Personal High performance computing on your desk is what we are talking about. Not server farms. And this will fit the need nicely.
The Mac line needs high performance machines.
The 15" MBP Retina is pretty sweet, but for pure, ultimate destructor performance for those who don't own server farms and don't want to rent processing time, this is where it's at.
Final Cut Pro X and its supporting apps get better all the time. some folks like myself do everything from web development, multimedia editing, book layout, and do many of these at once in a workflow.
The current machine is great. But a truly updated Mac Pro with the latest multicore CPUs, gobs of blazing fast RAM, and big SSDs to match the rest of the system would be a Godsend.
"Working together with architects from STEC, DataON Storage evaluated an all-flash storage solution that yielded an unprecedented 16GB/s sustained throughput featuring 48 2TB STEC s840 enterprise SAS SSDs within two DataON DNS-1640 external storage JBODs."
At $8,000 a piece, that's almost half a million dollars just on drives.
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
Who in the hell ever said the Mac Pro targets HPC computing? Get real. This is a pre-production workstation which off-loads large scale cluster work to a Rack server scenario but you sure as hell won't use an HPC solution with dumb terminals for your Solid Modeling, Animation, and any other Design Work modifications from, but when you need massively parallel nodes sure.
If you think the world is strictly for embedded/laptop and iMac desktop office drones or reams of Servers you're seeing a different world that exists in any Engineering Firm across the globe.
"Working together with architects from STEC, DataON Storage evaluated an all-flash storage solution that yielded an unprecedented 16GB/s sustained throughput featuring 48 2TB STEC s840 enterprise SAS SSDs within two DataON DNS-1640 external storage JBODs."
At $8,000 a piece, that's almost half a million dollars just on drives.
Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- Micron on Thursday unveiled its first terabyte-sized solid-state drive (SSD) for consumers, the Crucial M500, which will sell for under $600, or 60 cents per gigabyte.
The new SSD, almost doubles the capacity over its predecessor the 512GB C400 drive, and comes in several versions, including an ultrathin card. A 2.5-in. laptop drive version that can hold up to 960GB of data will sell for $599.
The Crucial M500 SSD uses the latest SATA 6Gbps drive interface and performs at up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The drive's sequential read and write speeds reach up to 500 MBps and 400 MBps, respectively.
By comparison, OCZ's first 1TB SSD, the Octane, delivers up to 560MBps read performance and up to 45,000 random IOPS, but at about $1.10-$1.30 per gigabyte, it retails for well over $1,000.
Samsung's latest high-performance SSD, the PM830, offers sequential read/write speeds of 500MBps and 350MBps, respectively; a 480GB model retails for around $800.
Intel's fastest consumer drive, the 520 Series SSD, can also deliver up to 80,000 4K-block random write IOPS and up to 50,000 4K random read IOPS.
And, it boasts sequential read/writes of up to 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively -- according to Intel's specification sheet.
While the performance may be similar to the new Micron SSD, the price isn't.
Intel's 520 Series SSD retails for $999 for a 480GB model, based on 1,000 unit orders. You can also find the Intel 520 SSD on sites such as Amazon.com for little more than $1 per gigabyte of capacity.
The 60-cent per gigabyte M500, introduced at International CES here today, is priced well below the average 80- to 90- cents-per-gigabyte price of most SSDs today.
"It is an aggressive introduction for a high-density SSD, where per GB pricing is still over $1/GB," said Ryan Chien, an analyst at IHS.
"The peak performance is impressive as is fitting 960GB of NAND in a 2.5-inch form factor. However, many enthusiasts and businesses have been burned by low-cost consumer drives with poor quality characteristics, and sustained success of products in this segment ultimately depends on latency, endurance, and sustained performance during mixed workloads," Chien added.
The M500 uses Micron's densest NAND flash chips, made with 20 nanometer node lithography. Micron claims the 128Gbit-sized chips are an industry first.
The new SSD also comes with power management capabilities.
The average active power use is 150mW, but a Device Sleep mode allows that to be cut by 93% to only 5mW, said Ben Thiel, Micron's senior product marketing manager. "By comparison, hard disk drives draw five to 10 times more power than this drive when its active," Thiel said. "With Device Sleep, we can still recover in less than 100 milliseconds, or about 65 milliseconds. All of this comes together with idea of giving ... a system builder the ability to claim extended battery life."
