New NI CompactRIO calls the question, "¿Quien is mas macho, Intel quad-core Atom or 4-year-old i7?"

Question

Perhaps you remember the Saturday Night Live TV sketch from 1979 where Bill Murray played a game show host who asked the show’s titular question, “¿Quien es mas macho?”
Today, Matt Spexarth, Principal Product Manager for Embedded Systems at National Instruments (NI), called the NI CompactRIO controller introduced this week at NI Week—the model cRIO-9039, which pairs a 1.91GHz, quad-core Intel Atom CPU with a Xilinx Kintex-7 325T FPGA—the highest-performance CompactRIO ever released. That includes the existing cRIO-9082 controller, which pairs a 1.33GHz, dual-core Intel i7 CPU and a Xilinx Spartan-6 LX150 FPGA. So both the processor and the FPGA have been upgraded in the new CompactRIO controller. The NI cRIO-9039 controller es mas macho.
NI Model cRIO-9039 Controller in an 8-slot CompactRIO Chassis
The new NI CompactRIO controller runs security-enhanced NI Linux Real-Time. It has an SDHC card slot for non-volatile storage and can directly operate a local, graphical UI (user interface) as a human-machine interface. Another key performance feature, noted Spexarth, is a bank of DDR3 SDRAM attached directly to the Kintex-7 FPGA to allow the FPGA to directly handle large data sets, to process large FFTs for example.
As with the entire line of NI CompactRIO controllers, you program the cRIO-9039 controller using NI’s LabVIEW graphical development environment with its many add-on modules including LabVIEW FPGA. In addition, the new CompactRIO controller maintain compatibility with the many CompactRIO plug-in I/O hardware modules.
 

Answer 1

Whygirl,
it reads as though an internal disk upgrade (and possibly a battery replacement) would suffice for you, and those two together would be far less expensive than a new MacBook Pro. Yes, you could install either a HDD or a SSD in place of its current internal HDD. You could look at the Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 as an example of a suitable 1 TB HDD; SSDs are more expensive per unit of storage than a HDD, but might be worth the extra cost if your apps are disk-bound. (I put a Samsung 840 PRO into my 13-inch Mid 2010 model, and it’s been working well.) Note that Chrome might be responsible for the extra heat (and the extra heat is responsible for the increased volume from the fans kicking in); Chrome isn’t optimized for use on 64-bit versions of OS X, like 10.8.5.