Will PCIe Flash Become Common In Laptops, Desktops?

Lucas123 writes "With Apple announcing that it is now using PCIe flash in its MacBook Air and it has plans to offer it in its Mac Pro later this year, some are speculating that the high-speed peripheral interface may become the standard for higher-end consumer laptops and workplace systems. 'It's coming,' said Joseph Unsworth, research vice president for NAND Flash & SSD at Gartner. The Mac Pro with PCIe flash is expected to exceed 1GB/sec throughput, twice the speed of SATA III SSDs. Apple claims the new MacBook Mini got a 45% performance boost from its PCIe flash. AnandTech has the Air clocked in at 800MB/s. Next year, Intel and Plextor are expected to begin shipping PCIe cards based on the new NGFF specification. Plextor's NGFF SSD measures just 22mm by 44mm in size and connects to a computer's motherboard through a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. Those cards are smaller than today's half-height expansion cards and offer 770MB/s read and 550MB/s write speeds."

Comments

Yes

[Intrepid imaginaut]

In ten years we'll be using equipment that makes the current best look like pocket calculators, just like we're buying gear today for a few hundred that would have been worth tens of thousands ten years ago, if we could even manufacture it. Goddamn I love living in the future.

Re:Yes

[AlphaWolf_HK]

The real desktop/laptop performance measurement is iops at low queue depth. Large sustained rates are meaningless for all but servers. (I mean really, how often are you going to copy files big enough for these speeds to matter, and what are you going to copy it to that can keep up? Certainly not cloud storage or a USB drive.)

This is sounding to me like MHz myth 2.0

Re:Yes

[MightyMartian]

I'll have you know I copy big files back and forth all day long, you insensitive clod!

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

Ahmdahl's law: A system needs a bit of IO per second per instruction per second.

Given that the i7-3720QM is capable of 20,333 "MIPS" source,

we will need 20 billion bits of IO per second.

We're close, but not quite there.

Re:Yes

[real-modo]

Haha, but lots of Mac Pro users do exactly this. They edit video.

So, 0.1% or 0.2% of all computer users out there will find increased bandwidth very useful.

Re:Yes

[Nehmo]

... Goddamn I love living in the future.

Nope. You're living the the present. You'll never make it to the future.

Re:Yes

[viperidaenz]

Like say, a 20Gbps optical thunderbolt connection? Ahmdahl didn't say anything about all I/O being disk based.
What about the 60+Gbps memory bandwidth in your average PC?
A couple of 10Gbe connections gives you 20Gbps I/O too.
You even get 5Gbps out of USB3

Re:Yes

[93 Escort Wagon]

So why don't we have 1000mpg cars yet?

Re:Yes

[Solandri]

Even high IOPS is starting to become meaningless. Here's an Anandtech comparison of top SSDs from two years ago of typical tasks which stressed IOPS. He played it straight for this one page and showed benchmarks in units that matter to people's perception of speed - seconds to complete a task. The result is utterly uninteresting. The HDD is substantially slower. The SSDs are for all practical purposes identical.

But boring graphs are bad for review sites. If the reviews are boring, people won't read them, and the sites lose out on ad revenue. So they invert the metric to make smaller differences appear bigger. Instead of the practical sec/MB, they use the more ephemeral MB/sec. That makes the graphs more interesting and gets people coming back to the sites before buying, instead of just buying some random cheap SSD without really caring about the max speed.

"But sec/MB and MB/sec are the same number! Why should inverting it make a difference?" Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?

Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time. Or if you want to be a purist, of the 8 sec saved going from 10 sec to 2 sec, the cheap SSD gets you 75% of that speedup, the expensive SSD gives only the remaining 25%)

Unless you're regularly doing tasks where you find yourself twiddling your thumbs for several seconds or minutes waiting for the SSD to finish reading/writing several GB of data, the difference between 600 MB/s and 1.25 GB/s is imperceptible despite being a 2x speedup. Twice as fast as the blink of an eye is still as fast as a blink of an eye to our perception.

Re:Yes

[Gerzel]

Don't be so sure.

Moore's law was only formulated to last a decade or two. It's gone longer but eventually we will start hitting some plateaus of development in all likelyhood. Though we probably won't notice too soon as once faster equipment becomes too expensive to develop we'll still have a lot of room to work on faster more efficient code.

You'll know Moore's is starting to fail when companies start advertising faster code for their products.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never dealt with:
a) Lossless 720p, 1080p, or anything higher
b) 1080p video in general
c) Non-linear editing of HD video of any resolution
d) ProRes Codec, REDcode RAW

etc

A lossless codec is completely constrained by the disk speed. It's often been considered impossible to capture 480p video at lossless compression due to a combination of factors. For example, a codec I have is single-threaded , you may know of it, it's called ZMBV if you've ever used dosbox. Well this codec is a wonderful lossless codec for editing animation on windows but the disk speed really kills being able to play back HD video, even with lossy h.264

a single second of 480p60 video requires:
83MB/sec uncompressed for the video+0.7MB/sec for 8 channel audio.
222MB/sec uncompressed 720p60 +8channel
498MB/sec uncompressed 1080p60 +8 channel
1991MB/sec uncompressed 2160p (4K or UHDTV)
7963MB/sec uncompressed 4320p (8K video (IMAX/UHDTV))

Take a look at the measurements. 20Gbps of bandwidth on the thunderbolt 2. That is 2.5GB/sec, so that IS enough to do 4K uncompressed provided the data was from SSD's. Since we aren't dealing with completely uncompressed video most of the time, we could assume something like a 12:1 to 4:1 ratio is being used with lossy codecs.

This still means we are dealing with lossy video, and computers still are not fast enough to actually handle uncompressed video in real time. Uncompressed video is what you would normally deal with when generated by a computer (everything from DOSBOX and NES emulators, to Pixar films)

Re: Yes

[Jeremi]

A Volt will do 1000 mpg if you charge it every 40 miles... ;)

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

Sure. If you what you want to process is already in memory, then disk i/o doesn't matter so much. But it isn't, so it does.

Re:Yes

[The Cat]

I mean what do the vast majority use these desktops and laptops FOR anyway?

Maybe they would have something to use them for if the software industry would un-fuck itself. Here are some questions to ponder:

1. Why is there only one viable desktop financial application for the PC? Where are the better alternatives? Because Quicken and Quickbooks are pure shit.

2. Why hasn't there been a new desktop application in the last 10 years? New defined as not a clone or an upgrade of an existing application, and not a game. A new desktop application as powerful or more powerful than Photoshop, Excel or Final Cut Pro. Are we going to pull out the "everything has been invented" bullshit?

3. Is TCP/HTML really the best we can do on the Internet? Where are the new network protocols and content types? When is the "browser" going to be replaced with something that reflects technology in 2013 instead of 1990?

4. Where is the Visual Basic equivalent for Linux? It's time.

5. Where is the game that teaches players to strategize and construct their own game engines in the process? Where is the game where the player teaches the computer how to improve?

Instead we're heaving PCs overboard so we can write fiddly shitty apps in fiddly shitty proprietary languages for fiddly shitty toy proprietary gadgets that are guaranteed to be obsolete and useless in 18 months.

Programmers have given the fucking store away.

Re: Yes

[The Cat]

You're not taking the question seriously, which, strangely enough, answers the question pretty clearly.

You're also a gigantic wiseass, which also answers the question pretty clearly.

Re:Yes

[gtall]

5. Check out LiveCode, they just freed it at least for hobbyist use. I believe it runs on MacOS, Winders, Linux, iOS, and Android...at least it produces apps for the last two as well as the first three.

Put quickly, it is Hypercard except updated for modern uses including producing mobile apps.

Re:Yes

[TheRaven64]

Video editing is typically done in a nondestructive fashion, so you do a big copy to get the initial data on, but then it's comparatively small transactions. It's been almost 10 years since I did any, but I think the basic approach is still the same. You grab the data from the camera (easier now - back then FireWire was essential because you were getting DV footage from tape with no buffering in the camera, so you needed isochronous transfer. Now flash costs about as little as tapes did). DV footage was 10GB/hour, which was a bit painful to edit with 1GB of RAM, but a modern system with 32+GB of RAM it's nothing. HD footage for consumer editing is about the same data rate. For pro stuff, I believe about 40GB/hour is still common, but even that fits nicely in 64GB of RAM.

You're then going to be streaming it through some filters (typically on the GPU, but sometimes on the CPU) and writing the results out to cached render files. These are fairly small (order of 100MB or so) files containing short composited sequences. When you play, you're doing a lot of random seeks to get all of these and play them in sequence (or just cache them in RAM - with 64GB that's quite feasible, with 128GB it's easy).

Finally, you'll write out the whole rendered sequence. Your cached pre-renders might be at lower quality than this, so you might not use them for the final step, in which case you do have something like a simple copy with some processing in the middle.

Re:Yes

[ezdiy]

4. Where is the Visual Basic equivalent for Linux? It's time.

Python (used to be perl, used to shell scripting...)

Re:Yes

[Kjella]

Unless you're regularly doing tasks where you find yourself twiddling your thumbs for several seconds or minutes waiting for the SSD to finish reading/writing several GB of data, the difference between 600 MB/s and 1.25 GB/s is imperceptible despite being a 2x speedup. Twice as fast as the blink of an eye is still as fast as a blink of an eye to our perception.

Well I feel there's an underlying assumption in pretty much every review that you're the kind of person this matters for. If any SSD is good enough for you, you don't need to read SSD reviews just like you don't need to read CPU or GPU reviews to play solitaire but if you do 3D rendering or play Crysis 3 you do. If you read reviews for things that are utterly irrelevant to you, well I'd grab those free page hits too if I could.

Re:Yes

[jedidiah]

> You've obviously never dealt with:

That's the problem. Most people haven't built a database cluster or a supercomputing cluster either. Each of these options is just as statistically insignificant to the vast majority of people as the other.

"Artistes" just hold some sort of cultural hype in certain circles but they are just as irrelevant.

They are less significant than "geeks" and power users.

I could create my own screed similar to yours and it would be equally irrelevant to 99.9% of users.

Re:Yes

[jedidiah]

> Apple leads the way. The others follow.

No. Apple chains you to the oars like you're a slave in a galley.

The idea of putting storage on an expansion card is old as dirt. It's just that Apple will force the issue and give you no other option. That's not leadership, that's fascism.

Re:Yes

[LWATCDR]

Until you copy that 4k video.

Re:Yes

[EdZ]

There's a metric you're missing: responsiveness. One of the big gains of moving to SSDs is not tasks completing faster, but of UI elements responding sooner.

Re:Yes

[halltk1983]

1) Because everyone is used to the existing and no one has come up with a stunning reason to move to a new one.
2) Most simple problems have been solved. Think of something you do every day that would be better with computer intervention. There's not much I can think of.
3) CSS, Javascript, HTML5, Flash
4) Lolwut. Are you talking about the IDE or the language? For language, you have all the C derivatives, java, python, perl, and dozens of others in your repo. For the IDE you have eclipse and a couple other less-featured ones.
5) Learning AI's are really hard to write. They're also very computationally intensive. They're being worked on, but no one's really made one.

As for all your bitching about proprietary this and that and you're calling for Visual Basic on linux? Really? "why don't we have more proprietary crap on linux" followed by "there's too much proprietary crap"?

If you think you can do better, there are lots of programming options out there. Get to it.

Re:Yes

[onyxruby]

You have put this quite well. Amusingly enough this could be used as an analogy to explain to people why it's more important to increase average economy of a car from 18 mpg to 24 mpg than a car from 30 mpg to 36 mpg.

Re:Yes

[tlhIngan]

In ten years we'll be using equipment that makes the current best look like pocket calculators, just like we're buying gear today for a few hundred that would have been worth tens of thousands ten years ago, if we could even manufacture it. Goddamn I love living in the future.

The circle of computing comes around again, actually.

We had IDE drives that could be hung straight off the ISA bus ("integrated drive electronics" - the drive controller and drive were one and the same and you could access them using a few IN and OUT instructions - the software picked master/slave by writing the write value to the M/S bit in the drive register.

As drives and computers got faster, we moved from strict ISA control to putting them on controllers and changing the PHYs (PATA to SATA, UDMA, etc).

Now we're back to hanging the drive "controllerless" (the controller exists on the drive itself) back on the main bus again. Then we'll abstract out the bus again to get even more speed and hang SSD PCIe controllers off them...

Re:Yes

[viperidaenz]

So you connect your 10Gbe cable to your SAN... or maybe your 300Gbps Infiniband, which is faster than your memory.
4x DDR Infiniband is commonly used to attach disk arrays, which is 16Gbits.

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

It's a fairly recent chip. The Xeon E5 is faster-- and if the balanced system law is to be believed, would require even faster I/O than the 3270M. CPUs have been getting faster and faster, while I/O has seemingly languished.

Re:Yes

[Aighearach]

I love living in the future, too! Everyone is here in the future! Everyone!

http://everyoneishereinthefuture.com/ (Warning: Flashing lights)

Will it be a repeat?