Form factors
Micron's new drive comes in three form factors: an M.2 SATA card that's not much larger than a stick of gum (22mm wide by 80mm long by 35mm high); an mSATA (mini-SATA) card (50.8mm long by 29.8mm wide by 3.75mm high); and a traditional 2.5-in laptop SSD.
The M.2 and mSATA drives are geared for use in tablets, ultrathin netbooks and thin clamshell-style notebooks, while the 2.5-in is designed to run in a typical notebook.
The M.2 and mSATA cards include 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacity versions. The 2.5-in. SSD adds to the latter a 960GB model.
Micron would not release pricing of anything but the 960GB, 2.5-in model.
The M500 SSD comes with native, hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption.
The drive is also compliant with the Opal 2.0 Storage Specification from the Trusted Computing Group. The Opal specification provides for a secure boot capability (pre-boot authentication).
The M500 is compliant with Microsoft Window eDrive, also known as Encrypted Hard Disk Drive. Microsoft eDrive can be used With Windows 8, RT and Windows Enterprise OSes automatically encrypt a drive by using TCG and IEEE 1667 transport standards.
Additionally, Micron's new SSD includes a power loss data prevention feature that uses internal capacitors to store data for up to one microsecond after a system shutdown.
"We don't use DRAM as a buffer on our SSDs; that's used for page table management," Thiel said. "But we've all had software hang on us when we've hit to power button, and that's when data in flight is not saved. This addresses that."
The 2.5-in. Crucial M500 SSD is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2013 through global channel partners. The M.2 and mSATA drives are expected in the second quarter of 2013.
The only reason why this would make sense is maintaining the Mac Pro pricing policy in a level high enough where desktop users cannot afford it and only a "niche" can buy it. Then call the Mac a niche market.
Last year Apple said the fusion drive was released because SSD was expensive. However, reality is that you can buy 512GB SSD drives at really affordable prices that any home user can afford. Maybe that's the reason why SSD starts at 768 GB on the iMac, in order to make SSD expensive and fool customers into the fusion drive, where Apple can get more margins.
I feel they just realized they cannot keep current prices of the 512GB SSDs for the Mac Pro, so they need to introduce bigger units in order to keep same prices, where margins are high.
Apple doesn't get what's the problem on the Mac line. Margins are a compromise that must be carefully driven. The Mac product line cannot be designed from a bare margins strategy, but from demand. It's fine if you've a box starting at $3000, but without considering it a competitor with the other Mac products, because it isn't (ie: don't tell customers that if they want a 2GB GPU or a SSD unit they've to pay $3000, because they won't, they'll move to Windows or Linux rather than paying $3000). You must offer such options on $2000 Macs, without fearing cannibalizing the Mac Pro. And yes, you need to release an iMac without display, without fearing cannibalizing the Mac Pro. You want Mac sells, not Mac Pro sells. And the only way of having Mac sells is to offer what desktop users want, with a price not higher than 30% of what they would pay for the same configuration on a PC.
Followup: Can I get a bare Apple-branded SSD for less than the cost of my house?
And does Apple branding on drives really mean that Apple made them? I have plenty of hard drives with the Apple logo on them; that doesn't mean Apple made them.
And for clarity's sake, this is the 'from Apple' configuration. Anyone can buy four 4TB drives and have 16TB in their Mac Pro right now.
People may have forgotten that Apple bought the flash memory company Anobit a year ago and are probably about to revolutionize the flash drive industry.
People may have forgotten that Apple bought the flash memory company Anobit a year ago.
If Apple has used that to spin some magic and get SSDs up in capacity and down in price by enough that a 2TB model is viable even in the Mac Pro as a BTO, that would be extraordinary.
Surely the whole point of Apple offering a 2TB SSD drive or array would be for bandwidth. I still have two XServe RAIDs in my facility and they cost way more than $8000 - which is probably what you would spend to put 4 of these alleged drives into a MacPro. Shoot, Apple is still selling Promise RAIDs starting at $15k for the non-Thunderbolt models.
So if they can sell the alleged 2TB SSD for around $2k I don' think they's have any problems selling them. If you are going to be cutting 4k video clips (which FCP X supports) you are going to need some bandwidth. An 8TB SSD internal RAID will do nicely.
