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New port is fiber channel

Why RAID on a desktop?

>Why would you want to have a RAID system hooked up to a desktop <

I can think of several things that will impact this:
1. It will get cheaper as time goes on.
2. "640K should be enough for everyone" - even if the quotation isn't true, 15 years (shoot, 5 years ago) ago people figured 31-bits of address space "would be enough for everyone", who would need it at home? 2GB of RAM is enough. Now we are at the point where it is NOT enough with iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, Panther etc.

I think the point is that in the future, you will see mass storage come down even cheaper than now (obvious) where it will add perhaps $50 to the cost of the computer to have a RAID system inside.

Eventually you see the server technologies (like DDR) migrate into the personal machines. For example:
1. Hard drives (remember when it was a tape drive, then a floppy on the Apple ][), then 400K floppies, the 800K floppies (wow lots of space) etc. Then the HD and NO floppy, just CDs. Now DVDs
2. Ditto for separate VRAM and graphics processors.
3. Ethernet on every machine (before that Appletalk)

Apple is generally the leader (dropping the floppy for just a CD), adding a mouse and windows, Firewire, SCSI, built in ethernet, Appletalk etc) in applying technology for the personal computer. Apple needs this type of thing: more memory address (hence the 970), eventually RAID (for reliability and speed), DDR (hence the 970).

Whether it is truly here now is another question, but RAID will be an option for the desktop and eventually not be an option, just be there.

And 20 years from now we'll be saying "who thought 63-bit addressing would be enough for everything? We need a 128 bit processor to handle more memory."
 
Although I'd like a lot of the recent rumors to be true I can't help but think a lot are just wishfull thinking by Mac fans with no grasp of economics.

Fibre channel's a case in point. Lets face it, how many people are connected to a Gigabit network let alone need fibre channel? I don't know anyone, at work it's all 100mbs and at home I've got a 10mbs hub - which is fine and can several computers over the internet at once - via a router (two PC's at once still get pings of 25-35 on Counterstrike).

Fibre channel, although cool, would be a waste of resources for 99% of people, so why not leave it out and let the minority that need it buy afterwards - there's no point paying for something most of us will never need.

I don't think this rumor is true and it's just building certain people (fanatics and fantasists) up for a fall.
 
What we have here is the xserve mothboard

the xserve has as of now 2 fw800 and one fw400
just like they claim that this 970 has

also the xserve has B-9 (RS-232
this is probably an other un known port.

also it would be smart of apple to build in fibre into these. because that will free up a pci slot, speed up the raid, and make the xserve a better buy.

The fibre pci cards you can get for the xserve are dual port/channel.... so that would be one of the 2/3 unknown port bundles.
 
shocked.. but they did it before.

I would SERIOUSLY doubt Apple is putting FC on the motherboards....
... but, Apple put 1000Bt on the boards back when Gbit PC NICs were about $600 a pop. I couldn't believe that either (after it happened!!!). BTW, who uses 1000Bt Ethernet now? ... a couple years after Apple put it in the machines? Prices are just starting to become reasonable for the 1000Bt switches but they are still way expen$ive, and you better have quality TP cable, and a nice RF free enviorn.

Personally, here's my take on all these rumors (if anyone cares ;-) )

1. MacBid is pulling a lot of this out of their butts... or someone they are talking to is pulling this out of their kiesters.

2. MacBid is probably fairly accurate regardless. The first thing I thought when Apple delayed WWDC was "The 970". I, however, wouldn't be surprised if IBM debuted the chip faster than 1.4-1.8 though. I've heard their yeilds are good, and IBM Germany did pre-announce a 2.5 GHz Blade. Why would they do that if 2.5 was way down the road... like 2004?

3. Apple is just wacky enough to put FC on the motherboard, BUT if they do expect this to be a 64bit Unix workstation. Don't expect this to be marketed to the pro-sumer. :-( That's bad IMHO. I like the iMac, but I want a tower for my 20" monitor... not an all in one.

.... but what do I know, I'm just a stupid Ffakr.
 
"Uh folks, this is all from the site that claimed to have benchmarks of the 970 using a soon to be released new version of Bryce that is far into development. Guess what? Corel just announced that Bryce version 5 is it as far as the mac goes. Everything on the MB site is just totally and completely bogus, and specifically, news about Bryce is the final nail in the coffin in regards to their earlier claimed benchmarks"

I could not c the refrance of Bryce 6 on MB:

http://www.macbidouille.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2003-05-05#5440

but did find it on barefeats who apprently had bench as well

http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html


:confused:
 
Originally posted by MikeH
Lets face it, how many people are connected to a Gigabit network let alone need fibre channel? I don't know anyone, at work it's all 100mbs and at home I've got a 10mbs hub - which is fine and can several computers over the internet at once - via a router (two PC's at once still get pings of 25-35 on Counterstrike).