[meerling]

Of course if Apple follows it's past history and wants too high of a royalty on it, the mobo & other hardware manufacturers will find something else to satisfy their need for speed. After all, that's why USB exists.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Tapewolf]

Um... what the hell are you babbling about?

At a guess, Firewire.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[tmark]

And how long were Apple users using Firewire drives before USB 3 - heck, even USB 2.0 if you want to pretend that's anywhere close to Firewire ? Even now Firewire is a viable interface.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[meerling]

Correct Tapewolf. USB came about because Apple wanted to charge other manufacturers a royalty rate on firewire that was higher than they could stomach. Maybe they'll do better this time around, but never underestimate arrogance, greed, and human shortsightedness.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MrEricSir]

How exactly will they do the same with PCIe and SSDs? Explain.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Osgeld]

USB doesn't exist because of fire-wire, at the time they were for 2 radically different reasons, one was for simple peripheral devices, the other was for fast transport of large streams such as video. How USB won is because it was the port that seemed to do everything whereas firewire still limits itself to media equipment and hard drives

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

USB largely came about (or finally became a utilized technology) because Apple made it the only way to hook stuff up to the iMac. The idea of using USB for external storage was laughable until USB 2.0.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement. Which is a plus or a minus, depending on the use case.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

That's rather some revisionist history considering that Apple used only FireWire and USB when they first unveiled the iMac. Also other MB munfacturers had started to include it but a fully working Windows implementation was years away. At the time it was USB 1 which was pathetically slow compared to FireWire and the two had different purposes. USB was for low data, low speed connections like mice and keyboards and printers. FireWire was for high speed, high bandwidth connections. If you wanted high bandwidth transfers, FireWire was the only good choice for pros. FireWire 800 is a different story.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[grim4593]

USB 1.1 wasn't bad compared to floppy disk capacity and read/write speeds.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Nutria]

How USB won is because it was the port that was a hell of a lot cheaper and pushed by Intel

FTFY.

If FW had been reasonably priced, there would now be 1 USB1.0 port on machines for kb+mouse, and 3 or 4 FW1200 ports for cameras, external HDDs, scanners, etc.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[quacking duck]

While true, there's no denying that Apple charging a per-port fee on Firewire ports (on devices at both ends of a cable) was a major motivation to get USB2 spec and devices out there faster.

It was a facepalm moment when I first heard it announced and knew right then Firewire's chances of becoming a ubiquitous interface was over. This was in early 1999, almost 3 years before they introduced the first iPod. Apple was in no position to dictate the direction of hardware at the time, having just started shipping the first iMac a quarter earlier.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Apple had nothing to do with USB other than taking credit for it. Furthermore, Apple was a bankrupt, meaningless player at the time willing to claim anything to impressionable fools to stay alive. Worked on you.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

I am not aware of Apple owning the PCIe standard. Did I miss something?

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Intel developed USB without the slightest concern for Firewire. The two were largely coincidental. Firewire came about because Sony wanted a serial interface for its new digital video standard and Apple had some old lab tech in the garbage heap. Sony made Firewire a success from spare parts while Intel developed their own from scratch. Apple lacked the leadership to deliver any of it but had the gonads to claim all of it.

Apple doesn't own 1394, only the Firewire name. Never underestimate ignorance and revisionist history.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dukeblue219]

Sure they were. People may not have been using floppies to backup their hard drives anymore, but in 1998 a floppy was absolutely the standard way to transfer and store small files. It was totally normal still to type up a school paper and save it only to "your floppy" and put it in a stack of other floppies, and it was the only way to transfer a file to someone and know they'd be able to access it. Plenty of people didn't have internet, and nobody had CD-R's yet. Even USB 1 was fast enough to get the job done with the (then 16MB-ish) thumb drives that were about to become ubiquitous because they were certainly faster than floppies.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

USB was on ALL new motherboards before Microsoft supported it in Windows. Microsoft required it for certification and then grossly missed their end of the deal.

USB was ubiquitous in PCs when the iMac was announced but was unknown because of MS's failure. Apple simply grabbed mature technology off the shelf and claimed to be the visionary.

The irony was that USB's primary reason for existence was to replace legacy IO yet Apple claimed to be the forward-thinking company that invented the concept. Legacy-free was the idea that gave birth to USB and it was fully formed and mature when Apple swiped it.

Firewire's reason for existence was far less grand than people like to imply. Apple was looking for ways to overcome their horrible disadvantage in processor technology and they were researching MP interconnects. They eventually abandoned Firewire but Sony found a need in their new DV standard. Sony wanted peer connectivity because editing was largely done outside of computing in those days. Firewire was never envisioned as a high speed serial IO connect, it just lucked into it.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[catsRus]

Windows 95 OEM service release 2.1 and beyond supported USB. For consumer versions it was not supported till the release of windows 98

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Jeremy Erwin]

The first few iMacs didn't come with firewire. Gradually, Apple introduced it as a premium DV feature--so users might plug in their camcorders. It wasn't until 2001 that firewire was standard on every iMac. At that time, the CDRom was read only, so a lot of people fretted about not being able to backup their stuff.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[jones_supa]

USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement.

The statement that USB uses CPU for the heavy lifting is thrown around a lot, but is it still true?

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dugancent]

They weren't? Then do tell what they were using.

I was in school at the time and we were required to have a floppy for each class using a computer. Nothing else was affordable at the time.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

Apple only recently dropped FireWire on the iMac. They still offer it on the Mac Mini. I suspect ThunderBolt will replace it.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

My recollection is that Windows 95 SR2.1 had partial support. You could use mice and keyboards but data transfer was slow regardless of hardware capabilities. Full Speed wasn't supported until 98.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

Wikipedia disagrees with you.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Jeremy Erwin]

wikipedia claims

The raw maximum transfer rate of 3 12-inch HD floppy drives and interfaces, disregarding overheads, is as much as 1000 kilobits/s, or approximately 83% that of single-speed CDROM (71% of audio CD). This represents the speed of raw data bits moving under the read head; however, because of the very high amount of overhead in the system (use of soft sectors with headers, sync issues preventing sequential reads of an entire 18-sector track in a single rotation, etc.), the actual user data read/write speed is much lower

so, usb 1.1 would appear to be an improvement.

Nevertheless, it's quite slow compared to the rest of the computer.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[noh8rz10]

nope. apple saved usb through things like the imac, which only had usb and got rid of serial ports etc. usb was lanugishing before then on windows because of poor support and buggy performance. this is why USB exists!

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[noh8rz10]

apple wasn't visionary because they used USB, they were visionary because they phased out the old stuff and made USB mandatory. that was the visionary part and it took some guts. you cannot disagree or deny that.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[amiga3D]

With CPU power being what it is nowadays it's irellevant. The average computer has spare CPU cycles to burn. I will say that I have an external hard drive case and when I run benchmarks on it using USB2 and Firewire 400 it's obvious that Firewire is superior. USB2 is supposedly faster but not in real life.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

To be honest, I don't know if USB 3.0 still relies on the CPU as heavily. It was certainly true with USB 2.0 - you could demonstrate it easily enough. In theory, it was a design goal, but I haven't seen any real-world tests.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

There is a difference between a design patent and a functional patent.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

I never bought an iMac, but if you would like to point to a non-candy-themed USB peripheral from that time period I will have to reconsider my memory.

Re: Will it be a repeat?

[shitzu]

This is not some proprietary Apple tech that it even can claim any royalties for. They are just among the first to have it in production systems, they did not invent hooking SSD onto PCI-e cards. The article is just saying that as apple has it in their products, perhaps the install base is large enough for other makers to move away from the s-ata bottleneck.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

Yeah, if you remember, the iMac was dinged for its lack of floppy, and Apple's answer was that you should buy a USB floppy drive. This was ridiculed by many (particularly here on Slashdot).

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[sirsnork]

For some definitions of "supported" I suppose. Minimum useful support came in Win98 SE and read proper support came with Win2000

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Jeremy Erwin]

OK. So wikipedia has faults.

MacVersion says

iMac: no firewire
iMac (5 flavors): no firewire
iMac (slot loading): firewire on 400 MHz model only
iMac Summer 2000: firewire on 400 MHz, 450 MHz and 500 MHz models only
iMac Early 2001: firewire on all models

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[KingMotley]

Well except that some of us have been using PCIe flash for years. It's not an apple invention.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[UnknowingFool]

*falls on knees* Noooooooo! Damn you wikipedia!

If anything that only proves my point. USB wasn't created before FireWire. Apple created FireWire to complement USB

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[PRMan]

At my job in 1998 I was burning CDs, but it was a brand new "2X" drive. Ooo. And I was the only one I knew who had a CD burner.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[sootman]

I remember having USB on a computer at work in summer 1996 (a Compaq Presario 3020), but interestingly enough, it did not become popular until Apple introduced the USB-only (and FireWire-less) iMac over two years later, in late 1998.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple doesn't own IEEE1394, but they do (or did) have encumbering patents (the standard incorporates over 250 patents belonging to 10 companies. Specifically, Apple developed their high-speed serial bus (that they trademarked as "FireWire" in 1986 as an alternative to SCSI, but with the ability to be repurposed for A/V applications. They realized very quickly that they were too small to get it widely picked up and adopted by vendors, so they approached the IEEE to form a working group to develop it as a standard. That working group, IEEE P1394 started with Apple and was later joined by TI, Sony, DEC, IBM and INMOS. Apple went ahead producing draft-standard Firewire hardware, but the first IEEE standard was released in 1995. Sony shortly thereafter developed an interface the implemented the IEEE1394 spec, except that it removed the power-distribution lines (making simpler and practical for use in digital camcorders), and trademarked that variant as i.LINK (with variations labeled S100 and S400 denoting the speed of the interface); the i.LINK variant spec was later added as an amendment to the IEEE spec. The standard has widely been adopted for DV video applications, industrial machine vision systems, and certain types of cable TV equipment and to a lesser extent, for storage applications.

Currently, licensing for FireWire and i.Link is managed by MPEG-LA, which charges a $0.25 royalty per finished device that uses it. Both Sony and Apple hold patents in the patent pool that covers the technology.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[saleenS281]

Troll on brotha, troll on.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[real-modo]

Mmm, "Thunderbolt"? Note that the new Mac Pro is almost entirely unexandable internally. PCIe, yes; but over Intel/Apple's proprietary interface.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[real-modo]

I well remember the overwhelming sense of 'living large' provided by my first 4MB flash drive. Why, I could practically host a whole OS on there.

And reliability, too. The name brand floppies were worse than the off-brand ones, where I lived. But not by much... Solid-state flash drives were nearly infinitely better.

Nowadays...64 Gigabyte USB3? Lasts for 200 years, you say? Meh. Give me Storage with a capital S! Make it faster! Make it more reliable!

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[real-modo]

IIRC, IBM was using Firewire (IEEE1394) in its System i (AS/400) servers, around 1996-ish. Do you have a reference for Apple's inventing it?

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[real-modo]

Correction, on consulting CV: 1988-ish.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Nutria]

it did not become popular until Apple ...

Did Apple really have the market share to influence the industry in 1996?

Or is it more likely that Intel was creating reference mother boards with USB ports on it, and enough kit was finally "out there" that peripheral manufacturers started switching to USB?

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dbIII]

I'm not sure if that's entirely true since firewire needs a bit more electronics than the downright dumb in comparison USB electronics that didn't need to do anything near as much. Firewire was designed to sustain a rate with multiple things on the same port while USB is just about shovelling the bits down the wire whenever it can. In the end firewire costs more (with or without royalties) and USB could get most tasks done. The niches where firewire was the only sane choice of the two, streaming from camcorder tape or to optical media burners without a buffer, have almost completely vanished leaving USB as good enough.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Reeses]

Apple was visionary because they got USB to work as promised/designed.

Back then, it was about 50/50 whether you could hot-plug a USB device into a Windows machine and have it not crash. Famously demonstrated by Bill Gates at a trade show. There's video. Look it up.

The Mac was also the first computer to allow you to plug in the maximum number of USB devices (128) without crashing. It took Windows a while to get there too.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[Jeremy Erwin]

The 1394 trade association says

The 1394 digital link standard was conceived in 1986 by technologists at Apple Computer, who chose the trademark 'FireWire', in reference to its speeds of operation. The first specification for this link was completed in 1987. It was adopted in 1995 as the IEEE 1394 standard. A number of IEEE 1394 products are now available including digital camcorders with the IEEE 1394 link, IEEE 1394 digital video editing equipment, digital VCRs, digital cameras, digital audio players, 1394 IC's and a wealth of other infrastructure products such as connectors, cables, test equipment, software toolkits, and emulation models.

One of those pat answers that only leads to more questions. But it's possible that Firewire was conceived as the successor to AppleTalk.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[guruevi]

Thunderbolt is no more proprietary than Firewire, USB or PCIe. It IS PCIe over copper, plain and simple.

Re: Will it be a repeat?

