrated devices for the embedded market, as well as PC chipsets for a long time. It already has enough of the building blocks and enough experienced engineers to make Atom-based SoC products.

And it isn't as if Intel needs better process technology, or more fabrication capacity. Intel already has more of the best fabs in the world than any other company.

What's the one thing TSMC can do that Intel can't? Operate with low gross margins. In its most recent quarter, TSMC's gross margin was only 31.3 percent, while Intel's gross margin is still an industry benchmark at 53 percent. The difference is more than Intel's net profit--that is, if Intel had TSMC's gross margins, it would be losing money.

Low-margin component suppliers are a critical element of the embedded-systems market, which Intel identified as one of its target markets for this deal. Cost is king in consumer electronics, so high-margin suppliers like Intel rarely get a chance to participate.

Similarly, as average PC-selling prices decline, a growing share of the demand for processors and chipsets drops into price ranges in which Intel just can't afford to play.

The TSMC deal is Intel's way of taking a piece of these businesses without spending much money or taking much risk. For example, TSMC is already accustomed to helping its customers make SoCs for embedded systems. Intel could build such a business itself, but not at the margins it's used to.

Intel said in its press release that it will be porting its Atom cores to TSMC's technology. This is the sort of work that can get expensive in engineering time, but it's possible that the work will be made easier by a convergence between TSMC's processes and Intel's.

Last May, Intel agreed to cooperate with TSMC and Samsung in the transition to larger 450-millimeter silicon wafers (a little less than 18 inches across, up from the 12-inch wafers used today).

This doesn't necessarily mean that the three companies will co-develop fully compatible manufacturing processes, but with the 450mm transition being slated for 2012, there's still plenty of time left to drop that other shoe.

Anyway, this new TSMC deal is merely at the earliest official stage. The companies have signed a memorandum of understanding, but they have yet to work out the details. That could take a year, and it could be another year or two before Atom-based chips are ready to start rolling through the TSMC factory.

All in all, Atom SoCs might not become available from TSMC until 2012, at which point, they could, in principle, be made on a common Intel-TSMC process.

Not that Intel would provide its really good process technology to TSMC. In chips, as in other things, quality is expensive. Intel's best process technology, which it uses primarily for microprocessors, is at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing, with features such as a metal electrode acting as the transistor's gate, a hafnium-based insulation between the gate and the channel, and strained silicon in the transistor channel itself (where the current flows when the transistor is on). (See this Intel presentation for more details. Incidentally, did Intel ever announce which metal it's using? If so, I can't find it.)

TSMC may not need or want any of these features, and it would make sense for Intel to keep its best process technology to itself, anyway, if only to protect its high profit margins.

Even without a leading-edge process, TSMC can still make good money from Atom-based SoCs in the embedded market. That's enough to justify TSMC's participation in the deal.

But I'm not sure that explains Intel's motivation. Sure, Intel will make money it wouldn't have made otherwise, but it will also have costs it wouldn't have had otherwise. Intel may make a few bucks per chip in intellectual-property licensing fees, and perhaps this could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but that isn't a whole lot of money to a company like Intel, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year in gross revenue.

Why else would Intel be doing this deal?

Well, I think that the chipmaker could be setting itself up to kill off three of its biggest rivals.

There's already an x86 processor company using TSMC to make (some of) its chips: Via Technologies. Via isn't a big player, but it's been a thorn in Intel's side ever since it purchased the x86 processor operations of IDT (WinChip) and National Semiconductor (Cyrix) in 1999.

Via specializes in exactly the kind of processors that Intel can't afford to sell: low-cost, highly efficient designs aimed at low-cost PCs and embedded systems. Today's Atom is better than Via's best chips, but it's also more expensive. A cheaper TSMC-sourced alternative will hurt Via badly.

Most of the same reasoning applies to ARM, which licenses its processor cores to be used in SoCs made at TSMC, among other fabs. That's almost the same business model Intel is adopting with its own TSMC deal.

ARM dominates the market for microprocessors in cell phones. Intel's current Atom processors are too expensive and too power-hungry for that market. But remember, it'll be a couple of years at least before Atom-based chips start shipping from TSMC. The Atom cores of 2011 or 2012 will be more directly competitive with ARM's cores.

So put ARM on the endangered-species list too.

There's one other company that ought to be worried by this deal, and it probably isn't one you'd expect: Nvidia.

Nvidia is generally thought to be TSMC's biggest customer. It doesn't make x86 processors (though there are persistent rumors that the company is developing one), but it does make the ARM-based Tegra family, which would run up against these future Atom chips.

It's Nvidia's graphics chips that I'm worried about, however.

Intel is developing graphics chips of its own under the Larrabee code name. I wrote about Larrabee last August, and it seemed like a bad idea to me at the time. One of my key objections, however, was that graphics chips are inherently a low-margin business due to the strong competition between AMD and Nvidia, and I didn't think that Intel could afford to drag down its margins just to compete in that market.

The TSMC deal changes all that.

Larrabee's cores aren't Atom cores, per se, but they're similar enough that Intel might consider them to be covered by the language in the TSMC partnership announcement. Or if not, agreements can always be expanded later.

Making Larrabee chips at TSMC would solve the margin problem, putting Intel's graphics chips on a level playing field with Nvidia's. Larrabee would still be at a significant disadvantage because its x86-based design isn't as well-suited to graphics acceleration as Nvidia's chips, but Intel has a special ability to sell inferior products along with other chips its customers need--especially processors. That's reportedly how Intel's slow integrated-graphics chipsets ended up in so many systems during the Windows Vista transition, leading to many disappointed customers.