Fibre channel, although cool, would be a waste of resources for 99% of people, so why not leave it out and let the minority that need it buy afterwards - there's no point paying for something most of us will never need.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. If this logic board is for real we're obviously not talking about an iMac. When talking about moving a lot of data we're not talking latency.

A pro computer would benefit from having FiberChannel and Gigabit Ethernet. All of our pro Macs that have gigabit Ethernet built in and several that don't are attached to gigabit switch(s). FibreChannel attaches our arrays to the servers, servers are attached to gigabit switch(s).

In may industries moving data fast is necessary to stay competitive. It would be nice to attach all our workstations to the arrays as SAN via FibreChannel. Maybe Apple has more in store for the xRAID. Maybe Apple plans to make SAN cheap and easy ... xSAN?

Whose to say that FibreChannel (copper version) needs to cost all that much. How much do you think people paid for that first built in Gigabit Ethernet port?
 
"
I think the point is that in the future, you will see mass storage come down even cheaper than now (obvious) where it will add perhaps $50 to the cost of the computer to have a RAID system inside
Click to expand...

Raid storage is already in this range if your running Linux, are willing to use software RAID, and aare satisfied by the capacity of older drives in the 20 to 50 GB range. In fact I ran RAID on my Linux system for awhile. Up until I could make better use of the drive configured as real disk space.

Whether it is truly here now is another question, but RAID will be an option for the desktop and eventually not be an option, just be there.
Click to expand...

I completely agree! As with the mouse, it is difficult to buy any PC without some sort of pointing device. A machine with built in Raid technology will have a marketing advantage.

And 20 years from now we'll be saying "who thought 63-bit addressing would be enough for everything? We need a 128 bit processor to handle more memory.
Click to expand...

Well this I may differ on a bit. I think the wave of the future is loosely coupled multiprocessor systems. Its amayzing what SETI and some of the others have accomplished in the crud manner that they have started out.

Thanks
dave
 
Perhaps Fibre channel on a Power Mac is possible.
But the real doubt in my mind is that there appears to be no ethernet port ! I can't believe a PowerMac or any other computer would come without an ethernet port. :(
 
One thing nobody has mentioned is the possibility of these being optical firewire ports. IIRC the 1394b spec allows for up to 3.2gigabits/sec over a few hundred meters of glass fiber, or short runs of copper. This is pure, unadulterated speculation of course. Has anyone even sampled optical firewire controllers?
 
Originally posted by bahram
"Uh folks, this is all from the site that claimed to have benchmarks of the 970 using a soon to be released new version of Bryce that is far into development. Guess what? Corel just announced that Bryce version 5 is it as far as the mac goes. Everything on the MB site is just totally and completely bogus, and specifically, news about Bryce is the final nail in the coffin in regards to their earlier claimed benchmarks"
Click to expand...

From MacCentral "Corel is discontinuing the development of Bryce for the Mac"

When did they discontinue development for the Mac? How far into develpment of Bryce 6 were they?
 
depending on the cost of the machines in total...

another possibility is a high-end PowerMac (970, FibreChannel), while keeping the G4's available at current pricings.

arn
 
Is this 'fibre' channel spelling a European thing from the translation or the purposed Apple spelling? It's just confusing me when I look at it. I keep reading 'fee-bray'.

Also, it seems like a race to stack up as much 970 info as we can before anything is actually released. Macdoobie is either sleeping with Stevie's European mistress or has the crack pipe working overtime with the shear number of rumors lately.
 
Originally posted by arn
another possibility is a high-end PowerMac (970, FibreChannel), while keeping the G4's available at current pricings.
Click to expand...

Well, I hope that doesn't happen. The 970 and the fast bus are needed immediately at all tower price points, to be even close to competitive with PC's in price/perf. The existing machines cannot compete at all, especially if they stay the same price (there's no sales now, and there won't be any later either).
 
don't get discouraged

With all these rumors coming from MB I would tend to think they might not be true - esp the 970 not to mention fibre channel.

It might make sense if these are new, high end, xserve motherboards. Apple is trying to make in roads to the high end server market and perhaps they have had some requests for this. I can't imagine they would put it in tower models, and I think we can safely say we will not see these in Imacs. If they do go in powermacs I hope they don't jack the price up too much, not something I would need or want - unless it was a desktop server maybe!