[Forever Wondering]

Actually, as Zzzoom pointed out http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3853421&cid=43981983, the SATA committee has already got a spec for this, it's SATA Express aka SATA 6.2. It will use straight up PCIe out with some slightly different [but still compatible] connectors. But, it is true, 100% PCIe, and was specifically designed to increase the speed for SSD's. IIRC, it's also backward compatible with pre-6.2 drives, just like USB 3.0 will still accept older USB 2.0 and adjust accordingly.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[serviscope_minor]

If by visionary, you mean annoying then sure.

I knew a few people with early gen iMacs, and they all bought external USB floppy drives, because the world was still on floppies.

Everyone knows tech advances and old stuff goes away (they were 3.5" floppies not 5.25 or 8 after all). It's not particularly revolutionary to remove obsolete stuff and people do that all the time.

It's also not especially revoloutionary to remove stuff which is slowly moving into obsolescence early especially when it makes the resulting product much worse.

So, yes, I do strongly disagree that removing the floppy drive was visionary. It was quite clear the floppy drive was going: at that time, Zip was becoming successful because the floppy was getting too small and seeing an obvious truth is simply not visionary. It was also, as I mention, really irritating.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[cffrost]

apple wasn't visionary because they used USB, they were visionary because they phased out the old stuff and made USB mandatory. that was the visionary part and it took some guts. you cannot disagree or deny that.

Folks who prefer Apple's computing appliances have — and will continue to — pay top dollar for iToys regardless of what they lack or how they're assembled: glued-in batteries, soldered-in RAM, tamper-resistant fasteners, missing SD slots, all the proprietary technologies you want — Joe Sixpack eats that shit up. Upgrades are no problem — Apple's happy to sell 'em all new shit. I suspect that eliminating legacy interfaces wasn't so much "guts" as it was a marketing strategy.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[ezdiy]

USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement. Which is a plus or a minus, depending on the use case.

Actually, no. The protocol is more complex than firewire and part of it is sometimes handled by cpu, but ultimately both hit the RAM directly, via DMA bulk scatter/gather transfers (assuming USB bulk mode for USB, not interrupt mode which is used for things like HID). It is more ubiquitous, and therefore ultimately cheaper to manufacture the chips.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[LWATCDR]

"apple saved usb through things like the imac, which only had usb and got rid of serial ports etc."
So it only had Universal Serial Bus ports and got rid of serial ports.....
Yea I know you mean got rid of RS-232.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[AmiMoJo]

At the time they did it you could easily go all-USB on a PC as well, but few manufacturers offered legacy free motherboards because customers wanted to keep using their old PS2 mouse. My new mobo from last year still has a single PS2 port which my 10+ year old Samsung optical mouse is plugged in to.

Apple sell complete systems with a keyboard and mouse and are willing to screw consumers on backwards compatibility with their peripherals. Parallel port printer? Too bad, buy a new one. Serial port modem? Too bad, my a terrible USB one. That's not innovation, it was just marketed as such in the same way that MS is trying to market the XB One restrictions as good for consumers, only Apple is better at it.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[AmiMoJo]

The biggest electrical issue with Firewire was the fact that the supply voltage could be any random value between about 5V and 15V depending on the device. Every Firewire capable device had to cope with this large supply voltage range, and do its own current limiting too.

In comparison a USB port puts out 5V and nothing else, with a 500mA current limit so that cheap devices don't need a fuse or anything like that to avoid catastrophic failure. It meant that Firewire would always be more expensive, so despite USB's many failings it lost out in exactly the same way that Betamax did.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

Or those magneto-optical drives that were backward compatible (SuperDisk, I think).

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[kimvette]

Because it's innovative, much like rounded rectangles, and doing $foo on a smartphone.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[drinkypoo]

I don't know about you, but I ridiculed it because of the cost at the time of a USB floppy drive, which was amazing. You could literally buy a used PC with a floppy drive in it for what people were charging for them, especially Apple. I have a Sony unit right here that I got at a yard sale, just I case I need to read a floppy. I haven't in years (two or three of them anyway) but what the hell, I installed an IDE LS120 drive in my PC anyway. Its merry whir at boot or wake reminds me that I have a PC. And, read errors aside, if I have to read a floppy in the future, I can do it at double speed without digging the USB drive out of a drawer.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[MightyYar]

I have a floppy in my PC, but the case I bought has no provision for it. It just sits in a spare 3.5" slot. Actually, I just replaced the motherboard and it is SATA only, so I'm betting that the floppy's not even hooked up anymore!

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Indeed, revisionist history is easy to find on Wikipedia.

The text you quoted is entirely consistent with what I said and with the actual history of Firewire.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Once again, this does not contradict what I have said. There's a huge gap of time between 1986 and 1995, some of which Firewire was abandoned and there's no evidence that "an alternative to SCSI" was its intention in the 80's. Firewire came about in the mid-90's *because* Sony needed it for DV. There were no applications for 1394 other than DV originally.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Indeed, there isn't any repeated misinformation here other than my own. ;)

If only the people who are such experts in this topic were even around back then. Unlike the ACs here, I actually used this stuff when it came out and was actively involved in technical development of products that used 1394 competition (SSA and FC back then). 1394 is just another area of deliberate misinformation that suits Apple's agenda. Technically speaking, 1394 is actually embarassingly bad.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

You don't see because you don't want to. This was the GP's claim...

"USB came about because Apple wanted to charge other manufacturers a royalty rate on firewire that was higher than they could stomach."

So first, Apple bashing could not have been my motivation because the GP was Apple bashing in his comment.

Second, the GP is wrong because "Firewire", the thing Apple licenses, is not required for 1394.

Third, the fundamental point the GP claimed was the origins of USB. He is completely wrong on that.

But, of course you can't see that. Nice post, AC.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[dfghjk]

Firewire lost out but not for this reason. Firewire had other design faults, too, as did USB but a consortium of companies with disparate agendas weren't going to be successful competing against a monolithic Intel that would integrate support for the opposition in every chipset for free.

Re:Will it be a repeat?

[toddestan]

"A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation (through free convection cooling), and the option of AirPort wireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003, mainly to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system."

I do have a question about this .....

[King_TJ]

From the photos Apple has on their site of the Mac Pro with its cover open, it looks to me like the flash storage used is a "mini PCIe" form-factor. I've already purchased and used an identical looking 480GB flash drive to fit in an HP "Ultrabook" type of portable called the "Spectre XT Pro".

(HP claims the notebook can't be purchased with a drive larger than 256GB, even in a custom build order on their web site, but a technical manual I found clearly showed it took the mini PCIe type of flash drive, so I bought a 480GB from CDW to try it and it worked just fine.)

I've seen a few comments yesterday and today though claiming some of these mini PCIe form-factor SSDs are not *really* following the standards for the PCIe connector? So in effect, they perform with a lot less throughput, the same as any existing SSD drive, except just using that type of physical connector.

Anyone know if there's much truth to such claims .... meaning what Apple is offering here really will be more advanced than current SSD technology, or is this a case where companies like HP have really been using the same stuff for at least the last 1-2 years in select ultraportables?

Re:I do have a question about this .....

[hklingon]

I believe this is intel's "NGFF" or "Next Gen Form Factor" -- I think the trade name is now m.2 . This format which apparently is a hybrid pcie-e and sata form factor. I guess the electrical signals are there for sata? But these devices can operate at pci-e x2 or x4. http://www.techpowerup.com/178188/intel-ssd-530-in-ngff-form-factor-pictured-arrives-in-q2.html

Look familiar?
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/27850/adata_shows_working_next_generation_form_factor_ngff_on_video_at_ces/index.html

Apple seems to have their own "extra long" variety (maybe) -- possibly to get at capacities around 1tb?

Re:I do have a question about this .....

[quacking duck]

Steve Wozniak is the chief scientist at Fusion IO, which makes a range of PCIe flash storage devices, including ones meant high-performance database servers. Woz has gone to previous WWDCs so his attending the keynote doesn't necessarily mean a thing, but I'm willing to bet that Fusion IO is involved in some way with the new Mac Pro's PCIe storage.

Re:I do have a question about this .....

[Azmodan]

You are right. From the article : "Update: It's a custom Apple design, not M.2. Since there's no PCIe routed off of the CPU in Haswell ULT, these 2 lanes come from the on-package PCH." http://www.anandtech.com/show/7058/2013-macbook-air-pcie-ssd-and-haswell-ult-inside Look under the disk benchmarks.

Re:I do have a question about this .....

[fnj]

I've seen a few comments yesterday and today though claiming some of these mini PCIe form-factor SSDs are not *really* following the standards for the PCIe connector? So in effect, they perform with a lot less throughput, the same as any existing SSD drive, except just using that type of physical connector.

I think you/they are thinking of mSATA. MSATA is spectacularly offensive intellectually. It is pin and electrically compatible with Mini PCIe, but the use of some of the pins is completely different. The connector is connected to a SATA controller in the host rather than a PCIe controller. Obviously, the throughput is SATA rather than PCIe.

Offensive as it is, mSATA makes sense economically because it uses a cheap, mass market connector and silicon.

Re:I do have a question about this .....

[AmiMoJo]

It's entirely true. Some people just want a cheap SSD that fits in their laptop's mini PCIe slot because that's what they have available. At the price they want to pay they aren't going to get top flight performance, but it will still be a lot better than a mechanical drive and maybe even a SATA SSD on an older SATA controller.

The other reason for them is to act as cache. Windows supports using a small SSD as a cache for the main drive, and Intel seems to have some kind of hack to do it too.

Of course many mini PCIe slots are only 1x, designed exclusively for use with low bandwidth devices like wifi cards.

Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[Sycraft-fu]

While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.

The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.

Also please note SAS 12g is coming out soon, and that means SATA at the same speed is soon to come as well.

It just really isn't that big a deal on the desktop. For SANs, databases, other high performance shit? Sure, there are cases where you need more IO or iops then you can get out of a SAS interface and then PCIe or the like may be an answer. But for user systems, SSDs are already more than fast enough, additional speed gains don't seem to translate in to wall time gains.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[mjwx]

While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.

The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.

This,

In sports car communities this is called "Hard Parking". People who modify their cars, intakes, cat-backs, chips, so on and so forth but never actually take it out on the track. They compare dyno scores and talk about how their latest tuning netted them an extra 5 bhp between taking photo's of their never-tracked car. For those of us who aren't hard parkers, I have to say it's a lot more fun taking an unmodified S13 around a track than sitting on a dynamometer in a highly modified WRX STI (I.E. I'd rather be using my computer than benchmarking it).

Moving from spinning disk to SSD nets real world performance benefits, but moving from SATA 2 to SATA 3 only shows real world benefits in niche applications (I.E. image processing, build/test, crap that already takes hours due to I/O requirements).

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[smash]

Whilst it is a case of diminishing returns, sure... but...

If i have to wait AT ALL for my machine to do something it is wasted time in my life I will never get back. Until everything I do on the machine is INSTANT, i'll take any speed improvements they can provide, thanks.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[timeOday]

Even with an SSD I still find suspending and resuming VMs to be slow enough that I avoid it until necessary. I am delighted by these improvements; for decades, hard drives were an increasingly narrow bottleneck in computer performance relative to other components, and it seemed it would always stay that way. But I guess I won't be totally satisfied until the L1 cache on my CPU is big enough to store my media collection and we can do away with the entire memory hierarchy.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[mjwx]

Whilst it is a case of diminishing returns, sure... but...

If i have to wait AT ALL for my machine to do something it is wasted time in my life I will never get back. Until everything I do on the machine is INSTANT, i'll take any speed improvements they can provide, thanks.

Right.

Way to miss the point. For the most part, the time you spend waiting isn't for disk I/O. It's not about diminishing returns, rather it's ineffective as it's not the bottleneck.

Anyway, as the OP said, I highly doubt you'd be able to tell the difference in a blind test. The only people it would matter to are people who have disk operations that are measured in hours.

Also, you have some serious problems if you cant wait 30 seconds for anything. Seriously, people suffering from ADHD tend to have more patience than that. However as someone who sells high priced items that provide minimal gain, I like suckers like you.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[noh8rz10]

have you considered multitasking? while waiting for your machine to do something you could clip your toenails, for example. just a thought, it works well for me.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[JoeyRox]

For throughput maybe but not IOPs. SATA adds a tremendous amount of overhead to I/Os. For spinning disks it didn't matter since the overhead represented a fraction of the rotational and seek latencies. For flash media however the SATA overhead is huge and inhibits transactional performance. As fast as SSDs are for IOPs they will see a quantum jump in IOPs with direct-attached interfaces like PCIe.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[Pulzar]

Also, you have some serious problems if you cant wait 30 seconds for anything. Seriously, people suffering from ADHD tend to have more patience than that. However as someone who sells high priced items that provide minimal gain, I like suckers like you.

Ok, you had good points until here.

Any (good) programmer, artist, writer, or anyone else who creates on a computer for a living will tell you that they hate unresponsive applications. Open a new file and wait 5 seconds before you can see it? It's distracting, and it breaks your train of thought.

