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Why is it taking so long for 3rd party nMP Flash?

phrehdd said:
Actually it is relevant and if you read what I wrote you will not that Apple's decision to only go with ATI reduces its market and makes it even more a niche product. This is not an attack on nMP that exploits Open CL, but rather raises the notion that if the nMP offered an NVidia option it might have been met with a less controversial response for those that were waiting for a newer Mac Pro.

The reality is that there are lots of software options that exploit GL and not CL. Apple has limited this new system to software that exploits CL. I speak of the nMP in a Prosumer and Professional system machine capacity.

I'll say again - those that get good mileage out of their nMP are lucky and I am glad for them. For the rest, they have to look elsewhere which is a shame.
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I think the fact that Nvidia is not in the nMP probably has more to do with Nvidia than with Apple. I don't think Apple has anything against using Nvidia GPUs... they have used them extensively throughout their full line of products in the past (they were the default config in the 2009 Mac Pro) and used on many laptops, iMacs, the Mini, etc. Was it their lack of support for OpenCL or rather their conviction to CUDA? Their unwillingness to build custom cards? Or their unwillingness to offer better pricing than AMD? Or something else? It takes two to tango on this. 🙂
 
VirtualRain said:
I think the fact that Nvidia is not in the nMP probably has more to do with Nvidia than with Apple. I don't think Apple has anything against using Nvidia GPUs... they have used them extensively throughout their full line of products in the past (they were the default config in the 2009 Mac Pro) and used on many laptops, iMacs, the Mini, etc. Was it their lack of support for OpenCL or rather their conviction to CUDA? Their unwillingness to build custom cards? Or their unwillingness to offer better pricing than AMD? Or something else? It takes two to tango on this. 🙂
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I think what you say has great merit. It does take two to tango but who takes the lead? Apple may be keeping its profit margin as first priority. Suppose Nvidia did cost more to put into the Mac Pro then it would possibly make sense that Apple would charge more. My take is that ATI wants the hot spot with Apple given that CUDA and GL is a problem for ATI (as well as the parent company have some challenges due to Intel). Again, I can't help but agree with your statement.
 
It's unlikely that we will see a 3rd party solution until SandForce SF3700 ships sometime later this year. The Samsung drive is currently the only single-controller PCIe 2.0 x4 drive in the market (excluding enterprise drives) and that won't change until the SF3700 ships (Marvell has a x2 solution that is used in e.g. Plextor M6e).
 
Hellhammer said:
It's unlikely that we will see a 3rd party solution until SandForce SF3700 ships sometime later this year. The Samsung drive is currently the only single-controller PCIe 2.0 x4 drive in the market (excluding enterprise drives) and that won't change until the SF3700 ships (Marvell has a x2 solution that is used in e.g. Plextor M6e).
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Then what is Apple doing? What do they have access to presently that other companies don't?
 
Cubemmal said:
Then what is Apple doing? What do they have access to presently that other companies don't?
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Apple sources their drives straight from Samsung (and from Toshiba and SanDisk for some other Macs). SandForce drives are different in the sense that any company can license their controller, firmware and software stack and build an SSD, hence e.g. OWC could build a drive for the nMP with the SF3700 controller.
 
Hellhammer said:
Apple sources their drives straight from Samsung (and from Toshiba and SanDisk for some other Macs). SandForce drives are different in the sense that any company can license their controller, firmware and software stack and build an SSD, hence e.g. OWC could build a drive for the nMP with the SF3700 controller.
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Interesting. How would you expect the SF3700 to compare to the Apple stock Samsung?
 
Cubemmal said:
Interesting. How would you expect the SF3700 to compare to the Apple stock Samsung?
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I would expect it to be faster, although the big questions is how much. SandForce has made some fairly big claims about the SF3700 and its performance but so far those have all been design targets. The advantage SandForce has is that they use on-the-fly compression, which gives them a performance advantage when dealing with compressible data (i.e. pretty much everything that isn't pre-compressed like video, audio and photos). We'll likely know more about the SF3700 and its state next month after Computex.
 
Hellhammer said:
I would expect it to be faster, although the big questions is how much. SandForce has made some fairly big claims about the SF3700 and its performance but so far those have all been design targets. The advantage SandForce has is that they use on-the-fly compression, which gives them a performance advantage when dealing with compressible data (i.e. pretty much everything that isn't pre-compressed like video, audio and photos). We'll likely know more about the SF3700 and its state next month after Computex.
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Thanks, great update.

AndyUnderscoreR said:
it's hard to image any situation where you wouldn't be better off adding more SSD space externally rather than internally, which means throwing away at least 256Gb of SSD.
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Add another reason for upgrading the internal Flash, updated or different controllers that are faster.
 
Hellhammer said:
Apple sources their drives straight from Samsung (and from Toshiba and SanDisk for some other Macs). SandForce drives are different in the sense that any company can license their controller, firmware and software stack and build an SSD, hence e.g. OWC could build a drive for the nMP with the SF3700 controller.
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Or better, Transcend could. They have just come out with a line of Blade SSDs for MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and even the Mini. Better pricing and a better product than OWC.

http://www.transcend-info.com/apple/jetdrive/

Lou

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AndyUnderscoreR said:
it's hard to image any situation where you wouldn't be better off adding more SSD space externally rather than internally, which means throwing away at least 256Gb of SSD.
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The Solutions from both Transcend and OWC (for the blade SSDs for the Macs I mentioned above) save the original blade drive in a clever external USB 3.0 enclosure. I'm using the Transcend solution right now in my MBA. A real quality product.

