Flash Based Apple Laptops... Again

[4np]

Are we perhaps speculating about Santa Rosa's Robson Caching mechanism?

Robson flash memory, also known as a Robson cache, is a technology the CPU producer Intel introduced on October 17, 2005 at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Taiwan when it gave a demonstration using a laptop that booted up almost immediately.[1] Robson flash memory uses NAND flash memory to reduce the time it takes for a computer to power up, to access programs, and to write data to the hard drive. For notebook computers, it could also improve battery life.[2] Flash memory keeps its data even after the computer is turned off, unlike most other types of solid-state memory.

As Santa Rosa is on track for release in May we may see MacBook Pro's using this technology in / around June 2007?

 

[CaptainHaddock]

A sub-notebook would sell like hotcakes in Japan. They need this. People here make do with pocket-sized piece-of-crap PCs because Apple has nothing in that segment of the market.

 

[lightsout]

OMG, I never even though of that... journaling would KILL solid-state.

But what about ZFS... wouldn't that fix the problem?

-Clive

Good job no-one else had thought of that then....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Flash_file_systems

Read the section above it also on limitations, it is quite explicit in that the bad block failure is a known & dealt with issue. It is extremely common to have a reserved area of blocks that are used if a block goes bad, remapping it automatically.

 

[kitchingj]

why bother with flash

Why would Apple bother with flash drives, which are expensive and have a limited life, when PRAM is about to be released http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/08/intel_pram_production_plan/

 

[Analog Kid]

Good job no-one else had thought of that then....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Flash_file_systems

Read the section above it also on limitations, it is quite explicit in that the bad block failure is a known & dealt with issue. It is extremely common to have a reserved area of blocks that are used if a block goes bad, remapping it automatically.

Following a few links from here brought up an interesting news story:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb/
Points of interest: 128GB flash drive is expected to cost at least $1000, while competing 32GB drives will cost hundreds. The 128GB drive couldn't be fit in a 1.8" case and is in a 2.5" case.

What I take away from this is that Flash is still much, much more expensive than rotating media and it's really no more compact once you use all those chips, their circuit boards, interface logic, etc, etc.

 

[Squozen]

It would probably only take a couple of seconds to boot into the full desktop as standard drives have to spool up and compile the data beforehand. Think less than half the time it takes for present macs to boot.

The battery time could possibly be improved by an additional few hours since the actual rotating media sucks up quite a bit of juice. If you watch movies on the road with your laptop you could probably get a good 5-6 hours depending on display settings instead of the 2 1/2-3 that one gets with a macbook watching a movie in H.264.

I checked all the way through the thread and nobody called you on this ridiculous claim. An LCD display uses around 10 times the power the hard drive does, yet you think that using flash memory instead of a HD that draws 2.6W maximum is going to double your battery life?

 

[gkarris]

eMate all over again?

eMate - sort of a sub-note that's kind of a computer but doesn't have the memory or as many functions, and expensive for what it was.

Not this all over again?

How much for a 64 Gig RAM sub-note - $3,000?

 

[dernhelm]

OMG, I never even though of that... journaling would KILL solid-state.

But what about ZFS... wouldn't that fix the problem?

-Clive

That's a good question. Apple's HFS+ (or whatever we're using now) would likely do a lot of unoptimized writing - I'm not expert on HFS or HFS+ mind you, I'm really only gauging this by its extreme age. Most Unix file systems are "inode" based, and they definitely do a lot of small reads and writes to maintain the inode structure. Many are designed to optimize the disk "as you go" reducing or eliminating the need for defragmentation tools. I'm guessing these types of optimizations would need to be turned off on a full flash hard drive.

I don't know anything much about ZFS first hand. I've never installed it, never played with it, but everything I've heard has always been good. But while it's relatively new - I'm still pretty sure they have not optimized it in such a way that the number of reads, writes, and rewrites are optimized.

Bottom line, I would have to hear something a lot more convincing than what I've heard before I'll believe that there is a full fledged all-flash subnotebook coming. Robson Caching? Sure. All Flash? I'd be very surprised.