It's not ADHD, it's the fact that we're used to, from the "real world", to have instant response to actions -- pull out a piece of paper and you can read it immediately. Put a brush to the paper, and the colour shows up instantly. The brain expects the computers, which are trying to model this real world interaction, to work the same way.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about the time lost, it's about the feeling of a tool that works smoothly versus one that hiccups or throws up every time you want it to do something.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[jspenguin1]

SATA is not going to 12 Gbps. Going from 6 to 12 Gbps is a huge leap, and requires quite a bit of extra electrical training, which has been defined for SAS, but not for SATA. The next generation of SAS controllers will support SAS at 12 Gbps, and SATA at 6 Gbps.

Instead, T13 has decided to move to a pure PCIe based model called "SATA Express". This uses either AHCI, which current operating systems will interpret as a SATA controller attached to a single hard drive, or "NVM Express", which is a completely new protocol which is intended for use in high-performance servers.

Apple is simply jumping the gun on the new technology.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[jon3k]

The Mac Pro is a workstation that is regularly used to work on very large video files. You will most definitely notice a huge performance difference between a SATA II and SATA III SSD. It's twice the throughput (~275MB/s to over 550MB/s). And then double again going to PCIe SSD.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[drinkypoo]

Man, I miss my extremely-lowered S13. That was insane. I had nothing in the motor, either.

As always, though, some people are really using the improvements. My S13 never saw a track but I did manage to really wring it out in the canyons on a regular basis. But then, I knew that my money was best spent on suspension :)

Likewise, I went to six cores because I'll really use them, and I do. And as soon as bigger SSDs come down in price I'll budget for one of those, too. I have an Intel X25-M at 80GB now, with a very slow and old 320GB spinner next to it... Because I definitely have tasks which are I/O bound on this system with all its RAM and CPU cores. Even just generating a minecraft gmap (with pigmap) gets I/O bound before six cores. I need a faster SSD...

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[MachineShedFred]

Because people buy a Mac Pro to brag about benchmarks? No, that's why people buy Alienware, or build their own. Benchmark braggers don't do Xeon.

This is a machine for real work, and that work involves huge amounts of data in the form of uncompressed, or lossless-compressed HD video. And if you've ever worked in ProRes422 (or similar) for any amount of time on a standard SATA3 SSD, you still end up waiting on the disk unless you've put in multiple and striped them together with RAID or some such.

There's a reason why people still buy fiber channel storage for devices that aren't servers - are they just trying to get the "high score" on 3DMark too?

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[MachineShedFred]

30 seconds here, 30 seconds there... that really adds up when you're paying several thousand dollars per hour to rent a video edit bay.

Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it

[bingoUV]

But I guess I won't be totally satisfied until the registers on my CPU is big enough to store my media collection.

FTFY

MacBook Mini? Really?

[rainer_d]

Can't people even get the half-dozen different computer models that Apple makes right?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

(1) depends on use case. (2) very reasonably priced (sub $1000) compared to $$$$ ultrabook alternives or that schmancy chrome book.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[Dahamma]

Wait, Ultrabooks are now "$$$$" expensive? Most of them are $1000, which is the *starting* price for a Macbook Air (there ARE no "sub $1000" Apple laptops). You can be an Apple fan but arguing on price will prove futile :)

Personally I have a MBP, but I'm not going to lie to myself that it was a great deal. It was "quite expensive", but IMO worth it...

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

mba $999: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_air
sucks to be proven wrong!

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[Dahamma]

Wait, you are trying to argue $999 is not roundable to $1000 in a comparison of Macs vs. Ultrabooks? Sigh, the fanboy comment that proves the rule...

If you really want to call $999 (good luck getting it for that in most states, and regardless I would be willing to bet you $999 that 5% of MBAs are sold without options, upgrades, or other software at that price) "sub $1000" then please join the other sheeple thinking gasoline at "$3.9999" is not basically $4 a gallon.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[king neckbeard]

How is he proven wrong? $999 is a psychological price point to fool the part of your brain that sucks at math into thinking it's far less than $1000. However, in practice, you are probably going to have to pay taxes and/or shipping, and even if you don't, you are a moron for thinking the difference is substantial.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

I'm sorry that you lack an interest in precision. perhaps you should move to reddit?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

wrong is wrong. also, I didn't even bother to post on the ultrabooks, most of which are in the $1500 range, even that pixel chromebook.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[king neckbeard]

Let's take it back to the real point here. You defined 'reasonably priced' as sub-$1000. Realistically, they wouldn't shift from being reasonable to unreasonably priced at $1001. The difference is insignificant, and outside of Americans buying the base model tax free (which they can't legally do anywhere, but enforcement is lax) with no shipping costs, you are paying more than $1000. So your argument only applies to a miniscule portion of the userbase and applying a ridiculously strict metric for something that is inherently ona spectrum. If you head was any further up your ass, it'd be coming out of your mouth.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

ok, let's go back to the original point. the ASP for "ultrabooks" is $1400+. regardless of $1000 price point, the MBA is significantly cheaper than other "ultrabooks" and significantly outperforms.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[Dahamma]

Here's a list of the top 10 Ultrabooks in PC magazine as of 5/2/2013.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400007,00.asp

6 of the 10 are under $1000, and 5 of those 6 are meaningfully under $1000. NONE of them cost $1400+/$1500/whatever incorrect numbers you are quoting. Even the Chromebook only costs $1300, and for that you get a 4MP display and touch screen.

Sucks to be proven wrong! (especially when it's your whole point and not a useless nitpick)

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

Pcmag is a horrible site so I didn't bother reading the article but you're clearly confusing ultrabooks and net books! Not the same thing! Apples and oranges, my friend.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[Dahamma]

Yeah, dismiss the facts because you don't like the source... pretty much out of arguments there, huh? Well, here's Wikipedia, is that a horrible site, too, regardless of the facts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook

I count 3 of the 40+ Ultrabooks listed at $1500+, and maybe 6-7 total at $1400+, the rest are less, some much less. And those are MSRPs; unlike Macs, Ultrabooks are usually significantly discounted at retail.

Anyway, you are *clearly* the one confused about what an Ultrabook is. "Ultrabook" is a specification and registered trademark of Intel that can't be used unless the device meets their requirements. Netbook is just a silly industry term describing "small, cheap laptops" with no real standardization.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[king neckbeard]

Even more telling is that he was off by hundreds of dollars, but nitpicked over a single dollar.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

Meh. I don't want to get into a discussion of specs and cents. One point that we can all agree is that the MBA is a fantastic value with amazing performance for under $1000. I don't have time to keep track of all the ultra books etc.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

I don't want to get into a discussion of specs and cents.

I saw you getting into a discussion of 100 cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

STOP REPLYING TO ME!!! stalking slashdot discussions

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

I don't remember ever replying to you earlier, but , I guess nothing works like a little paranoia to avoid explaining your stupidities.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

this is why slashdot is going to pot. i post a factually correct comment and get cyberbullied

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

This is about the factually incorrect statement you made that you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Contradicted by your own venture into a discussion of exactly 100 cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

It's an expression! Fact: MacBook airs are the highest value computer on the planet. Bang for your buck, low price too. Not true for ultrabooks that are rebranded net books! Cheap does not equal value. These are the facts, Sun .sorry you don't like them

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Calling $999 as $1000 is also an expression. You weren't kind enough to understand that for others. Why would others understand your "expression" of "not wanting to get into a discussion of cents" ?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

STOP REPLYING TO ME AND MODDING ME DOWN ACROSS THREADS!!! i think if a third party were to read this treadh he or she woudl agree that it is very reasonable.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Posters who are replying couldn't possibly be modding you down.

Downmodders might be triggered by the extremely illogical position you take on differentiating between $999 and $1000; then proceeding to declare you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Try posting sensibly - that might expose the downmodders.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

STOP PLEASE I never did anything to you. And if you buy with student discount it's even cheaper, like $949

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Or you could admit you were being an idiot differentiating between 999 and 1000 while claiming to be above discussing cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

I HAVE REPORTED YOU TO SLASHDOT AUTHORITIES FOR CYBERBULLYING. and if you think there's no difference between 999 and 1000, then i would be happy to sell you things for 1000, buy them myself for 999, and keep the profit! i'm sorry that you have a bad home life or whatever, but if you read your posts throughout this thread you'll see an intellectual inconsistency, and frankly, dishonesty.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Haha. Slashdot authorities. Mod up +11 funny, modders.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

And yes, to add to the post, you are the one who doesn't want to get into a discussion of cents, not me. So you can play the game with yourself or other "like minded" people who don't want to discuss cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

CYBERBULLYING IS A CRIME. I HAVE REPORTED YOU TO SLASHDOT AND MY ISP. i will not reply any further because this thread is not conductive for my health.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

I am shaking in fear. Really.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

WHO ARE YOU? do you know me in real life? is that why you're stalking me online? STOP IT.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Yes I'm the one your mom warned you about.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

I am not going to reply to this thread any longer as it is detrimental to my health. btw mossberg provided evidence to back up my argument in a recent review: http://allthingsd.com/20130618/power-testing-can-two-new-laptops-really-last-all-day/?mod=atd_reviewbox

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

I've been cowering in my basement for fear of the slashdot authorities all day.

But do let me know when mossberg studies the willingness of sane people to discuss the difference between $1000 and $999 while being above discussing cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

[citation needed]

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

Come on, you can do better than this in spite of your health, surely? You need a citation for my cowering or for you letting me know about an action of mossberg?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

FACTS

burrrn how does it feel?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

How's that relevant? You did mention this thread is not conducive to your health but I expected you to at least post stuff which made sense at a kindergarten level in spite of the health concerns. My bad, I guess.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

even on slashdot they just had an article about sammy's macbook air killer which is $1600! (sorry $1599).

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

And how's that relevant?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

the whole point of THIS ENTIRE THREAD is that WHILE MBA IS >$1000!!! CANT YOU REEEEEEED?

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

No, my question has been from the beginning how you can differentiate between $1000 and $999 while claiming to be above discussing cents.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

who's discussing cents? YOU make no "cents" bahahahaha

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[bingoUV]

who's discussing cents?

You.

YOU make no "cents" bahahahaha

Doesn't mean anything, sorry for the loss of your mental health.

Re:MacBook Mini? Really?

[noh8rz10]

YOU make no "cents" bahahahaha

Doesn't mean anything, sorry for the loss of your mental health.

"cents" -> "sense". homophones = pun.

this thread has ceased to be interesting. i've run out of things to troll about, and your trolling has gotten pretty weak too. kthxbai.

Oh, wait ... clarification needed!

[King_TJ]

I didn't recall the type correctly... The drive I replaced in the Spectre XT Pro was actually an "mSATA" type of drive.

I guess it was something like the drive Crucial sells here:

http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=433DDBDFA5CA7304

So I stand potentially corrected.... Perhaps the PCIe connector Apple is using here a little thinner and different. Looked very similar though.

Re:Not until capacity, price, and lifetime improve

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is not meant to replace spinning drives.

Spinning drives are not meant to replace reel to reel tape.

The automobile is not meant to replace the horse.

PCI drives have been around for a while.

[mjwx]

Both in traditional storage and cards that allow you mount volatile RAM as a HDD. Long before the age of SSD's friend had one of these drives with 4 x 2 GB sticks to form an 8 GB drive (at the time a 500 GB drive was the largest commercially available, XP service pack 2 was causing great consternation and people used Friendster). These never took off because.

- Performance benefits weren't useful outside niche applications.
- They simply weren't practical.

SATA has a huge legacy, is cheap to produce and numerous. SATA III has a transfer rate of 600mbs which is faster than most drives that people will use and definitely faster than most application. Unlike moving from spinning disk to SSD, this wont have a noticeable performance difference to the end user.

Reading up on this, it sounds like they just used SATA 3.2 Express, which means fortunately Apple wont be able to control it... But still, no doubt Apple did this so they can make it hard and more expensive to replace a HDD in a Mac by making it difficult for 3rd parties to build compatible components.

Re:PCI drives have been around for a while.

[KingMotley]

Correction, SATA III has a transfer rate of 600MB/s, or 6000mb/s. You either got your bits and bytes mixed up, or you dropped a 0.

Re:PCI drives have been around for a while.

[serviscope_minor]

They simply weren't practical.

In what way?

FWIW, the old eee 900 netbook has a PCIe flash drive, because mini-SATA ports didn't exist at the time so the usd mini PCIe. Entertiningly the original drive used a cheapie PCIe-PATA bridge and some PATA flash.

The replacement ones use cheapie PCIe-SATA bridges and SATA flash.

It was also one of the asier laptop drive replacements. Certainly not impractical in any way.

no!

[slashmydots]

Self contained modular components are always superior in ease of replacing and overall use to both the manufacturer and the consumer. If it's some one of a kind custom one made just for them, that's trouble because the manufacturer has them by the balls and it's just one supply source. The last time I heard of a company getting 100 "identical" Dell laptops, there were 4 different hard drive models in them. That's because of cost and supply changes. With just 1 item to choose from, that's bad.

