Apple Gains Early Access to Intel's Z68 Chipset for New iMacs

[MacRumors]

As noted by tonymacx86 (via 9 to 5 Mac), iFixit's teardown of the new iMac released earlier this week reveals that the machine utilizes Intel's BD82Z68 platform controller. The inclusion is notable in part because the Z68 chipset is reportedly not set for public introduction until next week.

Apple use of the Z68 chipset marks yet another exclusive for the company, which has occasionally been granted early access to forthcoming chip components ahead of public unveilings and competitors' offerings.

The Z68 chipset is also notable because it supports SSD caching, a system that marries conventional hard drives to small solid-state drives (SSDs) to provide a seamless user experience with increased performance as the most frequently-accessed files are placed on the speedy SSD.

Apple of course offers SSD options in its iMacs, either as a replacement for or in addition to the traditional hard drive included as standard. The iMac's SSD, however, is a full 256 GB drive rather than the much smaller-capacity drives envisioned for SSD caching. And while Apple doesn't seem to be supporting true SSD caching in the new iMacs, the company achieves a similar but less seamless effect by installing the operating system and applications on the SSD while leaving the traditional hard drive for media on systems configured with both types of drives.

Intel is reportedly preparing to launch its own "Larsen Creek" line of SSDs with capacities around 20 GB and specifically designed to support seamless SSD caching when paired with a traditional hard drive and a compatible chipset such as the Z68. It is unclear if Apple will be looking to incorporate such systems in future hardware, but the company is clearly interested in pursing SSD technology for its performance benefits.

Article Link: Apple Gains Early Access to Intel's Z68 Chipset for New iMacs

 

[iPad 2]

Glad you're increasing support for SSDs.

Now please add a basic file system to iOS with drag and drop functionality for media files and you're gold.

iTunes is fine and all, but sometimes we quickly want to drag a song, or movie or photo onto our phone without having resync the whole damn thing.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/editorial-hey-apple-why-does-it-take-an-hour-to-put-an-album-o/

A wireless/OTA file-soup solution allowing apps to push and pull files from a cloud-synced file-collection would supplement this very well.

 

[campingsk8er]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_7 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E303 Safari/6533.18.5)

I don't know what to say here. I guess this is great. Actually. I really don't care!!!

Who Cares!

 

[SiskoKid]

Can someone explain the benefit of this then?

If I don't have a hybrid drive in the actual iMac, and I never intend of ripping my iMac open to install one, why would this chipset matter to me? Why would Apple bother putting it in the machine? I'd wager that a super majority of iMac owners never open their iMacs, especially not to install drives like that.

It just seems so so bizarre to me.

 

[iPad 2]

It lets you use a cheap hdd to get speeds similar to an expensive large ssd.

 

[steadysignal]

Good.

Now add blu ray support and you're gold.

shame it wont ever happen....

 

[SiskoKid]

It lets you use a cheap hdd to get speeds similar to an expensive large ssd.

That doesn't make any sense. The article says you'd need a drive that specifically does that. The old hdd would need 20GB of SSD embedded on it. Since the new iMacs have two separate drives, one SSD and one HDD, this makes absolutely no difference.

You don't need this chipset to install your OS and apps on the SSD and run files off the HDD. It's what people would've done anyway. I see absolutely no benefit to this being in the iMac.

 

[talkingfuture]

I like the sound of that. I wonder why they didn't offer the 20GB option at launch too. Could it be a BTO feature in the near future?

 

[wacomme]

It lets you use a cheap hdd to get speeds similar to an expensive large ssd.

Does this imply that with the arrival of TB supported drives, a cheap HD can be paired with a small SSD for speeds on par with a large SSD? Does TB access the Z68 chipset, assuming TB can be used as a boot drive?

 

[Lesser Evets]

I'm still waiting for an inexpensive and functioning PCI-e SSD for my tower. The tech is oddly behind for such things, on Mac. I'd love to have a 128gb SSD starter in a PCI-e slot... yeah, I'm slightly off topic.

 

[Al Coholic]

It lets you use a cheap hdd to get speeds similar to an expensive large ssd.

Huh? In order to do that this "cheap hdd" will have to spin so fast it will blow the guts out of the iMac.

