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Intel Launching Next Generation MacBook Air Processors
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I love the backlit keyboard on my MBP. But the Air is cool enough I'd buy one without. If they made a 15" version which may never happen.
I didn't say I *needed* 2GB for that, I said I would be fine with it and that appears to be the minimum you can get with Macs these days. 384MB of RAM for a Linux server without a GUI is fine, but try running OS X with that much RAM. I used a Mac Mini with 512MB of RAM and it wasn't pretty.
You say a MBA is fine for what I'm doing, but my experience with 4GB vs 8GB of RAM tells me otherwise. This is on a 17" unibody MBP (2.93 GHz C2D 6MB cache) with a 7200 RPM HDD. Does the SSD in the MBA make that much of a difference that the amount of RAM becomes irrelevant? I assure you I'd be hitting swap constantly with only 4GB.
Eclipse today is not what it was 10 years ago (and throw Flash Builder plugin in and you have to give it at least 1GB of RAM unless you want to see out of memory exceptions all the time). I am running Tomcat, which is not heavyweight, but the apps I am running on it sure are (have to configure at least 512MB of RAM if not more for each instance). When you have a bunch of JVMs using 512MB or more each and then VMs for different OSes, 4GB of RAM starts to be cramped.
I was fine with 4GB for Eclipse, even running multiple instances at times. But in order to run VMWare Fusion with XP or Win7 without swapping, I need 8GB. 8GB is very cheap these days so why not - cost me a grand total of $90 or so - nothing considering the MBP cost me $3,000 when I bought it.
The SSD will not make up for swapping - once you start swapping you're running a slow system, SSD or not. That said using an SSD over a HD makes a huge difference - much bigger than CPU or RAM upgrades.
Only you can know if you can get by with 4GB... you might have to quit programs at times.
XCode is a CPU pig on my system so I'd be a little bit concerned about that. Any time I edit a source file, I get a CPU spike. Never slowed down because of that, but I noticed significantly reduced battery life compared to working in Eclipse.
From a fellow developer...
I was fine with 4GB for Eclipse, even running multiple instances at times.
But in order to run VMWare Fusion with XP or Win7 without swapping, I need 8GB.
From a fellow developer...
God bless developers ...
with a taste for MBAs
Seriously, you guys seems to be the only hope, the only niche atm, that might warrant enough demand for 8GB RAM BTO MBA
Yet there is other problem might lurk in there .... 8GB will wear out SSD twice as fast - as it dumps entire RAM to SSD dozens times a day when you close/sleep your MBA ....
I doubt Apple will disable it from factory (I do
)P.S. I have a feeling I heard somewhere that it actually dumps RAM after an hours of sleep or something like that .... to protect excessive SSD wear ?
We don't know that yet - we simply don't have enough statistics ....
What we know is that they fail .... differently
That would be SLC SSDs - much pricier kind than MLC we get from Apple ...
(1st gen Intel drive's cells were rated 100K and 10K rewrites correspondingly, current gen (die tech shrink) is rated at 3K ... )
That's what powers "the magic of Air" to have 30 days standby time within second's wakeup - RAM is dumped to SSD and powered down ....
to do that MBA literally wakes up, say an hour later, does the thing and goes back to sleep ... creepy huh ?
... otherwise, using about 0.5W to sustain RAM it would be dead in 5 days
About 3 times I had my Mac come out of HDD hybernation it was totally useful - so my guess caches were preserved/restored as well ....
You do know it has been solved right ? Basically Intel paid boatloads of money to nVidia and nVidia stepped out of the chipset business. IGPs other than Intel's won't grace a Sandy Bridge system, ever. And I doubt Intel will change their position on it in the future. All that remains is to hope for Intel to realise they suck at graphics and just sub-contract the GPUs to nVidia for future Intel branded IGPs.
God bless developers ...
with a taste for MBAs
Seriously, you guys seems to be the only hope, the only niche atm, that might warrant enough demand for 8GB RAM BTO MBA
Yet there is other problem might lurk in there .... 8GB will wear out SSD twice as fast - as it dumps entire RAM to SSD dozens times a day when you close/sleep your MBA ....
I doubt Apple will disable it from factory (I do
P.S. I have a feeling I heard somewhere that it actually dumps RAM after an hours of sleep or something like that .... to protect excessive SSD wear ?
Let the manufacturers worry about SSD lifetime. I bought Intel for that reason: you know that they won't put out a crap product and even if they do screw up, they will fix it. Recall in the worst case. Peace of mind. Data safety is a non issue as you must do regular backups anyway - I have lost quite a few hdds...
Realistically I am hoping for a MBP without DVD drive and redesigned. It should get slimmer but probably not as small as the MBA. I don't need the CPU horsepower that much but I do need 8GB and a 15" high res screen.
Here's a server grade 1.2 TB SSD using MLC NAND...
Extreme high end server SSDs (such as those used for caches in million dollar Fibre Channel storage arrays) do tend to be SLC, though.
The system would be "totally useful" whether or not caches are preserved.
A simple test would answer this question. Time how long it takes to read a large file a couple of times. (The first read would be fairly slow as the file is read into cache, subsequent reads would be very fast as it is read from cache.)
time grep MyMotherTheCar 100MB.file
time grep MyMotherTheCar 100MB.file
time grep MyMotherTheCar 100MB.file
time grep MyMotherTheCar 100MB.file
time grep MyMotherTheCar 100MB.file
Hibernate and resume, and repeat the timings. If the first one after the resume is slow, caches were not preserved.
Apples got deep pockets, wouldn't it be awesome, if they could get Intel and NVIDIA to play nice ,just for them? Then they could bring out some stunningly super for just the MBA, Come on HH, Scottsdale weigh in!
, Come on HH, Scottsdale weigh in!
Apples got deep pockets, wouldn't it be awesome, if they could get Intel and NVIDIA to play nice ,just for them? Then they could bring out some stunningly super for just the MBA
Forget it. They didn't do it for the MBP 13", why would they for the MBA ? The next MBA, if it does get SB is getting the Intel IGP. We're going to cry and moan over it for a while and then move on.
Apple's flirt with nVidia IGPs is over. We're back to Intel IGPs.
Apples got deep pockets, wouldn't it be awesome, if they could get Intel and NVIDIA to play nice ,just for them? Then they could bring out some stunningly super for just the MBA
Sure it would be awesome but I think we should just forget NVIDIA IGP for now. I'm sure Apple was aware of the lawsuit and did what they were able to do. The court has handled the case and we all know the unpleasant result.
If Apple got special access, it might anger the other OEMs. In the end, Apple is just one OEM and a quite small one. MBA is also just one product. If Apple sells e.g. 5 million of them each year, is it really worth it to pay billions (the lawsuit was about billions) just to get one chip for one product? Sounds pretty expensive.
The lawsuit wasn't only about the NVIDIA IGP either. NVIDIA lost their monopoly of SLI when they had to start licensing it for Intel chipsets too.