Then from the consumer side, some modified BIOS that only boots off of PCI-E controlled storage devices and then not being able to use Acronis or GParted because it's a custom driver on a custom controller are both huge problems. Not being able to replace it with any 2.5" drive, just 1 single replacement option at a price-gouging 5x charge from the manufacturer is pretty awful too. Your upgrade options go out the window too.

Then it's just some anonymous nothing brand. There are 3 brands of SSDs that I buy and that's it because I don't want the flash chips failing in a year like Kingston SSDNow or Adata or Sandisk or any of those wacky off brand ones. HP and Dell are famous for garbage like rebranded lite-on DVD burners that fail constantly instead of something nice like Phillips so you bet it's going to be a true piece of crap.

Overall, it's a terrible idea.

Two trends reversing?

[Virtucon]

Most Motherboard manufacturers have been coming out with designs that reduce the number of slots for expansion, this may be a reversal and there's mini PCIe which I'd love to see available in more and more systems. It will definitely push for more SSD solutions in laptops/desktops and workstations but I was also curious about the release of the new Mac Pro yesterday and their expectation of externally connected hardware as well. While they've reduced the footprint of the system I can imagine a bunch of cable now all over my office going to the hard drive expansions and also this bucks the trend a bit in "PCs are dying" doesn't it? I mean yeah the Mac Pro will probably cost your first born and your left nut but still if Apple is willing to bet on the High End workstation market I guess they're not seeing the IPAD as the end all killer for everybody. Oh well, it'll be fun over the next few years.

Re:Two trends reversing?

[hobarrera]

If PCIE disks gain market share, motherboard manufacturer will inevitably add more PCIE slots, and gradually start removing SATA2 slots, on at a time.

Pundits speculate on a depressingly regular

[Nutria]

basis and are almost always wrong. Why should we believe them this time?

If you can, do.
If you can't, teach.
If you can't teach, pontificate.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[Virtucon]

I think you mean 4TB there...

But I agree, Raid 6 here with 8 new 4TB drives in the last six months. In SSD pricing I'd be astronomical for that but then again I wouldn't probably be running Raid 6 more like Raid 0 if it was an all SSD array.

Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[raymorris]

I don't yet own any flash drives either. I have about 40 magnetic drives. One reason I didn't buy flash drives was write endurance.
I recently found out that the newer Flash drives have the same or better life expectancy as magnetics, though. They have enough write cycles for like 40 years of hard use now, so that's basically a solved problem. Also, when they fail they normally become read-only, so you can copy everything over to a replacement drive. 18 months ago I wouldn't have purchased flash drives, but now that they have improved I will. To reinforce what I read, I have watched Flash drives perform reliably in busy database and web servers. Not that the eight or so flash drives in those servers are statistically significant, but it's nice when your own anecdotal experience is consistent with the studies.

Yes, of course one particular drive might last a long time or a short time. I've had magnetic disks that lasted a long time and magnetic disks that died quickly. On average, an SSD will last just as long as a spinning platter .

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[citizenr]

no they dont :)
the newest 19nm MLC drives have 80TB for 256GB drive write endurance.
80 TERRABYTES and warranty is GONE.

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[sirsnork]

Whilst I'll agree it's not up to HDD standards yet. There are two very important things to point out here.

1. Endurance gets worst as the size manufacturing size gets smaller. 19nm is the worst, not the best for endurance.

2. The massive speed benefits more than make up for the size disadvantage. Use SSD's today to store data you have backed up, or as a boot drive for an OS that's easily replaceable, for simply for a cache drive like Fusion drive or the Intel Windows drivers give you.

Don't exclude a revolutionary technology just because you need to be a little more careful how you store your data

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[real-modo]

*consults dumpe2fs -h*

Mmm, 91TB in 9 months. SSD? Perhaps not.

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[jon3k]

Who has that warranty?

Not Seagate (3 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820248015

Not Crucial (3 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443

Not OCZ (5 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791

Not Intel (5 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167154

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[citizenr]

Learn to read:
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-600-ssd/#

"What do you get?
-SATA 6Gb/s interface
-Up to 400GB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor with 7mm or 5mm z-heights
-Comprehensive portfolio from a trusted storage-industry leader
-Limited 3 year, usage-based warranty"

Guess what "Limited 3 year, usage-based warranty" means, you have hmm one guess.

And now the fun part :
Endurance (method 2: Total Bytes Written (TBW)) 72TB, 73TB 72TB 36.5TB

120GB model has 36TB endurance !!!!! I write about 2-5TB per month right now on my desktop :/

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[macraig]

G.Skill might arguably be crappy, but would you argue the same of SanDisk? One of each choked.

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[macraig]

Not really the point. The controller of a platter drive is physically separated from the actual storage medium; historically people with dead logic boards on otherwise usable drives have been able to swap the boards and reanimate them, at least long enough to recover the contents. (I even tried that once myself, though there was a slight revision difference in the PCBs and it didn't work.) That's not even possible for an SSD because the controller logic is right there on the same PCB with the NAND Flash medium. Unless you have a dear friend who works in the production side of the mfr., you're screwed.

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[macraig]

That's most of the SSD market then, isn't it? So the majority of SSD buyers should expect a 66% failure rate? Wow, that's a strong advertisement for it.

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[toddestan]

So what on earth leads you to believe that a SSD controller, a silicon integrated circuit, is inherently more likely to fail catastrophically than a HDD controller, also a silicon integrated circuit?

Given the massive controller issues that many early SSDs have had, such as stuttering, data corrupting firmware bugs, hard lockups, and the like, they just don't seem nearly as well designed or mature as the controllers found on typical hard drives?

Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long

[toddestan]

Also, when they fail they normally become read-only, so you can copy everything over to a replacement drive

What actually happens is that some of the blocks go "bad" while others are still "good", so your writes will still partially work. Of course, most of the time the drive won't check to make sure that the data actually got written (true for HDDs too) so unless you're running DOS and always use the /V option with the copy command(*), by the time you realize that your writes haven't been completing you're probably at the point where you've already got massive data corruption. Which is only made worse by the wear-leveling mechanisms which generally aren't smart enough to realize that they really should stop doing their thing at this point and will continue to hamper your efforts to recover any data from the drive by slowly corrupting your data any time the drive is powered on.

That's all assuming though that you don't have the controller just die and everything suddenly go *poof*.

(*) also recommended for use with floppy disks.

How many failed to upsurp the throne

[tuppe666]

Spinning drives are not meant to replace reel to reel tape.

The automobile is not meant to replace the horse.

This is storage, lets look I used to lust after those large storage floppy disks Floptical; Superdisk; HiFD...in the end people use USB flash drives, or Optical Disk failures Laserdisk :) MiniDisc, HD DVD...in fast Is Blu Ray success. Lets look at SSD's which are ideal for portable technology, because they are faster , and more resistant to knocks..and expensive and small storage so poor for Desktop machines and Data Centres. The idea that a (storage) technology will succeed because its measurable better by some metric is short sighed especially if its worse in others. Comparing it to unrelated technology insane.

Re:How many failed to upsurp the throne

[real-modo]

In 10 years no company will be manufacturing spinning hard drives.

...or horses.

apple

[smash]

... only use cheap components, same design as everybody else, blahblahblah...

No.

I doubt PCIe based flash will be universal or even that common for a long time. Hell, one of the tablet/notebook convertible things (HP envy I think?) I tested recently was trying to run Windows 8 Pro on SD based flash. Took me a while to figure out why it was so slow and unresponsive...

Totally ruined the performance of the machine, but hey its cheap!

Re:apple

[fnj]

Hell, one of the tablet/notebook convertible things (HP envy I think?) I tested recently was trying to run Windows 8 Pro on SD based flash. Took me a while to figure out why it was so slow and unresponsive...

There is SD, and then there is SD. SD can be as slow as 1-2 MBps; Class 10 is 10 MBps or greater; and there are available both SDHC and SDXC with 95 MBps read and 90 MBps write. The latter are close enough to notebook HDD throughput that you could never tell the difference. And even the slowest SD has a seek time many times faster than an HDD. Sure, none of them can match a good SATA SSD, but the fastest can come pretty close.

Re:apple

[smash]

10 MBps is still a lot slower than SATA III at 6 gigabit. It was advertised as "flash" - using SD is somewhat misleading when comparing to other devices in the market.

MacBook Mini

[Anonymous Coward]

"MacBook Mini" does not exist, nor has it ever.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[UnknowingFool]

Your 15 year old computer has a better processor than a 12 core Intel Xeon, better memory than registered, ECC 1866 MHz RAM and better external connectors than 6 Thunderbolt (20 Gbs) ports? Really? I have to see this computer.

The Thought and Effort

[tuppe666]

In 10 years no company will be manufacturing spinning hard drives.

Again impressed with the well thought out argument from an AC, Here is a Ramcard from 1982 by Microsoft http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/300240/the-secret-history-of-microsoft-hardware/3 that is 21 years ago. I won't bother with any real explanation, because I'd be wasting my time.

Re:The Thought and Effort

[noh8rz10]

what is a ramcard?

Re:The Thought and Effort

[Nutria]

31, but who's counting...

Re:The Thought and Effort

[Nutria]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=microsoft+ramcard

It doesn't need to

[Murdoch5]

Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash. A standard SSD over a Sata 3 interface is more then fast enough for 97% of general computer users. I would really like to hear the actual reason, beside price increase, that Apple can give as to why anyone needs this. How about they put the Ethernet port back on the notebook, they include more USB ports and a solid optical drive. The next thing Apple is going to include is a 10GB Fibre interface, because they can and it looks / sounds cool.

Re:It doesn't need to

[KingMotley]

The Mac Pro isn't for the 97%. For example, those FirePro's in it are $1000 each. The processor is $1000-$2000 depending on speed. I suspect the Mac Pro will start at no less than $4,999, and that's not a price range the 97% will be looking at.

Re:It doesn't need to

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they put the Ethernet port back on the notebook, they include more USB ports and a solid optical drive.

I disagree on the optical drive. It's legacy technology and we should move on.
But I very much agree on the other two. Ethernet does not take up that much space. The Samsung Series 5 ultrabook is the same thickness as the Macbook Air and it has an Ethernet port.

Re:It doesn't need to

[Murdoch5]

Fair enough but the post is able running PCIe in laptops and desktops. I can see a use for it in the desktop, it's in the laptop I fail to see the use of it.

Re:It doesn't need to

[drinkypoo]

Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash.

Sadly, you have this 100% backwards. Apple is the king of omitting what you need. In this case, they're omitting the SATA controller and connector. You need it so that you have more storage options. They're also omitting a full fleet of memory slots, and normal GPU connection.

Re:It doesn't need to

[itsdapead]

Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash.

For general-purpose use, the killer feature of SSD is not bandwidth, but seek time. With SSD, you see a huge speed-up in boot times, application load times and, if you run out of RAM, swapping. If using PCIe reduces access time or CPU load (seems plausible c.f. going through an unnecessary intermediate interface designed for spinning discs on the ends of long cables) then it still might be worthwhile.

Also, there is no fundamental reason why a PCIe SSD should cost more than an equivalent SATA-3 SSD as long as Apple shifts enough computers to get decent economies of scale. I'm sure they're not using the same grade/speed of flash chips in the Air as they are planning to do on the new Pro.

Re: It doesn't need to

[Anonymous Coward]

If given scale of quantity, PCIe flash is no more expensive than a regular SSD. You already have enough flash RAM chips that rearranging them into a slightly wider bus is fairly trivial. The only real difference is how you go from the PCIe interface to those chips. Non-PCIe implementations use a PCIe to SATA bridge then another controller to go from SATA to the flash chips. With PCIe flash you combine both and eliminate the SATA bottleneck.

Re:It doesn't need to

[Murdoch5]

Well that is also a fair statement, it seems with every new "rev" of the mac books you lose valuable components and gain expensive and over powered options, for instance losing an ethernet port and an optical drive and getting a retina display.

Re:It doesn't need to

[drinkypoo]

Good old 'drinkypoo' - whenever I read something on /. that's bollocks there's a 50-50 chance that it'll have your name on it.

You know, when people who are too afraid to put their name on their complaints tell me I'm wrong, it only convinces me more strongly that I've hit the mark.

Better :)

[tuppe666]

Your 15 year old computer has a better processor than a 12 core Intel Xeon, better memory than registered, ECC 1866 MHz RAM and better external connectors than 6 Thunderbolt (20 Gbs) ports? Really? I have to see this computer.

In context of the article I notice you haven't mentioned storage. To be fair I consider Thunderbolt to be as useless as a serial port. In fact I plan on sticking a new graphics card in next year. So when I say better I mean it.

Re:Better :)

[UnknowingFool]

First of all Apple hasn't said anything about storage capabilities other than PCIe flash. Secondly my company has a PB server of storage in their data center so if you are measuring useless metrics, your 15 year computer has nothing on my company's rack of disks. Lastly what technology do you use for external transfers and how much does it cost you? If you say eSATA let me remind you if the bandwidth.

Re:Not until capacity, price, and lifetime improve

[Rod Beauvex]

Woosh.