Put an affordable 2TB SSD in a MacBook Pro and I'll be in heaven. In a Mac Pro I could always have redundant striped 10000RPM RAIDs in a 2x2 configuration for 8TB of fast, dependable storage.
Why the HELL do people think the retina MacBook Pro hasn't been selling? There simply isn't enough storage.
How about we forget about the Mac Pro and make it so that Mac minis can be shared via Thunderbolt for x-san to utilise the available hardware on the "chain".
"It should be noted that AppleInsider is unable to vouch for the veracity of the publication's statements and offers the following information for purposes of discussion only."
This should accompany all of Kaspers Slave posts. Especially analyst post.
Put an affordable 2TB SSD in a MacBook Pro and I'll be in heaven. In a Mac Pro I could always have redundant striped 10000RPM RAIDs in a 2x2 configuration for 8TB of fast, dependable storage.
Why the HELL do people think the retina MacBook Pro hasn't been selling? There simply isn't enough storage.
Why the hell do people think the Macbook Pro hasn't been selling? A 3.5" drive won't fit in an MBP, btw.
Maybe they think the CPUs won't be able to strut their stuff if disk bandwidth is a bottleneck. In a way the Mac Pro doesn't make sense without these drives.
Put an affordable 2TB SSD in a MacBook Pro and I'll be in heaven. In a Mac Pro I could always have redundant striped 10000RPM RAIDs in a 2x2 configuration for 8TB of fast, dependable storage.
Why the HELL do people think the retina MacBook Pro hasn't been selling? There simply isn't enough storage.
Why the hell do people think the Macbook Pro hasn't been selling? A 3.5" drive won't fit in an MBP, btw.
I didn't say it would. Nor did I imply that these mystery drives had anything to do with the MBP. I was simply sharing my opinion that a (future) 2TB drive in the RMBP would be nice.
As long as you keep data on HDD and put the OS + Apps on SSD I'm failing to see the point of a 2TB SSD. But times are changing, and if we 'enter the UHD / 4K video era' we might need larger storage solutions, not fater throughput. The 48 minute docu TimeScapes is 330GB, thus 117MB/s video so current 4TB HDD can only hold 12 of those 4K files.
Seems like a perfect fit for Apple's datacenters. SSD has much faster speed and low power consumption.
Apple doesn't use their own hardware for their datacenters. Heck, they don't use their own software; it's all supplied by Microsoft / Amazon / Oracle et cetera
As long as you keep data on HDD and put the OS + Apps on SSD I'm failing to see the point of a 2TB SSD. But times are changing, and if we 'enter the UHD / 4K video era' we might need larger storage solutions, not fater throughput. The 48 minute docu TimeScapes is 330GB, thus 117MB/s video so current 4TB HDD can only hold 12 of those 4K files.
Apple doesn't use their own hardware for their datacenters. Heck, they don't use their own software; it's all supplied by Microsoft / Amazon / Oracle et cetera
Indeed much faster, that's why I got the PCIe card for my MP. Follow JeffDM's link to OWC and read reviews.
But definitely getting cheaper, slashed by about $100 every 6-9 months
Outside of enterprise level SSD drives, the Read/Write caps are 550MB/sec performance. There is a reason you see nearly 400 models for SATA III on Newegg and 7 PCI Express models of SSD on Newegg.
The SATA III bandwidth is 6Gbits/sec. No SSD drive is ever saturating that bus.
This up-to 1GB/sec PCI Express Card from Intel that is a 400GB SSD Drive:
Comments
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
I suppose it doesn't change the outcome very much, but why did you choose to edit the 2006 model image instead of a modern one?
The Mac line needs high performance machines.
The 15" MBP Retina is pretty sweet, but for pure, ultimate destructor performance for those who don't own server farms and don't want to rent processing time, this is where it's at.
Final Cut Pro X and its supporting apps get better all the time. some folks like myself do everything from web development, multimedia editing, book layout, and do many of these at once in a workflow.
The current machine is great. But a truly updated Mac Pro with the latest multicore CPUs, gobs of blazing fast RAM, and big SSDs to match the rest of the system would be a Godsend.
Wow.