 

[JGowan]

I'm getting fed up with speculation.Period.

This is macRUMORS.com. You're going to get a fair amount of speculation here. Period.

 

[JGowan]

i'm getting so fed up of all these flash based rumors, that the announcement is going to come, and i'll see the words "flash based" in the title somewhere, and i just won't read it

Yet you posted. ::james confused::

 

[richard4339]

Someone may have beaten me to the punch with this, but ComputerWorld believes Apple is planning on releasing a flash laptop in the second half of 07.

http://www.computerworld.com/action...articleId=9012619&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top

 

[Swarmlord]

Yeah, if the computer is not powerful enough to run Mathematica, Aperture and Final Cut Pro all at the same time, it's garbage.

<snip>

Don't you mean World of Warcraft and a browser connected to Allakhazam? To each his own I guess.

 

[dvader]

Some is based on my own measurements. Here is a site that is a little dated but still has lots of good information:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddisk.html

Here is a ReadyBoost FAQ, which touches many aspects of this discussion: http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx. ReadyBoost is the feature in Vista that uses Flash drives to speed up some operations.

Here is a benchmark that shows the wide performance spread of flash products: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/10/two_fast_and_functional_usb_flash_drives/page9.html Check out the access time chart - 0.5ms for the best, 79ms for the worst.

Thanks!

 

[Clive At Five]

Yeah, if the computer is not powerful enough to run Mathematica, Aperture and Final Cut Pro all at the same time, it's garbage.

Seriously what would you like to do with an ultraportable sub-notebook? It's not meant to be you primary machine. It can't be as powerful as a full-blown laptop is. Subnotebook could do maybe 80-90% of what real, notebook could do, while being a lot more portable. 30GB hard-disk? That's more than enough. It can hold lots and lots of documents, apps and content. You want a more powerful machine with more HD-space? Get a real laptop then. It would propably weight around three time more, while having four time more volume, but who cares?

Apart from those people who want a machine that is REALLY portable, that is....

No no no. That's not what I'm saying. The webpage claims it will run Vista. Right now, I have a 2.4 GHz Pentium, with a gig of RAM, and it chokes on Vista (RC1)... even without Aero. That little brick WILL NOT be capable of running Vista (+1 or 2 moderately complex apps) effectively. XP, it'll be more than enough. I'm not suggesting it should be able to run Photoshop, Mathematica, etc, all simultaneously. I'm saying it should be able to run the OS without significant strain.

-Clive

 

[tortoise]

Before everyone throws out the HDD for FLASH, remember that FLASH is slow to write (good for persistent cache, not for dynamic files) and can only be erased/re-written a finite number of times (kinda like battery charges).

FLASH is super-fast for random access reads and writes compared to HDD, and a huge amount of disk usage is of this type. Even if HDDs are slightly faster in the sequential access department, it will be more than compensated for by the fact that FLASH is orders of magnitude faster for random access.

Also, while it is true that there are a limited number of write cycles for FLASH (on the order of a million plus for any given memory slot), it is also true that HDDs have a limited number of write cycles as well. Once the number of write cycles is high enough, hardware becomes obsolete before it is likely to fail due to write cycle overrun and we can treat that factor as though it doesn't exist. The difference is that people still have lingering memories of when FLASH only lasted for thousands of writes. Modern FLASH should outlast an HDD now.

 

[Maccus Aurelius]

I checked all the way through the thread and nobody called you on this ridiculous claim. An LCD display uses around 10 times the power the hard drive does, yet you think that using flash memory instead of a HD that draws 2.6W maximum is going to double your battery life?

No, I was wrong, you won't get "double" the time, but there would be a substantial improvement depending on how taxing certain applications and files are on the processor at any given time. If I was watching short videos and surfing the web and accessing various files on a macbook with an SDD drive, a macbook with rotating media with the same settings and battery doing the same exact things would not hold the charge as long.