External Storage.

[tuppe666]

First of all Apple hasn't said anything about storage capabilities other than PCIe flash. Secondly my company has a PB server of storage in their data center so if you are measuring useless metrics, your 15 year computer has nothing on my company's rack of disks. Lastly what technology do you use for external transfers and how much does it cost you? If you say eSATA let me remind you if the bandwidth.

...and yet I am already bragging that my 15year old PC has larger storage capacity than it, and I need the storage *in* my machine, and no external storage does not cut it. The last thing I want is ugly boxes hanging of my machine...its a ugly stupid design. The reality is my *desktop* computer doesn't have data centre storage :), but it has *desktop* storage...the apple machine is a fast nettop I have no use for one of those. As I said I plan on upgrading my graphics card this year too. ;)

Re:External Storage.

[UnknowingFool]

So you are bragging that you have a lowly file server that has more storage han Apple's workstation for creative professionals that is not marketed or designed to be a file server and Apple hasn't disclosed how much storage it will have. Also you have placed so much value this useless metric of more storage while the Mac Pro can easily crush your lowly file server in practically everything else. As for ThunderBolt, are you telling me that your 15 year old computer can do internal transfers faster than external 20Gbs ThunderBolt? Not bloodly likely. As for upgrading your graphics card, do you think you can beat two FirePro GPUs? Do you even have PCIe in your 15 year old computer or is it still AGP or legacy PCI. At best you're full of it.

Re:External Storage.

[KingMotley]

I'm not tuppe666, but 15 years ago, servers had PCI-X slots.

20Gbps isn't nearly as fast as you might think. Most 15 year old servers could do that pretty easily. Any server with 3 (or more) PCI-X slots (each of which can do 8.5Gbps) would be able to transfer data that fast, and most servers had more than 3 slots.

That said, the new Mac Pro has 6 such 20Gbps thunderbolt ports, and 4 USB 3.0 ports (5Gbps). You would be pretty hard pressed to use all that bandwidth up, assuming of course that the Mac Pro could keep up and there isn't an internal bottleneck somewhere. My current system for example would need 3 of those thunderbolt ports to drive my storage needs currently (assuming a 100% efficiency on the thunderbolt ports).

My current system has 2 SATA-3 SSD drives in a RAID-0, and 10 3TB drives in a RAID-6. I would need to split the RAID-6 up across a couple thunderbolt ports because a single port doesn't have the throughput to handle it even at 100% efficiency. I get 2.7GBs off it now (21.6Gbps). And I have a spare 3TB drive that isn't in any kind of RAID (It used to be RAID-1, but one drive died, and I haven't replaced it yet). Still very doable, and leaving half the ports free for other stuff. And for external transfers I use SFF-8088 cables (4xSATA-3).

The video in the Mac Pro is awesome, although I would have preferred a NVidia solution to ATI, but that's just my preference. The 12-core Xeon definitely bests my 6-core CPU in all but single threaded apps and games.

Re:External Storage.

[UnknowingFool]

He's not saying he had a server. He said he has a 15 year old desktop. Also he says later in his thread that he was able to expand it by changing the case, CPU, RAM, HD, video every few years. So then it's not a 15 year old computer is it?

Re:External Storage.

[KingMotley]

Well, he does have a point. You can't exactly swap the motherboard out for a new one in the Mac Pro, nor is most of the components upgradable very much if at all. I haven't seen the internals close enough to say exactly, but I suspect that most everything inside that case is pretty custom and either not upgradable, or only upgradable with a very select few options all from Apple.

A good question is if you swap out a different computer part every x months, at what point is it no longer the original computer? I don't have an answer, just seems that line is pretty blurry and open to interpretation.

Re:External Storage.

[UnknowingFool]

That wasn't his point. His point is that his 15 year computer had more storage than a MacPro. At best that is incredulous as it only had 4 IDE drives. Also he contradicted himself when he said in swapping all component he got "a whole new machine 3-4 years". He didn't swap a few components; he swapped them all out. The point isn't debatable.

OCZ drives have 3 year warranty, no TB limit

[raymorris]

If you want to look at the warranty, some OCZ SSDs have a year limit - no limit on TB.

Re:OCZ drives have 3 year warranty, no TB limit

[raymorris]

That should say a three year warranty, unaffected by TBs written.

Google is everybody's friend

[tuppe666]

http://apple2online.com/web_documents/microsoft_ramcard_-_manual.pdf Extra Ram later iterations acted like *floppy disks* boasting 50X speeds basically a precursor of today’s SSD drive

Pearls to the swine

New Broom

[tuppe666]

So you are bragging that you have a lowly file server that has more storage han Apple's workstation for creative professionals that is not marketed or designed to be a file server and Apple hasn't disclosed how much storage it will have. Also you have placed so much value this useless metric of more storage while the Mac Pro can easily crush your lowly file server in practically everything else. As for ThunderBolt, are you telling me that your 15 year old computer can do internal transfers faster than external 20Gbs ThunderBolt? Not bloodly likely. As for upgrading your graphics card, do you think you can beat two FirePro GPUs? Do you even have PCIe in your 15 year old computer or is it still
AGP or legacy PCI. At best you're full of it.

I'm sorry You seem confused :), Most here would understand that a Desktop PC in terms of it being meccano for stupid people, consisting of about 5!? very distinct parts. My Desktop computer unlike Apples new nettop is upgradable with means over those 15 Years its case changed every 4 years, memory every 3, cpu every 3 years, Graphics cards every 2-4 years, Motherboard every 2-4 years, and Hard Drives every 2 years...about a whole new machine 3-4 years, with components at best value. It means my hardware has always been cutting edge bought at best price vs important metrics. My computer is a neat solution.

To repeat myself I find external storage a messy ugly solution, for nettops, and poor design. The fact that the box is not upgradable means than it starts with at least two worse metrics than my rectangular box, and the rest possible having 6months to maybe a year before they are outdated, at a small cost. The fact that these things lave a long refresh product line ads insult to injury.

Re:New Broom

[UnknowingFool]

Most people understand a workstation is not a desktop. Most people understand that different things are made for different purposes. Most people would understand the cheap laptop I have was not made to be a file server; it was made to be a laptop and any comparisons of that metric useless. Also most people here would find your claims exaggerations disingenuous.

If you've changed the case, MB, CPU, and HD multiple times, it's not the same computer over 15 years. They are different computers. I was wrong; you're not exaggerating. You are basically lying.

Re:New Broom

[foniksonik]

Sounds like you spend more time building your system than using it. My own experience is to buy an Apple laptop and use it for 4 years, then buy a new one, use it for 4 years (I'm about ready for a new one). I do have a NAS box for storage that is RAID 5 and I get larger drives every other year.

I'm pretty sure you've spent 10x what I spent and haven't gotten 1/10th the value out of it. What's great is that Apples OS keeps getting faster so my hardware actually does more work now than when I bought it.

Re:New Broom

[UnknowingFool]

This is what he originally said: "So this advertisement for Apple is lost on me, as my 15 year old computer has better specifications, at a fraction of the cost." Then later he says: "about a whole new machine 3-4 years". He didn't say something like " over 15 years I've been upgrading my machines to get the best performance for the price." That's a lie. I can't say my 15 year old car has better gas mileage than the new Hondas if I've only gotten a new frame, engine, and interior every few years. It's not a 15 year old car if I've changed out every single component in the car.

Re:Not until capacity, price, and lifetime improve

[samkass]

...which is why Apple's not advertising the capacity. It's probably only 128 or 256 GB. Spinning platters also last longer (I have a few going on 10+ years). Flash has that nasty problem where it can only take so many write cycles before it starts losing capacity. I have high hopes for flash but they've got some hurdles to overcome.

The capacity of Apple's PCIe flash drive on the new MacBook Air isn't hard to verify. 128GB and 256GB configurations are standard on the $1K and $1.2K models respectively, and it can be custom configured up to 512GB for an additional $300 (over the 256GB option). The read/write cycles are improving all the time, and software support can spread it out to last a long time. I'd say [citation needed] that laptop-sized platters in laptop-style abuse tend to last longer than solid state...

Well, it is the biggest bottleneck.

[Severus Snape]

While not a fan of the new Mac Pro, HDD speeds are the major bottleneck in PC systems, any attempt to thwart this should be praised.

Re:Well, it is the biggest bottleneck.

[Voyager529]

While not a fan of the new Mac Pro, HDD speeds are the major bottleneck in PC systems, any attempt to thwart this should be praised.

Clearly you're not the target demographic for the Mac Pro. Having an SSD for a SYSTEM drive, I wholeheartedly agree with. Omitting the SATA bus and the physical capability to add in spinning rust drives is NOT a generally desirable feature. See, the majority of people who still use Mac Pro hardware are video editors. the ~70MBytes/sec of sustained linear writes for HD video on a RAID-5 of SATA drives is just fine; what's much more important is the storage space. A terabyte goes REAL quick when editing HD video of any length. You also need stock footage, scratch disks for render files, and in some cases multiple audio channels. Yes, adding in several terabytes of storage can be done using external drives or a Thunderbolt storage array or similar, but the original Mac Pro case made it possible to do all of that with bog standard hard drives and SATA cables. It is a solution not solved by present availability of PCIe flash storage, and the requirement of a Thunderbolt storage tower to prevent the Mac Pro from having to retain its physical appearance as a tower seems a bit counterproductive in this regard.

But SONY is already doing it!

[ikaruga]

Why Apple is taking credit for this new trend? Sony new Vaio Pro line has optional 20Gbps PCIe 256/512GB flash storage. I pre ordered one(first vaio in 9 years) simply because of that. Credit where it's due.

Re:But SONY is already doing it!

[king neckbeard]

Ah, but when it comes to credit and Apple, you don't have to do things first, you just have to be the first to masturbate into a a massive crowd about doing it. Apple are masters at dropping tech at the crossover between early adopter and early majority. It's got a very good ratio in R&D investments to PR payoffs.

Re:But SONY is already doing it!

[itsdapead]

Why Apple is taking credit for this new trend?

Hands up who had heard about Sony offering PCIe Flash as an option.
Now hands up who had heard about Apple offering PCIe Flash as standard.

What Apple "gets" is that it is no good innovating unless you're going to market the fuck out of it. Apple didn't invent [GUIs,LANs,laser printers,small form-factor,USB,music players,touch screen phones,app stores,tablets,'retina' displays,...] they just persuaded people to buy them in quantity while the original inventors sat around admiring their new mousetrap and waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.

They just can't use good parts

[slashmydots]

Are there no limits to OEMs cheaping out on parts? Really? They can't just buy an existing product? They have to have their awful vendors do it for slightly cheaper despite typically epically screwing it up? Here's the thing they just invented except oops, this one's over a year old and is faster and more respectable.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227744
And don't forget the fastest single drive in the entire world:
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Z-Drive-Series-Maximum-ZD4CM84-HH-300G/dp/B005HU0KCG

Re:They just can't use good parts

[fnj]

For $2070.99 and 14 watts and a GIGANTIC size for just 300 GB, it bloody well BETTER be the fastest. And I personally think the reviewer who claims to have installed 15 of them in his own personal server is having us on.

Re:They just can't use good parts

[gl4ss]

that's for entirely different use.

this(apples use of this) is for saving space inside the machine. and for gouging on upgrades.

One thing that will be useful ...

[Skapare]

... is honest benchmark/speed ratings conducted by an independent 3rd party testing. And this testing should include a number of methods of testing to simulate best case, worst case, random case, and typical case scenarios. That testing should include single devices as well as several common RAID configurations. The selected test configurations should be the same for all products. That should include all-read, all-write, and mixed read/write scenarios.

Then all retails who don't list these exact ratings should be boycotted.

Re:never heard of PCIe Flash

[Skapare]

It has been around for a while, but only at premium pricing. Top end PCIe Flash has been about $10,000.00 for a while. But things are starting to go down with many models. But demand is going up, too. Certain cloud service providers are building massive databases that live on redundant multi TB SSD.

General Question

[User1138]

I believe already that we have hardware that can function faster than the user can respond (tetris anyone). At what point does the hardware and software get to the point where interactions are instantaneous and any further development would just be unnecessary. I know that there are probably going to be some futuristic answers along the lines of HAL or SkyNet, but in reality at what speed would Joe Baggadonuts think that additional speed unnecessary. This being said, I think Joe would also go for Ultraband internet speeds before going for raw computational output as long as the computer could handle that amount of data which i think most desktops are.

Re:never heard of PCIe Flash

[KingMotley]

OCZ Revo 3 x2 is a PCIe Flash drive that has been around for a couple years.

Slot or pci-e card or slot on a pci-e card where w

[Joe_Dragon]

Slot or pci-e card or slot on a pci-e card where will this end up.

maybe even have a X16 or X8 or X4 card with more then 1 slot on it.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[jon3k]

and moved from functional design

Not sure if you read about the new design, but the shape is very functional. You might want to read up on the concept of the thermal core and the fan on top. The RAM is also much easier to replace than your typical desktop PC. You just slide off the outer cover and it's right there. I really think you don't know what you're talking about, I assume because you haven't read anything about the actual design of the Mac Pro. You just saw a picture and made a bunch of assumptions.