If I can offer any sort of hope that the MB rumors about the 970 are true let me offer a little rumor I have heard. A collegue of mine just got back from an Apple training (at Apple). During one session a guest speaker told the class (it was a small class) to buy Apple stock becuase some BIG changes are coming at WWDC. For what it is worth, I have no reason to doubt my collegue and while no mention was made of the 970 the guest made it sound like this would be more than just something like "you will be soo impressed with Panther" type of hint.
 
Originally posted by Kid Red
Is this 'fibre' channel spelling a European thing from the translation or the purposed Apple spelling? It's just confusing me when I look at it. I keep reading 'fee-bray'.

Also, it seems like a race to stack up as much 970 info as we can before anything is actually released. Macdoobie is either sleeping with Stevie's European mistress or has the crack pipe working overtime with the shear number of rumors lately.
Click to expand...

well put. funniest thing I've read in a while.

I agree with the person who said these are x-serve mother boards. We all just assumed powermac... but that was us jumping to the conclusion that we wanted, and was not based in any fact.
 
Actually

There is the possibility that this is both a PowerMac & Xserve motherboard.

Little has been given on the chipset. What if Apple has built FibreChannel into the southbridge to reduce costs of design? Remember the XServe & PowerMac now use the same chipset which was originally designed for XServe.

I could see Apple integrating FibreChannel and a second gigabit ethernet port into the chipset. And the motherboards are so close in design, if they wanted to, they may be able to design a universal board with maybe a daugher board for the expansion cards so towers can contain more slots. I dont know, thats just speculation.....however reducing overhead by relying on a single pro motherboard would be a good decision.
 
clustering?

There were some rumors about system-level clustering a while back. Is gigabit ethernet good enough for that? If not, would fiber channel do it? This is something any power/creative user could take advantage of. Buy four macs and cluster. Anyone have any comment on this?
 
Originally posted by mcl
...short-haul, high-speed optical alternative to SCSI (and notorious for driver problems on pretty much every platform on which it's been deployed. Sun's one of the the longest-running platforms using FC-AL, and their drivers STILL spontaneously LIP, and don't interop well with non-Sun GBICs.)
Click to expand...
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. You obviously don't know jack sh*t about fibre channel. All of the major Unix players use fibre channel for high capacity storage, and I assure you it works quite well. This includes Sun, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, SGI, and anyone else worth a damn.

By the way, fibre channel now supports 2gb a second transfer rate, and if by "short-haul" you mean several hundred meters then I guess that would be short.

Get with the program. Fibre channel is superior to all flavors of SCSI, except perhaps SCSI-320, in speed, and the ability to have up to 127 devices on a single fibre channel loop is a plus.
 
Sound very logical!

i want to add a few remarks about this fibre channel stuff from MacBidouille...

Being a Profesionnal Video Editor, this FC rumors just add the lacked piece to the pict picture actually at Apple...

First, they started with Final Cut Pro then bought Shake and DVD Studio Pro. FCP and Shake can deal with HD pictures but need a big and FAST storage... SCSI can hardly make it. Even if you want to work with SD (regular PAL or NTSC) and multiple real-time uncompressed streams, yo uwill need a FC stream as well...

Now, all the high-end editing stations are FB-Raid based (like Symphony from Avid).

Apple is very into getting back the video market. They introduced FCP 4 and Shake 3 during NAB '03 but lack a fast computer to use them (the dual 1.4 are ok but still lag in speed in front of PC solutions). Moreover, all the raid options on MacOS X (ATTO and stuffs) are NOT releable under MacOS X... Just see all the problems we have at work with those, ATTO claiming it's Apple's fault...

So what do they need to offer to make the video ppl happy? a fast computer with a fast and storage that work well with MacOS X.

Now the rumors parts: the PPC 970 should make look the Dual 1.4 like a calculator and now the motherboard should have a FB connector in it... See the link? ;)

Of course, it's my personal opinion and i have no insider infos (except was once beta tester for FCP 2 and 3 ) But it seems very logical for me afterall :D
 
Just wondering, but if Apple wanted to include onboard RAID, wouldn't it be cheaper to put whatever ATA(insert your favorite ATA speed here) RAID hardware onto the logic board rather than require someone to chuck out $500 to get a special fibrechannel raid card?

I don't see a personal need for this, but I can see why my sis (who wants to go into professional video editing/directing) would need such.

I would much rather see this as a built-to-order option rather than having it rammed down my throat (not to mention my pocketbook).
 
Like I said before. The Fibre it true. The digital is true. Let there be no more wondering. What is the next subject?
 
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