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Intel's Upcoming Ultra-Fast Optane SSD May Come to MacBooks
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Except in mobile. 10 years ago, 100 to 200 MHz was the fastest clock speed you could get on a smartphone CPU.
Next frontier, clock speed in a wearable or cornea implant. Lots of headroom.
Apple is not a leader anymore. I'm sure this tech will be first available from competitors and when Apple finally offers it too, it will be just some extremely overpriced option.
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Except for you know, built in WIFI (most PCs still don't support 5 Ghz) battery life, SSD bandwidth, bandwidth to external ports, displays (go find a PC with a 5k display), trackpads, synchronisation between devices in their ecosystem, after sales support, extended warranty repair for busted GPUs, etc.
Dell, HP, etc. all used the same defective GPUs as Apple in their 15" machines, yet Apple are the only vendor to do replacement 5 years out, without the user even buying 3 year warranty via applecare...
But except for all that, what has apple done lately?
I have a Mac Mini (mid 2011) I replaced the internal HDD with a 256GB SSD, added an additional one in the empty bay, racked the ram to 16GB and I have a 5TB NAS drive that is networked to all the computers and tv's and tivos in the house. I also have an addition 5TB drives via USB for local backups and such. Each person has an account on my Mac and I have not problems whatsoever with it running out of space.
Well considering in most major cities you can't go more than 20 mph on the highways anyway, a 1995 Honda Civic is fine.
It's NOT typical anymore.
It hasn't been for years now.
Mac is now the half-assed platform, money is in the iOS devices and even there one could argue they don't run on full steam considering their base model capacity. (at least most of the hardware within the devices is mostly top-notch)
Glassed Silver:mac
He's not being a troll, he speaks the truth.... Just because you don't agree doesn't make him a troll.
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Get a NUC with SSD... Just after POST - 3 seconds to boot-up, almost to your dream.
Built in 5 GHz WiFi is very important for desktop computers, you know.
Finding a PC with a 5k display? 99.9% of PCs are sold without integrated displays, because it doesn't make any sense to include the PC into the display.
You mean Thunderbolt 3? Or USB Type C with 10 GB/s? Can't find any Mac with that stuff, sorry.
How many PCs on sale have any form of thunderbolt at all?
How many PCs on sale have any form of PCIe SSD? Of those, how many are under $1200?
Haha, reminded me of an old quote: "It used to be wooden ships and iron men. Now it's iron ships and wooden men."
Come on, why do you expect Apple to behave different from, for example, your car dealer. If you buy the cheapest version of any car, you might find out that the steering wheel is just not on the option list yet. Note, the option lists are longer if the brand get more expensive.
I am not saying that I like this and I agree that nobody would buy a 1500 dollar iMac with a 5400rpm disk (as this would be like a Ferrari with a two cylinder / one liter engine). But this is just how marketing works.
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I don't think they had 'colors' in the seventies, unless you count they eye-hurting amber and green displays as 'color'
:in 1981 IBM introduced the Color Graphics Adapter, which could display four colors with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, or it could produce 640 x 200 pixels with two colors.
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Yes, well, workarounds are exactly that, no? You can't do that RAM stuff anymore with the mini either, you have to buy it maxed out if I'm not mistaken.
I am aware of the options out there, but I cannot stand the hypocritical Apple position of neat and tidy machines mired by a gazillion dongles, cable runs, docks and other BS when stuff was provided internally (I'm looking at you Mac Pro).
That and the fact that speed is an issue, especially when dealing with large files and databases. Internal > external every time (until TB3/USB-C at least).
In addition, the cost grows exponentially when you have to purchase all these cables, enclosures, their power-hungry supplies, plus the time it takes to get it all working.
One of the things that brought me to Apple in the first place was the ability to unbox and go, for the most part. I might as well go the Linux or (gasp) Windows route if I have to do all this work (yes, I exaggerate).
So, I am and will remain in 2011/2012 until the transition to high-speed, inexpensive external connectivity occurs or my current systems die.
And I can still dream, can't I? It's frustrating that Apple keeps getting close to what I want, and then they switch it up on me and take away features I loved. Grrr.
PD. Please someone, ANYONE, figure out a way to get a modern table lamp iMac like the G4s of old, with a 23 or 27 in screen. I'd OVERPAY for that.
Just imagine if Apple decided to do a classic lineup of some of their older hardware (with new internals). I wish someone would come up with a kit. But I digress...
