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Apple Doubles MacBook Pro R/W Performance
Lucas123 writes Benchmark tests performed on the 2015 MacBook Pro revealed it does have twice the read/write performance as the mid-2014 model. Tests performed with the Blackmagic benchmark tool revealed read/write speeds of more than 1,300MBps/1,400MBps, respectively. So what's changed? The new MacBook Pro does have a faster Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor and 1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, but the real performance gain is in the latest PCIe M.2 flash module. The 2014 model used a PCIe 2.0 x2 card and the 2015 model uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes) card. Twice the lanes, twice the speed. While Apple uses a proprietary flash card made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and SanDisk are all working on similar technology, so it's likely to soon wind up in high-end PCs.
Not referring to the drive in the article, but if you think it's all marketing bull, measure it yourself. In NVMe's case, getting rid of the SATA and SAS translation layer has cut out over 60% of the CPU overhead, and cutting out the max 6Gbps or 12Gbps speed means the drives can go insanely fast. That's a lot of real change by using NVMe. Now, I am one of those marketing guys who work for one of these companies, but I can tell you it's not all BS.