Or it's possible that Intel will not allow the TSMC deal to harm these companies, if only because Intel may still be in court defending itself against AMD's antitrust lawsuit.

But I wouldn't make that assumption, and I bet that ARM, Nvidia, and Via won't either. Intel isn't the only paranoid company in this industry.

I couldn't be at the Tuesday morning Apple launch event for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro systems, but I've had a chance to review the announcements.

Normally I focus on the technology in new products, but this time, I have to say my first impression is dominated by the appearance of these systems. These are some good-looking laptops.

Apple's new MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

The most dramatic change is the new display surround, black glass that goes right out to the edge of the upper case just like on an iPhone. The lower case also looks significantly cleaner now that the old gray plastic edging is gone. I never liked this edging on my MacBook Pro. It looks and feels like what it is: a compromise forced on Apple by the inherent difficulty of making bare metal edges meet cleanly.

Apple dealt with this problem on the new machines by relocating the case seams to the underside of the machine, where they're less visible--and where they can serve a more useful purpose, that of simplifying access to the battery, hard disk, and RAM. I'm especially sensitive to the whole hard-disk thing on the old machines, having upgraded my hard disk twice in two years.

The new case is what Apple calls a "unibody" design, recalling the term used in the automotive industry to describe a car chassis made by welding together many sheet-steel pieces...but in fact, Apple's new manufacturing is much more unitary than that. The lower chassis of all the new machines (as well as the original MacBook Air) is made by milling down a solid block of aluminum to the exact shape needed.

This approach makes for an exceptionally strong, stiff chassis. Milling (also known as stock removal) is more expensive than some other methods, but it provides almost unlimited design freedom. It's the same method I'd use if I were building low-volume, high-value custom notebooks; for Apple to be using it on high-volume system expresses a strong commitment to product quality. (The only method that would produce an even stronger chassis is net-shape forging, in which the metal is formed under high pressure to the exact shape required...but that approach would also be more expensive, and it imposes significant design constraints.)

I also really like the new trackpad. It's huge, and it supports more multi-finger gestures than a New York cabbie. My MacBook Pro uses two-finger dragging to scroll within the window under the cursor, and really, I think this was one of the greatest improvements in general usability in years. More gesture recognition should be even better. With any luck, Apple will support both one- and two-finger clicking for left- and right-clicking.

Apple's decision to use Nvidia chipsets is especially significant on the MacBook models, because the Intel chipsets usually used in midrange systems have really weak graphics. Mac OS X and many Mac applications rely on good 3D acceleration. Nvidia has it, Intel doesn't. On the MacBook Pro models, Apple would have included a good discrete graphics chip no matter who made the chipset, but the fact that both come from Nvidia made it easier for Apple to support switching between integrated and discrete graphics depending on whether the user needs battery life or 3D performance at the moment.

There are some things I'm not so sure about on these new systems. I generally prefer a matte-finish display, but there's no longer any alternative to a glossy, glassy screen. Apple says reflections are less of a problem with a high-brightness LCD such as these machines are equipped with, but I'd have to live with one for a while to believe that.

I'm also not sure if the crisp new aluminum edge around the keyboard and palm rests is entirely a good thing. It doesn't look any sharper than the edge on the plastic around my own machine, but the plastic has a glass-smooth and, more importantly, low-friction surface. This is another thing I'll have to try for a while before I can make up my mind.

Is this really the right time to shift all of Apple's portables to the new DisplayPort standard? Apple's new 24" Cinema Display with DisplayPort and a built-in MagSafe power supply is a very cool product, but most of the displays in the world use analog RGB (over a VGA cable) or DVI.

Apple used to throw in a free DVI-to-VGA adapter, but the new MacBooks require extra-cost adapters--three different ones!--for the same functionality, and some of these dongles are active electronic devices. It looks like one of these even needs to draw additional power from a USB port!

The battery-level indicator is now built into the side of the machine itself, rather than being part of the battery. This puts the indicator where it's easier to see when a battery is installed, which is good, but I wonder if there's another indicator on the battery itself, since it's even more important to know the condition of a battery when it isn't installed.

A few things that aren't quite so awesome:

There's no new 17" model, just a lightly updated version of the old 17" model. (If you really must have a matte-finish LCD screen on a MacBook Pro, that's the only way to get it.) I expect this is just a temporary situation.

There's no Blu-ray optical drive. At the post-announcement Q&A, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained that Blu-ray licensing "is just a bag of hurt" today, so the company is holding back until that gets straightened out.

The maximum RAM is still only 4GB. With OS support for considerably more, I was hoping Apple would remove that particular limit in this generation of notebooks. Personally, given my tendency to keep a dozen applications open plus, sometimes, Parallels Desktop running Windows Vista--and the low cost of DRAM today--I'd be happier with as much as 16GB of RAM.

Apple doesn't yet offer 500GB hard disks as a build-to-order option. With two companies making these drives, Apple's a little behind the times on this one.

There's no eSATA or FireWire 3200. The MacBook Pros still have FireWire 800, which is plenty good enough for any single-disk or dual-disk RAID boxes, but it's old technology now. (And as a commenter points out below, the MacBooks have lost FireWire 400, a problem for video editing and other applications that benefit from fast external hard disks.)

I mention these things because they matter...but really, not as much as the high quality and aesthetic appeal of the new machines. I'm not in the market for a new laptop quite yet, but if I were, I'd have placed my order by now.