Lou
 
VirtualRain said:
I think this really demonstrates the incredible value of the nMP SSD... You get 80% of the performance of this enterprise drive for one-tenth the price.
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There much cheaper FusionIO cards.

I'm curious to see some performance benchmarks between the two. FusionIO is all about low latency while most people tend to quote the least important performance metric. (Sequential)

I'll do some tests this week if I have time. Have a few Iofx cards here and an Mac Can.
 
beaker7 said:
There much cheaper FusionIO cards.

I'm curious to see some performance benchmarks between the two. FusionIO is all about low latency while most people tend to quote the least important performance metric. (Sequential)

I'll do some tests this week if I have time. Have a few Iofx cards here and an Mac Can.
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It may be interesting, but I'm sure the enterprise cards are designed for high IOPs for database server duty vs the mixed workflow of a workstation.

My point was, that even if you compared the nMP SSD to the fastest SSD money could buy, you're getting great value and bang-for-your-buck with the Samsung SSD in the nMP. 😉
 
AndyUnderscoreR said:
Given that an internal SSD would have to connect to the Apple controller built into the motherboard, that's complete nonsense.
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I love it when people say things like "that's complete nonsense", thanks for that.

My understanding is that the controller is on the daughter card with the chips. Read that bit above by Hellhammer, who says he is the SSD editor for Anand.

OWC could build a drive for the nMP with the SF3700 controller
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I haven't seen any analysis yet for the nMP flash, but I believe these always consist of controller and actual flash. Indeed you'd want that design as there are different flash technologies.

Oh, here's another bit, I've heard reported that the 1TB flash is faster than the 256 due to more controllers in parallel. Apple certainly wouldn't put that on the motherboard, much more modular if you put it on the daughter card.
 
Cubemmal said:
I love it when people say things like "that's complete nonsense", thanks for that.

My understanding is that the controller is on the daughter card with the chips. Read that bit above by Hellhammer, who says he is the SSD editor for Anand.



I haven't seen any analysis yet for the nMP flash, but I believe these always consist of controller and actual flash. Indeed you'd want that design as there are different flash technologies.

Oh, here's another bit, I've heard reported that the 1TB flash is faster than the 256 due to more controllers in parallel. Apple certainly wouldn't put that on the motherboard, much more modular if you put it on the daughter card.
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You're absolutely right... the small daughter card that is the SSD contains both the Samsung controller (left) and NAND chips (right). This image is of the 256GB version. It's possible the 1TB version uses 8 chips and thus potentially has twice the NAND in parallel offering a performance boost.

yFKA62gfKhgwVbvT
 
Cubemmal said:
Oh, here's another bit, I've heard reported that the 1TB flash is faster than the 256 due to more controllers in parallel. Apple certainly wouldn't put that on the motherboard, much more modular if you put it on the daughter card.
Click to expand...

VirtualRain said:
You're absolutely right... the small daughter card that is the SSD contains both the Samsung controller (left) and NAND chips (right). This image is of the 256GB version. It's possible the 1TB version uses 8 chips and thus potentially has twice the NAND in parallel offering a performance boost.

yFKA62gfKhgwVbvT
Click to expand...

I thought that there was an artificial constraint that VR wouldn't discuss SSDs that used RAID-0 for bandwidth.... 😉

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beaker7 said:
fusionio is all about low latency while most people tend to quote the least important performance metric. (sequential).
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+1

Like they believe that one screen capture from a discredited utility with a cute GUI can capture the performance of a disk system.
 
AndyUnderscoreR said:
Given that an internal SSD would have to connect to the Apple controller built into the motherboard, that's complete nonsense.
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VirtualRain said:
You're absolutely right... the small daughter card that is the SSD contains both the Samsung controller (left) and NAND chips (right). This image is of the 256GB version. It's possible the 1TB version uses 8 chips and thus potentially has twice the NAND in parallel offering a performance boost.
Click to expand...

Thanks VR. I was cautious in making pronouncements, even though I was entirely sure that the controller resided on the Flash daughter card. This is a beautiful example of how not to embarrassingly shoot your mouth off on the internet.

The usual approach to get a performance boost with Flash is by paralleling up the controllers, thus making a hardware RAID system. I'm expecting then that OWC is waiting for the SF3700 to release, and will then come out with a 512 and 1TB daughter cards that are both faster and cheaper than the Apple version.

Here's an article that "Hellhammer" above did for Anand on this controller

LSI Announces Sandforce SF3700

LSI's targets are far from humble as it's shooting for 1.8GB/s for the PCIe 2.0 x4 version, which is only 200MB/s short of the theoretical 2GB/s limit. LSI is expecting to be able to hit these performance targets, but it's not quite there yet. Based on LSI's own tests, they've been able to achieve 1.45GB/s sequential read speed with early firmware
...
There is a ton of potential in SF3700. If LSI is able to get the performance to the expected level, the SF3700 will likely be the fastest consumer-orientated PCIe solution we've seen.
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Cubemmal said:
Thanks VR. I was cautious in making pronouncements, even though I was entirely sure that the controller resided on the Flash daughter card. This is a beautiful example of how not to embarrassingly shoot your mouth off on the internet.

The usual approach to get a performance boost with Flash is by paralleling up the controllers, thus making a hardware RAID system. I'm expecting then that OWC is waiting for the SF3700 to release, and will then come out with a 512 and 1TB daughter cards that are both faster and cheaper than the Apple version.

Here's an article that "Hellhammer" above did for Anand on this controller

LSI Announces Sandforce SF3700
Click to expand...

Sounds promising. Thanks for sharing.
 
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