 

[Cult Follower]

I consider adding hybrid drives would be a given.

 

[gnasher729]

You have to be kidding! You'll have to pay through the nose for the miniaturization and technology that will have to go into a subnotebook that can handle the workload of a macbook. Maybe I am misunderstanding your definition of subnotebook. I think if it as being a small laptop, like the old 12" powerbooks. If you're thinking that it will be like a slightly larger apple version of a pocketPC, than yes, $799-$899 should be a good pricepoint. I personally would not want such a device to perform the basic functions of the iPhone, because it would be too big. But a subnotebook that has some power under the hood would be sweet

See www.flipstart.com , these guys think that they can sell a tiny subnotebook with 1.1GHz single core processor for $2000. I think Apple can do better for less.

 

[50548]

See www.flipstart.com , these guys think that they can sell a tiny subnotebook with 1.1GHz single core processor for $2000. I think Apple can do better for less.

Not to mention that FlipStart is simply ridiculous...it looks FUGLY. No wonder it came from Gates's pal Paul Allen...

 

[Jiebke]

Intel unveils Flash-based hard-drives

Intel has unveiled small SSDs. And because Apple is following the Intel product releases on a close counter, it looks like this SSD could be in Apples laptops within a short time.

Source: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2185212/intel-targets-low-cost

 

[JeffDM]

All of the itzy bitzy notebooks I've seen were priced higher than a midrange Macbook Pro, yet didn't provide as much hardware capability. You pay dearly for that nice lilliputian computer, and don't expect Apple to build one and suddenly sell it cheaper than any macbook.

It is done for weight, size and battery life. The battery life of subnotes run from 6 to 12 hours, depending on the model.

You are right that they would be more expensive than the MacBook.

just about how much battery saving and how much faster of startup are we talking about here?

I'm not convinced that you'd get more than ten minutes of battery life out of a standard notebook if you switched it to a flash drive. Notebook hard drives don't take much power.

You can force a swap drive to use a Solid State Drive. So you have some control over the OS. It would be a speedy scratch disk for PhotoShop as well.

You don't want to swap to SSD at all. They have much more limited number of write cycles. For large files, SSD is slower. SSD is only faster for random seeks, for bulk transfers, the hard drive is still faster. In a specialized industrial machine, I recently replaced a ten year old 1GB spinning hard drive with a 512MB Compact Flash (CF) drive, with swapping disabled of course. It was only very slightly faster with disk-related stuff, and this was on a drive with only tiny files. I'm skeptical that the operational speed of a computer flash drive would be significantly faster than a notebook drive. As yet, I don't see enough benefit. I think one can buy 5x of 200GB notebook drives for the cost of 1x 128GB flash drives, if you are so concerned about reliability, then outfit your notebook with Optibay and use drive mirroring.

I say invest 95% into solid state and push capacities beyond that of these spinning medias. Bring down the price, increase the reliability.

Technology and capacity doesn't necessarily scale faster just because you throw more money at the problem. It's going to require denser semiconductor fabs and those don't build themselves, and they aren't cheap, nor are they easy to build, then there's the shake-down time to get the yields and volumes up.

This I didn't know. What does that say about the life span of a Nano as well as an iPhone?

Nano doesn't use swap files. I don't think the iPhone swaps either.

Simple maths: There are 8GB in the iPhone. Flash can handle at least 100,000 writes, that is a total of 800,000 GB written (the OS needs to be clever to make sure that all areas of memory are written equally often). If you plan to use the iPhone for ten years = 3600 days, that's 222 GB that you can write every day. That's an awful lot. Check with Activity Monitor if your Mac comes anywhere near that; for most people, it won't. At 10 MB per second, writing 222GB would take 22,000 seconds or more than six hours.

In other words, if you write 10 MB per second, six hours per day, for ten years, that's when the iPhone's memory will start wearing out.

I've heard of this technique, but a lot of files don't get replaced very often. I'm not sure how the OS can track or handle wear-leveling at that scale. I think the file system would need to be significantly reworked to do this.