1. You can get 512GB only on the most expensive 21inch model.
2. Apple asks $500 for it. Meanwhile, on Amazon a 1TB Samsung SSD is under $300 and a 960GB SanDisk is $225.
I imagine, that as soon as operating systems change in nature to use a drive like this, that there may be no dividing line at all between an application and the ram it uses. the ram could be embedded in the middle of an application, right where it's needed. there are some risks of the application writing over itself (like you can accidentally do within ram with basically every language but java) so developers would need to be careful that they didn't do that.
another possibility is that these applications could end up depending on the operating system for safe memory management, being given a dynamically sized add-on at the end of the application. if a 24 MB application knows it will use a maximum of 1000 MB of ram, it could ask to be installed as a 1GB application.
that would fill up the drive rather quickly, so when that part of the disk is actually empty, it could be used for other things... and it would be possible to install applications with total ram that exceeds the real size of the drive, just as long as not too many are left in hibernation, with that ram block full. probably we would want essential things like operating system processes and services to always reserve their ram, so that we can't actually crush the life out of them by filling the drive with other things.
people would be able to cause pretty catastrophic failures of their computer by shutting it off, switching out their graphics card or whatever, and turning it back on. modern volatile ram is an excellent safety feature; it prevents us from doing such things without the computer being able to adapt when it starts up again. even if all of the ram is stored on disk, it might need to be wiped whenever you restart. that would certainly save the drive from filling up with ram and getting slow.
If I'm not mistaken, a computer slows down when you use too much ram because the ram is actually being compressed. perhaps, in a full-sized SSD, we'll have plenty of room to embed technology for compressing and decompressing things discreetly. you'll just get a message that your drive is at 120% capacity and you should close some crap to decompress the ram you're really using now.
Come on, why do you expect Apple to behave different from, for example, your car dealer. If you buy the cheapest version of any car, you might find out that the steering wheel is just not on the option list yet. Note, the option lists are longer if the brand get more expensive.
I am not saying that I like this and I agree that nobody would buy a 1500 dollar iMac with a 5400rpm disk (as this would be like a Ferrari with a two cylinder / one liter engine). But this is just how marketing works.
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I don't think they had 'colors' in the seventies, unless you count they eye-hurting amber and green displays as 'color'
in 1981 IBM introduced the Color Graphics Adapter, which could display four colors with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, or it could produce 640 x 200 pixels with two colors.
The Atari 400 came out in 1979 with the following specs, which could display 256 colors at once when programmed in ASM.
Processor: Atari 6502C
Processor Speed: 1.79MHz
RAM: 16K ROM: 24K
Screen Resolution: 320x192
Controller Ports: 4
So true, I long ago upgraded my 2012 MBP to 1TB and 16GB, and want to upgrade, but.... I can no longer upgrade RAM past 16GB with the new MBPs, what are they thinking!!! This is the MacBook *PRO*, for pro's. I sometimes need a win VMWare running MS Visual Studio plus various databases, and that currently requires 16GB, but in 2 or 3 years, it will require 32GB. Come on Apple, get it together! I am sticking with my 2012 MBP for now, twiddling my thumbs waiting for my upgrade door to re-open.
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The original comment should have said "Apple is typically first to adopt Intels new stuff when it makes a real world difference in most use cases". For most people, they won't notice the difference between DDR3 or DDR4, nor between 4-core or 16-core, but almost everyone will notice the difference between IDE and SSD, simply because the HD speed is the bottleneck in most applications.
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Because it still needs to be physically close to the CPU. That's why there are multiple levels of cache memory and registers. These layers, including the main RAM, will continue to need to exist. However, if you exceed your RAM usage, instead of your pc crawling to an almost halt as it uses the HD for virtual RAM, it will still fly along reasonably fast.
How is classical RAM that much closer to the CPU than non-volatile memory? Even if we talk about few centimetres additional connector distance, the latency increase is within picosecond range — its negligible compared to RAM access latency. There is nothing preventing one moving the SSD storage closer to the CPU in that fashion or another. If the SSD becomes a magnitude faster than the DDR RAM, having the later in the system just introduces an additional bottleneck. What purpose does it serve using slow memory as a cache for fast memory?
Besides, the issue is merely terminological. A non-volatile memory with very low latency and high bandwidth becomes RAM (random access memory) for all intents and purposes. There is nothing that forbids RAM to be non-volatile. The main question is simply whether this new SSD technology offers O(1) read and write access to arbitrary memory areas and how low is the random access latency.
Another fun fact: DDR RAM is technically an 'SSD' — it is build with solid state circuits and does not use moveable parts
How is classical RAM that much closer to the CPU than non-volatile memory? Even if we talk about few centimetres additional connector distance, the latency increase is within picosecond range — its negligible compared to RAM access latency. There is nothing preventing one moving the SSD storage closer to the CPU in that fashion or another. If the SSD becomes a magnitude faster than the DDR RAM, having the later in the system just introduces an additional bottleneck. What purpose does it serve using slow memory as a cache for fast memory?
Besides, the issue is merely terminological. A non-volatile memory with very low latency and high bandwidth becomes RAM (random access memory) for all intents and purposes. There is nothing that forbids RAM to be non-volatile. The main question is simply whether this new SSD technology offers O(1) read and write access to arbitrary memory areas and how low is the random access latency.
Another fun fact: DDR RAM is technically an 'SSD' — it is build with solid state circuits and does not use moveable parts
You're quite right, I stand corrected! It's been too long since I've studied computer architecture in my undergrad engineering days! This could indeed render the traditional RAM to the dustbin, interesting times, and one less thing to have to regularly upgrade.