LOL!

 

[ciTiger]

I'm at a loss here since I really don't understand what this means exactly... Can any one offer some insight?

 

[alvindarkness]

The Z68 does something far more important than just SSD Caching. It lets you use QuickSync. Basically letting you use the onboard intel HD GPU to accelerate tasks such as encoding while still relying on your dedicated GPU for normal graphics tasks.

Some Z68 motherboard manufacturers have decided to ignore this entirely, such as Gigabyte who dont supply power to the VAXG pin of the CPU - which means the Intel HD GPU is never powered.

I'd love to know what Apple have done. Does their implementation of the chipset/cpu allow OpenCL access to the HD2000/HD3000 on the iMacs?

 

[BTGeekboy]

More than just SSD Caching...

The Z68 chipset has more functionality than just SSD caching. Check out the writeup from Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z68-express-lucidlogix-virtu-ssd-caching,2888.html

A few things I learned from the article:
1. SSD Caching is not the best; it's far faster to use the SSD on its own. It does add a small speed bump when it's "primed" but, when I first read about it, it seemed like a lot of work for little gain, which I could already do better with existing chipsets.

2. The other big benefit, and I think this is even bigger than the SSD angle, is it allows you to access the excellent video transcoding capabilities that are included in the video chip built into the processor while making use of the add-in discrete graphics card to run the display. If they can combine that with Grand Central, that's a whole lot more performance out of the same chip than with a P67.

 

[Consultant]

Apple must be a great customer for intel to do that.

Glad you're increasing support for SSDs.

Now please add a basic file system to iOS with drag and drop functionality for media files and you're gold.

iTunes is fine and all, but sometimes we quickly want to drag a song, or movie or photo onto our phone without having resync the whole damn thing.

[link]

A wireless/OTA file-soup solution allowing apps to push and pull files from a cloud-synced file-collection would supplement this very well.

This is about the iMac, not iOS. Is someone confused?

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Even on my 8 GB machine, i need to use 2 GB of VM (Virtual Memory). The VM I/O would be much faster, if that VM would be on a fast SSD. Probably a cheap way to improve the VM-performance on machines, which have RAM-upgrade limitations.

 

[commander.data]

The Z68 does something far more important than just SSD Caching. It lets you use QuickSync. Basically letting you use the onboard intel HD GPU to accelerate tasks such as encoding while still relying on your dedicated GPU for normal graphics tasks.

Some Z68 motherboard manufacturers have decided to ignore this entirely, such as Gigabyte who dont supply power to the VAXG pin of the CPU - which means the Intel HD GPU is never powered.

I'd love to know what Apple have done. Does their implementation of the chipset/cpu allow OpenCL access to the HD2000/HD3000 on the iMacs?

Yes. It's weird that all news reports of the Z68 in the iMac focus on the possibility of SSD caching support rather than the possibility of QuickSync compatibility with discrete GPUs, which is the more useful feature for most users.

And its not OpenCL access that is required. Sandy Bridge has a dedicated hardware video encoder that is faster than anything OpenCL can do. QuickSync has been shown to be noticeably faster at video encoding than CUDA on even a GTX460 so it'll be much much faster than OpenCL encoding on the HD6970M. Hopefully Apple will integrate QuickSync support in Quicktime X and iTunes in Lion if not sooner.

2. The other big benefit, and I think this is even bigger than the SSD angle, is it allows you to access the excellent video transcoding capabilities that are included in the video chip built into the processor while making use of the add-in discrete graphics card to run the display. If they can combine that with Grand Central, that's a whole lot more performance out of the same chip than with a P67.

I don't see how a dedicated fixed function video encoder that requires specific programming support has much to do with Grand Central which is trying to distribute general processing tasks/threads efficiently.

 

[PeckhamBog]

Sounds like a Seagate Momentus XT implementation by Intel with you bringing [providing] the SSD and regular hard drive.

 

[downset]

The Z68 does something far more important than just SSD Caching. It lets you use QuickSync. Basically letting you use the onboard intel HD GPU to accelerate tasks such as encoding while still relying on your dedicated GPU for normal graphics tasks.

Some Z68 motherboard manufacturers have decided to ignore this entirely, such as Gigabyte who dont supply power to the VAXG pin of the CPU - which means the Intel HD GPU is never powered.

