Some potential good news, always nice to read Mac rumors. Once I'm done with university I'll definitely buy a Mac with an SSD.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Intel's Upcoming Ultra-Fast Optane SSD May Come to MacBooks
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
And laptops with DDR3LE would refute THAT statement. Speed is not the only stat.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean, or what point you're trying to make. I've re-read your comment multiple times and it just isn't making sense.
As well as fast and affordable external storage. Thunderbolt 3 is around the corner but already now there are hardly any affordable large storage solutions that even use Thunderbolt 2 speeds. Currently you have to buy either HDD RAID systems of absurdly expensive SSD drives. Most drives currently being sold as USB 3 HDD drives barely use half of the possible speed. At the moment I don't really need more than the current SSD speed but want to be able to use and move terabytes around without spending hours. Well, maybe this new technology will bring current SSD prices further down and then we can finally send spinning HDDs to the graveyard.
Good point. If something takes 10 s and new technology makes it 1000x faster, that may very well be a big improvement.
But if something already takes 0.01 seconds and new technology makes it 1000x faster, will it make a huge difference?
Cumulatively, perhaps. But I agree that more affordable space on SSDs is the pressing issue at the moment.
Major improvement from the Hand crank spinny drive on the Mac Mini, though its Mono speaker is more than ample.
Today's generation is just spoiled. I remember Dos and Mainframes. Aren't computers these days fast enough? I get suckered into an upgrade every few years for this mythical "speed" increase. At this point, the only acceptable speed is if the computer reads my mind and just does the work for me in 5 seconds.
You just reminded me of The Jetsons:
"How was the supermarket?"
"Terrible, I had to wait in line for seven seconds!"
You know what I would like to see apple do? Offer more storage for less money in their systems.
They seem to be going down this route of offering the same amount of storage which is getting faster and faster.
When it comes to storage, ssd drives are fast enough, but what I want is more storage. Not faster storage.... MORE!
/rant
If they offer both then that would be lovely, though more likely we're up for a big price hike for a completely new design which looks lovely but is faster... and has less storage.
They seem to be going down this route of offering the same amount of storage which is getting faster and faster.
When it comes to storage, ssd drives are fast enough, but what I want is more storage. Not faster storage.... MORE!
/rant
If they offer both then that would be lovely, though more likely we're up for a big price hike for a completely new design which looks lovely but is faster... and has less storage.
It sounds like this has a couple of other advantages over flash: First, much longer life (which is a worry with flash - although current drives are supposedly good enough to rival the lifespan of HD under 'consumer' loads). Second, you can read/write individual bits, c.f. flash which has to re-write the whole block of data to a spare block, then delete the individual. So, no more faffing about with TRIM, garbage collection and leaving 10% of the capacity unused to stop the drive grinding to a halt as it runs out of free blocks.
Or, it could be as much a replacement for RAM as for conventional drives - there are people who, currently, actually need 32GB or more of RAM for their graphics work etc. because as soon as the computer starts swapping to disk, you're wading through treacle. If swap space suddenly got 1000x faster, then you don't need so much RAM and your soldered-in, non-expandable 8GB RAM suddenly ceases to be an issue.
Also - if the Optane price-per-magabyte is prohibitively high for TB-class drives, how about something like a 'Fusion drive' but, instead of a 128GB flash SSD acting as a non-volatile cache 2TB spinning disc, you have a 128GB Optane drive acting as a non-volatile cache for a 2TB flash drive using cheaper, slower MLC flash?
That said, the logic behind the article seems to be "Optane will use the NVMe interface. Apple use the NVMe interface. Therefore Apple are going to use Optane". Not strong and, yeah, I'd like to see more affordable 1TB+ flash drives in MacBooks first.
iMacs and MacPros not so much - I think that on a desktop the advent of Thunderbolt, USB 3.1 etc. means it makes sense to have a box with a small, very fast SSD just big enough for the OS, applications, swap and cache files and to keep you data on external drives - which you'll need anyway if your working with bulky data like video. Optane could be ideal for that. On a laptop, though, you don't want to carry lots of external boxes.
Yeah, mine running on an external ssd- I couldn't stand the 3 minute boot up and the spinning wheels when using the ssdDon't forget about the Mac minis!
Clock speed is not a performance metric when you're talking completely different architectures.And it's been ten years since any meaningful CPU clock speed improvement...
"Spoiled"
Yeah guys let's just stop advancing technology, 5 seconds is good enough for me! While we're at it let's just all drive 1995 Honda Civics, it gets to the grocery store all the same. While we're at it let's just stop doing drug research, Advil is all I need!
There are quite a lot of people out there who think the same way you do, and boy am I glad that these people are the minority; otherwise we'd all be stuck with 19th century tech going "eh, good enough"
Found a subreddit for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/lewronggeneration
You mean you actively sit at home/work, look at your 4.0 GHz i7 iMac and think "what a pile of garbage this is, if ONLY it had a 20 GHz CPU..."?
I predict combo drives with xpoint partitions on ssd drives. It might actually be a super way to get insane speeds without much extra cost. i think layered SSD type drives pretty much have been coming since the start but it's great this extra breakthrough has come. With the extra speeds we are seeing is there any other benefits to gpu cpu ram or motherboard that could happen speed up software? not sure on the ins and outs but would these speeds not help remove the need for ram?
Are they?
[doublepost=1457848300][/doublepost]
Clearly "typically" doesn't jive in your vocabulary.
[doublepost=1457848344][/doublepost]
It's a timing thing. I didn't say always.
We'll need to see what the real world numbers are, but if the speed really can be competitive with RAM, and the density competitive with SSDs, then it really will be game changing, and I hope it becomes the standard across all electronics. No more distinction between memory and storage...
The thing is, the new x-point storage is fast enough that it will work almost like RAM, but far larger.
So potentially you don't need as much RAM, and the RAM you do have acts as a cache for the X-point in the same way CPU cache acts as cache for your RAM.
I think it's going to be very interesting - RAM capacities might not go up quite as fast if x-point takes off, and last i read about it about 12 months ago, they were talking about it being not much more expensive than SSD.
Having 256 or 512 GB of X-point will be a game changer, even if your RAM stays the same.
[doublepost=1457854120][/doublepost]
On the contrary, see above... this isn't intended to just be "Storage" like an SSD is... think retina macbook (or pro) with the effective equivalent of 512GB or 1 TB of RAM...