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[jon3k]

For what you're storing, SSD is probably unnecessary. God forbid we have options depending on workload. Just like you wouldn't use SSDs to store your WaReZ I wouldn't use 4TB spinning disks for my bootup and application drive.

I've been telling people this for some time

[Sycraft-fu]

Heck, in this thread even. SSDs are all more than fast enough for today's usage on desktops. They aren't the bottleneck. With the lower latency, and good random access, they all seem to work well.

There's a difference between synthetic benchmarks and what you notice on the wall clock, and just because it is faster doesn't mean it is needed. Another area you see it is RAM. DDR3 scales up to 2133MHz by the spec, and you can find stuff of to 3000MHz. The Sandy/Ivy bridge controllers support RAM speeds async with the CPU bus, so it can scale up. When you drop a synthetic RAM speed test on it, you see the results. The faster RAM scales nearly linearly, as you'd expect. However then you test actual computation, including synthetic CPU benchmarks, and the difference vanishes. Anything past 1600MHz makes essentially no difference and even 1333MHz->1600MHz isn't that big. The RAM speed just isn't the limiting factor on the CPU.

That's what people need to understand about any data access kind of benchmark: There is such thing as enough. Once whatever processing you are doing isn't limited by it, more doesn't help. Now as processing speed increases, so can bandwidth requirements, but at a given level, you can hit "enough".

SSDs really are that point (past it really) for desktop tasks. You just don't wait on them. They can get data as fast as is needed, if there's any waiting it is on other things.

So while I don't hate on faster SSDs, I don't care either. I've played with RAIDing them, I've used fast and slow ones, none of it matters in terms of how long it takes for things to happen, or my ability to work in parallel. SSDs are just faster than I require.

Now this is not true in all applications, you can find server setups (NAS, DB, VM, that kind of thing) where indeed an SSD might not be fast enough and you need more than one ganged together, or you need them on a faster interface like PCIe or maybe FC.

Even then, SAS is advancing. HGST has 12G SAS SSDs on the market, and that'll get you 1.2GB/s of throughput, and do on in a hot-pluggable, RAID-able, setup and with more drives. There are reasons to want to hang drives off of a storage bus rather than right on the system bus.

Re:I've been telling people this for some time

[julesh]

It all depends on the task, I guess. Until I got a TV that could play media files, I used to regularly prepare DVDs of stuff I wanted to watch. If you're familiar with the process for writing a DVD using free software, you know that the last step is to run "dvdauthor", which does two things: it prepares the menu & index files for the DVD, and copies your MPEG2 input files into the correct "VOB" formatted output files. This latter step amounts to basically copying 4GB of data with a trivial transformation applied. It used to take about 20 minutes when I started doing it, IIRC.

(At least things improved when I moved off Windows 2000 as my OS -- it left the entire system unusable while it was running, for some reason.)

Your quote

[dbIII]

The "weak and the timid" got pissed off enough to sign up for WWII and win it.

And you are going to do that on what space?

[Sycraft-fu]

One of the problems with "very large video files" is they are, well, very large. This lil' PCIe SSD isn't (480GB likely). So you'll be needing external storage, since there aren't drive bays, and then you are back to where you started. Also with video files, you need enough speed to stream them in realtime, more doesn't make it magically better. Unless you are doing 4:2:2 uncompressed or something, you don't need that kind of throughput. REDCode is only like 42MB/sec, AVCUltra is 55MB/sec max. A regular SATA 3 SSD is enough to easily stream 6+ of them. At that point, your system will be swamped anyhow with the decoding, you'd probably build proxies for editing.

Also it is rather amusing that you bring up video since anyone who has something like an AJA Kona, Blackmagic Decklink, MOTU HDX-SDI, Avid Nitris DX, or the like is straight fucked. No PCIe slots. So you get to rebuy your hardware if you can get it in Thunderbolt (like the HDX-SDI) or you get to go and find something new if you can't (like the Kona).

This is NOT some well reasoned design to make video pros happy. This is Apple wanting a new toy to wave around and say "Oooo, look how fast this is!" For most uses, useless. If you actually have the need for that kind of speed, you probably also need more capacity than it can deliver. That and PCIe was the chones interface for most video gear, and either PCIe or FW for audio. None of that to be found, so you get to get new gear on top of a new system. Well isn't that fun.

Re:And you are going to do that on what space?

[SuperKendall]

This lil' PCIe SSD isn't (480GB likely)

I'd guess 1TB minimum. Pro system, remember?

That still means you would need external storage for large video files but you seem to be forgetting the vale of large local fast scratch storage, like Photoshop uses and FCP will quite likely make great use of.

Unless you are doing 4:2:2 uncompressed or something

Something, like 4k/8k video something...

This is NOT some well reasoned design to make video pros happy

It is if you think beyond a year.

New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

The new Mac Pro isn't that great -- and I've been waiting for it. Really had my hopes up.

Flash drives seem to be characterized by very high failure rates. Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation. All real drives -- the ones you use for your data -- would have to be external bricks. Whereas standard HD's for the current design go in and out trivially. It's wonderful. Four of 'em.

External drives? External graphics? (3 display max it would seem unless you have external boxes.... yech) Nah.

Best thing right now seems to be the last generation of the big box. 12 cores, 12 more semi-competent hyperthreads, holds four drives, can push six monitors, RAM is (user!) upgradable...

And they finally fixed OSX so it handles multiple monitors correctly, fixed the broken menu paradigm, fixed how full screen apps work... perfect.

The mac pro.... unless there are some real differences between what they say they're making and what they actually make, I think it's the big box for me. My older 8-core can live in the ham shack doing SDR and digi-mode duty. :)

This way I know I can do the big jobs, and without littering my workspace, which I am quite particular about, with bricks and cables. I *really* don't understand what they were thinking.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[kthreadd]

According to some people att WWDC replacing a "drive" is merely a matter of taking the cover off and popping it out of the PCIe slot. Plugging the new one in and closing the cover. The units they have on display features two such slots. Seams pretty OK to me.

RAM is definitly user upgradeable. Four slots for DDR3 1866 MHz ECC. Works like any other RAM slot.

It should be possible to replace the GPUs as well. The only question seams to be that it's unclear how many GPUs will be availble that fits within the form factor.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

Uhmmm... 3 x 4k monitors. I guess it can drive more than that using "normal" monitors.

You guess? Where does it actually say this? If it can actually drive six or more monitors at reasonable resolutions (4k is silly, frankly, unless you have a 40 foot wide display) without external graphics bricks, that's definitely of interest. It doesn't solve the external drive brick problem, though.

and you can daisy chain those

What are you talking about "daisy chain" -- I'm talking about DVI, VGA, etc. They don't daisy chain. Are you talking about monitors that are "thunderbolt" or whatever? Don't own any, don't think it makes any sense to own any, already have a forest of perfectly good monitors anyway.

Why waste space with internal drives and connectors that are slower than the external ones?

So your desk doesn't turn into a garbage dump? So you don't knock the drive off onto the floor? So the cat doesn't yank the plug out during a write? So Bubba doesn't walk off with my drives? So the drive noise is muted by the case? So the drives get power and cooling inside, instead of from some noisy-ass switcher brick? So there aren't more power strips on the desk than pics of the family? So I can pick it up and move it without a scad of external stuff trailing along behind it? And this is a machine that apparently is going to need all six of those fancy new plugs with DVI or VGA adapters to drive monitors, if in fact it can do that -- so the only option left is firewire drives, which present all the same problems.

The bandwidth in thunderbolt 2 should be enough for some serious raid configurations, right?

Where? In your desk drawer? Glued to the ceiling? In the refrigerator? Seriously, this "put it all external" nonsense just isn't going to fly. USB is bad enough. Not going to exacerbate the brick problem. If the machine can't operate as a single unit, it's not for me, that's all. You want one, cheers, enjoy. I'm sure someone will want one. I'm also pretty sure they'll hate the thing once they face the reality of all that desk cruft, but I admit, it's only an opinion. :)

External disk makers are going to be very happy

With you, perhaps. All they're getting out of me is laughter. It's a dumb design. It's form over function. Something Apple has a real problem with, although sometimes, as with the Mac Mini, they come along and fix it later.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[kthreadd]

Four slots total. One socket. 128 GB maximum RAM. All subject to change.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[AmiMoJo]

Are they standard size slots though? They won't take normal sized PCIe graphics cards, for example. It seems like you will be limited to overpriced Apple parts with no possibility of using a cheap off-the-shelf upgrade.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[bcmm]

Flash drives seem to be characterized by very high failure rates. Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation. All real drives -- the ones you use for your data -- would have to be external bricks.

Hard drives are also prone to high failure rates. If your "real data" lives only on a single magnetic disk (in a portable device, FFS) you're already asking to lose it.

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[kthreadd]

Nothing in this machine is designed to be cheap. From what I understand it's mostly a matter of if third party vendors are willing to support the cramped form factor. Hopefully they will. We don't know yet.

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[dfghjk]

Wow, this reads like it's written by someone who knows nothing.

"...still a waste at $500+ add on for only SATA quality..."

SATA is not a measure of quality. SATA is not "worse" than SAS.

"...Fibre Channel external arrays that are heavily managed, RAIDed, and backed up to tape."

Like this is universally a good thing or that desktops need "heavily managed" drives...or RAID.

"These new Mac Pros are perfect to suck down a few hundred gig of video and process on the workstation at high speed. Then push the finished work back to the SAN at almost "RAM" speed via Thunderbolt 2."

No, they aren't because they have no storage, because Thunderbolt runs nowhere near "RAM" speed, because the connection to the SAN is slower still than even Thunderbolt, and because combining SANs and desktop content creation is dumb. Video creation involves working with large amounts of transitory data. Backing this with RAID would be of low value and would either be costly with mirroring or terribly slow with parity schemes. SAN makes this worse still. The idea is stupid though I have no doubt that some do it. There are plenty of stupid people, many of them posting here.

How are cloud platforms relevant in a discussion of PCIe SSD, or are you trying to simply imply that the new Mac Pro is somehow the king of cloud servers too? Funny how people are only now talking about PCIe SSD because Apple integrated it into a new machine, just like how no one would accept a workstation platform with no integral storage except that Apple just introduced it. This isn't about what the right answer is, it's about how Apple can't do wrong.

The new machine would have much broader appeal if it (1) could have some degree of GPU configurability for those that don't need that much GPU, (2) could take internal drives for those with modest storage needs beyond SSD, and (3) wasn't made to be an expensive, disposable appliance. If the shape weren't round the system could be of similar size and still offer some internal storage. This is, once again, Apple sacrificing function for style. Frankly, 4 internal 2.5" bays would be trivial to add, aesthetics aside. Then you could add spindles OR a massive SSD bank internally. Apple isn't creative or innovative, they are predictable and really pretty dumb, just less dumb than the competition.

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

You're OK with six cords for six monitors, two cords for mouse and keyboard, but not one cord for a raid array? Come on...

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[dfghjk]

"Why waste space with internal drives and connectors that are slower than the external ones?"

Ignoring the fact that they wouldn't be, you are suggesting that this would be unacceptable yet attaching your storage "over the network" is a good answer? Seriously?

"The bandwidth in thunderbolt 2 should be enough for some serious raid configurations, right?"

This is a dumb question with no answer. What defines "serious"? Why only bandwidth? In what moment in time? Thunderbolt is enough bandwidth to scale to a certain point. You can attach disk which means you can attach RAID. That isn't the question nor is it the complaint.

"External disk makers are going to be very happy :)"

And fanboys are ecstatic.

How many 4K Thunderbolt monitors are there? None. How many hardware platforms allow you to create additional monitor connections based on the resolution of your existing displays? None.

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

but DVI is limited to 8-bit color while the displayport can supply the monitor with 10-bit color;

That's perfectly fine. The human eye can't discern a 1/256th step when the entire range lies within the normal human brightness capability without iris variance (which, if your monitor is adjusted correctly, is always the case when looking at one.) Try looking at a 256 level greyscale on a high quality linear (meaning, probably not an LCD) monitor one day; you simply can't pick out a single change -- and your eye is most sensitive to greyscale changes. You're even less able to tell the difference of one step out of a 16 million color range; compared to your rods, your cones kinda suck. :) Where extra bit depth actually benefits you the most is in the data of an image so you can recover very low contrast detail and stretch ranges without creating banding; not in its final display. And my DSLR and editing software have that handled quite well.

All thunderbolt ports are half PCIe and half displayport, meaning all 6 are also displayports. You can drive 6 2K monitors off this thing.