I'd love to know what Apple have done. Does their implementation of the chipset/cpu allow OpenCL access to the HD2000/HD3000 on the iMacs?

exactly

i can't believe not a single mac website i read is reporting on this

 

[Hellhammer]

The official name for SSD caching is Intel Smart Response Technology.

Yes. It's weird that all news reports of the Z68 in the iMac focus on the possibility of SSD caching support rather than the possibility of QuickSync compatibility with discrete GPUs, which is the more useful feature for most users.

And its not OpenCL access that is required. Sandy Bridge has a dedicated hardware video encoder that is faster than anything OpenCL can do. QuickSync has been shown to be noticeably faster at video encoding than CUDA on even a GTX460 so it'll be much much faster than OpenCL encoding on the HD6970M. Hopefully Apple will integrate QuickSync support in Quicktime X and iTunes in Lion if not sooner.

Quick Sync is still a no-go since iMacs use discrete GPUs. QS needs one monitor to be connected to the IGP in order to be activated, or you need technology like Virtu or Synergy.

 

[Dan--]

The concept of SSD caching is similar to other forms of caching - store a small amount of frequently accessed items in a speedy accessible form.

It can work well to improve average performance if you frequently "hit" the cache, instead of "miss" it. (Meaning, the item you are looking for is actually IN the cache, and the system doesn't have to go to the slower memory to find it.) The bigger the SSD, the more likely you are to have hits.

In the SSD caching system, you have 2 drives, a large normal (but slowish) rotating drive, plus a quick access SSD drive. Your most frequently used items wind up on the SSD drive (automatically) so the overall system can have good responsiveness. Anything that doesn't wind up on the SSD though, will show no performance enhancement. The hope is that, on average, your system is more responsive. It should be snappier. However, if you go to measure copy time of large files, it probably won't do a thing for that.

 

[Al Coholic]

The big news here to me is Apple's continued quick access to components from intel that are barely out of the mold. Bodes well for future updates on their entire computer line.

Is it just me or has Apple been more aggressive with this in the last 12 months or so?

 

[commander.data]

Quick Sync is still a no-go since iMacs use discrete GPUs. QS needs one monitor to be connected to the IGP in order to be activated, or you need technology like Virtu or Synergy.

That's the thing. We don't know how Apple has the display implemented in the iMac. They've implemented seamless display support allowing the use of both the IGP and a discrete GPU in the MacBook Pros so they can certainly implement something similar to allow the IGP to be active for QuickSync. As for Virtu, Apple would have to implement something similar themselves due to the different windowing/graphics system from Windows. It'll be interesting to see whether they've done so, perhaps in Lion. Certainly the performance of QuickSync over OpenCL for video encoding makes it worthwhile. Particularly, because all subsequent Intel processor generations look to keep and expand QuickSync support so adding support now will have long-term benefits and its something they will probably have to do eventually anyways.

And I've read the latest version of Virtu virtualizes the IGP rather than virtualizing the discrete GPU as before. Perhaps that also means that the display can be connected to the discrete GPU.

 

[Hellhammer]

That's the thing. We don't know how Apple has the display implemented in the iMac. They've implemented seamless display support allowing the use of both the IGP and a discrete GPU in the MacBook Pros so they can certainly implement something similar to allow the IGP to be active for QuickSync. As for Virtu, Apple would have to implement something similar themselves due to the different windowing/graphics system from Windows. It'll be interesting to see whether they've done so, perhaps in Lion. Certainly the performance of QuickSync over OpenCL for video encoding makes it worthwhile. Particularly, because all subsequent Intel processor generations look to keep and expand QuickSync support so adding support now will have long-term benefits and its something they will probably have to do eventually anyways.

And I've read the latest version of Virtu virtualizes the IGP rather than virtualizing the discrete GPU as before. Perhaps that also means that the display can be connected to the discrete GPU.

Hopefully Apple has since QS is definitely awesome. However, this could have been achieved with H67 as well since it supports the IGP as well so the main point of using Z68 still seems to be the SRT.

 

[shartypants]

Apple must have reserved a large volume to get this early access (or Intel people wanted to buy the new iMacs sooner )