That's been the case, but the ads for this thing talk -- consistently -- about being able to drive three monitors at up to 4k. It's quite possible that they didn't hook a graphics engine to three of the ports, but instead, only the general bus stuff. Not saying they did or didn't, just that the marketing to date on the Apple site and at devcon really doesn't lay this out explicitly. So until they say "can drive six monitors directly", I'm not assuming that's the case. And, if it *is* the case, then I'm left with firewire for the drives -- desk-bricks -- which makes me pretty unhappy, especially when the current model has no such problem. So does the flash boot drive. I'm not yet to the point where I trust flash to survive for long, limited writes and etc (and on a system that writes logs constantly!), and although the flash is apparently replaceable, a replace and reinstall of the OS, plus possible disruption of apps... that's not exactly my favorite vision of the evening, you know?

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

Encapsulate this Mac Pro core cylinder inside a normal chassis of your choice, that has all the hard drive mounting space you could want, and contain all the wires that you're worried about your cat or Bubba unplugging. You can even bolt your custom chassis to the desk.

There are some issues -- like power up and down access -- but it's not a bad idea at all, really. Case with a big exhaust fan on top. If the cylinder fits inside a standard case. Or -- perhaps -- someone will build a solution so this machine is reasonable to use. Seems like a market opportunity.

Are you telling me that your cat keeps unplugging your mouse and keyboard too? Or has your solution been to go Bluetooth for those and invest in Duracell?

Yeah, my cat has unplugged my USB stuff many times. There's a fair bit of it. Powermate, MIDI control surface, microscope, scanner, oscilloscope, SDR, DSLR, guitar/bass input, keyboard... the mouse, happily, is bluetooth. See no reason to deal with a tail there. It's pretty annoying when I get "catted", but rarely even comes close to reaching the level of crazy that would be experienced if data on a drive was damaged. IMHO, drives belong in a safe, secure, vibration free environment. Which my desk most definitely is not. Other's milage may vary; but mine doesn't. I actually like your case-around-a-case idea, though.

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

You're OK with six cords for six monitors, two cords for mouse and keyboard, but not one cord for a raid array? Come on...

note: I didn't say anything about a raid array. I just said HD.

Q: What happens when I pull a monitor, mouse or keyboard cable? A: Nothing. I put it back and go on with life. No harm done.

Q: What happens when I pull a drive cable? A: Anything. I could lose a lot.

Q: What happens when someone steals my mouse? A: I get a new one, no problem.

Q: What happens when someone steals my HD? A: You don't wanna know.

In reality, one cable is not the same as the next cable, now, is it?

Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

Are you being dense?

No. I'm thinking, based on what info Apple has provided so far on this specific machine, rather than making assumptions. You should try it.

You have six TB ports, which are Mini-DisplayPort compatible

You're making an assumption here, when Apple has, this far, said the machine can drive three monitors. Your assumption may, or may not, be a good one. I, on the other hand, am not making any assumptions. However, if it turns out that all of these can drive monitors, that's good, but then that leaves me with firewire drives, which isn't.

Where do you put put it? You put the new Pro and an good external RAID box, and maybe a nice potted plant, in the huge empty space on your desk left by not having a huge tower case full of fans.

You assume I want a raid box. I don't. You assume all this will have a smaller and safer footprint than a current gen mac pro. It won't. You're going to need power strips, power bricks, and HD bricks *at a minimum*. As for space, the old Mac Pro (I have an 8-core, externally physically like the current gen), and do you see it inconveniencing me here? No, you don't. And I don't plan to go there, either.

Re: New MP isn't great for big jobs

[fyngyrz]

Nor have they said, as yet, anywhere, "The new mac pro can drive up to six 2k displays"

You would think, given that very few people have 4k displays, and very few are interested in such, and even fewer could afford them even if they *are* interested, that they might have mentioned normal monitor capabilities.

Now, you may be perfectly correct in your assertion, what I am telling you is that Apple hasn't said *anything* that backs you up as yet. If they do, then we're down to the firewire brick problem. If they don't, then it's a 3-monitor white elephant of absolutely no interest.

RE:New MP isn't great for big jobs

[nobodie]

well duh, didn't you check the brand under discussion?
My wife's 1998 iMac (blue and white) had the cd drive fail after a few years (she had the very earliest one, a tray!) and it was cheaper to by a junk iMac for 100 euros than to buy the drive (from LaCie as I recall, although it was a long time ago)

Leads where?

[fyngyrz]

I think in the case of the Mac Pro, Apple may be attempting to lead us right down a blind alley.

Pretty sure I'm going for the previous generation, which (perhaps lacking info on the new one) at least at this point seems better designed for a real working environment.

There isn't much to like about the new design, frankly. Not with what they've told us thus far.

Re:Not until capacity, price, and lifetime improve

[fyngyrz]

Not until it has comparable, or better, lifespan, it won't. I'll take a "real" HD any day right now.

Bacially I'm a star

[tuppe666]

If you've changed the case, MB, CPU, and HD multiple times, it's not the same computer over 15 years. They are different computers. I was wrong; you're not exaggerating. You are basically lying.

If I get a larger case that is easier to take things in and out, or compact to fit under my desktop computer, I can have it in every color, I have that choice. If my computer is slow. I can get a new CPU...or upgrade to a new connector standard I can swap the motherboard. Or hell is I want a quick gaming boost I can swap out my graphics card. Thats not lying that is an outright massive advantage over Apples Chinese re-badged foxconn massively marked non-upgradeable quickly out-of-date nettop with an impractical ugly design with devices hanging off it with ports nobody uses.

I'm not basically anything. I think I have covered everything :)

Re:Bacially I'm a star

[UnknowingFool]

No you're just a liar incapable of telling the truth of the situation who got caught with your own words. As for Chinese parts, have you checked where your components were made? Probably the same places Apple sources theirs. The truth is not something you value is it?

Ride the Thunder

[SuperKendall]

It should be possible to replace the GPUs as well.

Which you can also do (along with everything else) over Thunderbolt. You could also have more storage at the same speed as the internal SSD chips.

Re:Ride the Thunder

[drinkypoo]

No, no you couldn't, and you certainly couldn't do both of these things at once. Thunderbolt 2 is still inadequate for connecting a GPU, it will not keep up with modern graphics cards. Not surprised to see you of all people get this wrong.

Re:Ride the Thunder

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using it to drive a display, then the latency is probably an issue. But bandwidth wise you should be fine, right? And really, who is going to upgrade the video card for the displays. What you really want it for is for processing video and other OpenCL applications. For these, some increased latency really isn't a big deal.

You have misread (or misunderstood) specs

[SuperKendall]

Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation

Changing everything seems to be a user operation, it's as easy to get in this new box as the old

External drives? External graphics?

Thunderbolt? Which even allows for external GPU expansion...

3 display max it would seem

It's not three displays, it's up to three *4K" displays (4096 x 2160). Where you really driving six displays of that resolution before? You could drive more displays with lower resolution.

Basically it seems like you didn't bother to even read the specs for even a moment.

Re:You have misread (or misunderstood) specs

[chaim79]

Graphics cards can support only X number of pixels/polygons/etc, and I've seen more than once graphics cards with multiple outputs that can drive either one really big display or two smaller displays. This is nothing new, nothing surprising. I've even run into it several times in my own computer history, a graphics card that can support amazing resolution on one monitor, but when driving two it drops down to mediocre.

As for driving graphics cards through Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2, I'd agree that the speed doesn't match current graphics power. However, I also doubt such is necessary for 99.99999% of users. I do think that the bandwidth would be enough to drive non-graphically intensive display, (eg non-3D games) still allowing the displays to be useful for everything but the graphically crazed gamer, who has never been a Mac user to begin with.

Re:Summary of your post

[king neckbeard]

Cool strawman, bro. There's not much of a reason to increase something that isn't the bottleneck (and if you had an argument that it was typically the bottleneck, you would have made that argument instead of being a jackass). I'm not saying that there aren't advantages, just that there are almost certainly better ways to spend the same money and get better performance.

I'm not saying that technology doesn't present significant improvements, but i haven't seen a compelling argument that it's going to make a real world difference for someone using a Mac Pro or similar setup. Obviously, at some point, a SATA III setup would be the bottleneck, but it's hard to say at that point, what the technology in question replacing it would be.

It does need to!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless your doing intensive video editing

You mean the exact group that purchases Mac Pros? What are you thinking about!? This isn't a consumer machine.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[cffrost]

I hate to say it but I'm still on spinning disks in fact I just updated my Raid5 to 12TB dunning on 4 Disks.

I hope you're not relying on RAID5 to prevent data loss following a disk failure — the likelihood of a 12TB RAID5 array rebuilding successfully is not very good.

Re:Summary of your post

[TheRaven64]

I compile large projects on a regular basis. We have one machine with 12 cores (24 threads) 256GB of RAM, so I tried running builds entirely to and from a RAM drive. The speed difference between that and using a mid-range SSD was too small to measure (-j12 up to -j64). The difference in performance between an SSD and a RAM drive is significantly greater than the difference between any two SSDs. In contrast, the difference between using a hard disk and an SSD is easily a factor of 2 in terms of build speed and often more.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[kimvette]

He could buy an old, fully-loaded SGI Onyx or even a Cray and still not match the performance of today's commodity hardware.

Re:Summary of your post

[dfghjk]

As ignorant as your summary is, SuperKendall, it's more flattering than a summary of any of your posts would be.

In low-write environments, flash lasts longer.

[Above]

For server use you're right to worry about the write lifecycle of flash, but you're also right that they have pretty much cracked the problem.

Most user desktop and laptop machines are low write environments. Most bulk storage is a low write environment. The pictures I took last week were written once and won't be written again, but they may be viewed many times.

From a life cycle perspective this gives flash a huge advantage. For instance, a percentage of HDD's fail due to bearing issues. The time until the bearing fails is the same if there are 0 writes or continuous writes. How many people here would trust a 10 year old HDD? I'm betting not many. The bearings and the servos are quite likely to have issues. Continuous use is hard on them. Sitting on the shelf for that long is hard on them.

A 10 year old SSD that's been in a low write environment? No problem! A 20 year old SSD in a low write environment? No problem! Leave it on the shelf for 10 of those years (properly stored, in an anti-static bag and proper environmental), no problem!

Re:In low-write environments, flash lasts longer.

[WuphonsReach]

A 10 year old SSD that's been in a low write environment? No problem! A 20 year old SSD in a low write environment? No problem! Leave it on the shelf for 10 of those years (properly stored, in an anti-static bag and proper environmental), no problem!

Big problem if you're thinking of pulling data back off of those drives. Because a lot of SSDs will only hold data for 3-12 months if unpowered (some units do better at 3-5 years, but only if they are custom tuned for the purpose).

Ridiculous

[partyguerrilla]

Jobs already proclaimed Flash dead years ago.

Nothing like an Apple Hater who misunderstands

[SuperKendall]

So does USB...and serial for that matter. Whether one would want to is another matter. Thunderbolt is a small fraction of native x16 speeds

Apparently someone else who knows more than you thinks it's a good idea.

Could have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment there with a bit of Google work.

Where is your evidence of this?

That it's three 4K displays? My "evidence" is the Apple Mac Pro specs page which says exactly that.

Name one system EVER where you could subtract pixels from one display and magically be allowed to connect another.

You may want to read up on the meaning of the word BANDWIDTH. In fact the total amount of bandwidth dictates the number of displays you can attach via thunderbolt, you can have more displays withe lower resolution. You seriously do not understand how that is possible?

Those aren't specs, it's an ad

It's an ad, with some specs. I see the problem though, it's not that you can't read, it's that you lack the technical depth and understanding of newer technologies to understand what is going on.

I'll let you have the last response since there's no way you can learn enough to write an intelligent reply before the story is locked.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[Zan Lynx]

You should be scrubbing your RAID at least once a week. That will detect and fix most of the creeping errors that would have prevented a successful rebuild.

Yes you lose IOPS during the scrub but if you didn't care about data correctness you'd be using RAID0.

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[cffrost]

You should be scrubbing your RAID at least once a week. That will detect and fix most of the creeping errors that would have prevented a successful rebuild.

Yes you lose IOPS during the scrub but if you didn't care about data correctness you'd be using RAID0.

Are you sure that patrol-scrub has any effect on the unrecoverable read error rate quoted in manufacturer's drive specs? I was under the impression that those particular read errors were non-deterministic in nature, and thus difficult or impossible to anticipate or prevent. As the article I linked to suggests, those error rates stand at 1-in-N-bits at best, where typical HDD capacities currently exceed N-bits by an unhealthy margin.

It was my understanding that this state of affairs was the primary motivation behind the creation (and increasing adoption) of RAID-6. (I'm partial to RAID-10 and 1E myself... and registered ECC, patrol-scrub (HDDs & RAM), UPSs, etc., on my machines at home. Performance over reliability — so I can lose data faster? No thanks!) ;o)

Re:What about Storage!! and Price!!

[Zan Lynx]

I don't think it affects the unrecoverable read error rate. But patrol-scrub does find those unrecoverable read errors as it goes and rewrites the block. If you don't scrub then those read errors will just invisibly accumulate over time.

So during a RAID5 rebuild you'd be limited to any read errors that occurred during that last week. Hopefully.

I do think that RAID6 or other systems that allow 2 disks to fail are more reliable.