"Working together with architects from STEC, DataON Storage evaluated an all-flash storage solution that yielded an unprecedented 16GB/s sustained throughput featuring 48 2TB STEC s840 enterprise SAS SSDs within two DataON DNS-1640 external storage JBODs."
At $8,000 a piece, that's almost half a million dollars just on drives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
Who in the hell ever said the Mac Pro targets HPC computing? Get real. This is a pre-production workstation which off-loads large scale cluster work to a Rack server scenario but you sure as hell won't use an HPC solution with dumb terminals for your Solid Modeling, Animation, and any other Design Work modifications from, but when you need massively parallel nodes sure.
If you think the world is strictly for embedded/laptop and iMac desktop office drones or reams of Servers you're seeing a different world that exists in any Engineering Firm across the globe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Wow.
"Working together with architects from STEC, DataON Storage evaluated an all-flash storage solution that yielded an unprecedented 16GB/s sustained throughput featuring 48 2TB STEC s840 enterprise SAS SSDs within two DataON DNS-1640 external storage JBODs."
At $8,000 a piece, that's almost half a million dollars just on drives.
Try this one on for size:
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9235277/Micron_unveils_its_first_1TB_SSD_for_under_600
Quote:
Micron unveils its first 1TB SSD -- for under $600
At about 60 cents per gigabyte, the M500 is priced well below average SSD pricing
By Lucas Mearian
January 10, 2013 09:01 AM ET
Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- Micron on Thursday unveiled its first terabyte-sized solid-state drive (SSD) for consumers, the Crucial M500, which will sell for under $600, or 60 cents per gigabyte.
The new SSD, almost doubles the capacity over its predecessor the 512GB C400 drive, and comes in several versions, including an ultrathin card. A 2.5-in. laptop drive version that can hold up to 960GB of data will sell for $599.
The Crucial M500 SSD uses the latest SATA 6Gbps drive interface and performs at up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The drive's sequential read and write speeds reach up to 500 MBps and 400 MBps, respectively.
By comparison, OCZ's first 1TB SSD, the Octane, delivers up to 560MBps read performance and up to 45,000 random IOPS, but at about $1.10-$1.30 per gigabyte, it retails for well over $1,000.
Online sites price the Octane from $2,549.99 and $3,006.99.
Samsung's latest high-performance SSD, the PM830, offers sequential read/write speeds of 500MBps and 350MBps, respectively; a 480GB model retails for around $800.
Intel's fastest consumer drive, the 520 Series SSD, can also deliver up to 80,000 4K-block random write IOPS and up to 50,000 4K random read IOPS.
And, it boasts sequential read/writes of up to 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively -- according to Intel's specification sheet.
While the performance may be similar to the new Micron SSD, the price isn't.
Intel's 520 Series SSD retails for $999 for a 480GB model, based on 1,000 unit orders. You can also find the Intel 520 SSD on sites such as Amazon.com for little more than $1 per gigabyte of capacity.
The 60-cent per gigabyte M500, introduced at International CES here today, is priced well below the average 80- to 90- cents-per-gigabyte price of most SSDs today.
"It is an aggressive introduction for a high-density SSD, where per GB pricing is still over $1/GB," said Ryan Chien, an analyst at IHS.
"The peak performance is impressive as is fitting 960GB of NAND in a 2.5-inch form factor. However, many enthusiasts and businesses have been burned by low-cost consumer drives with poor quality characteristics, and sustained success of products in this segment ultimately depends on latency, endurance, and sustained performance during mixed workloads," Chien added.
The M500 uses Micron's densest NAND flash chips, made with 20 nanometer node lithography. Micron claims the 128Gbit-sized chips are an industry first.
The new SSD also comes with power management capabilities.
The average active power use is 150mW, but a Device Sleep mode allows that to be cut by 93% to only 5mW, said Ben Thiel, Micron's senior product marketing manager. "By comparison, hard disk drives draw five to 10 times more power than this drive when its active," Thiel said. "With Device Sleep, we can still recover in less than 100 milliseconds, or about 65 milliseconds. All of this comes together with idea of giving ... a system builder the ability to claim extended battery life."
Form factors
Micron's new drive comes in three form factors: an M.2 SATA card that's not much larger than a stick of gum (22mm wide by 80mm long by 35mm high); an mSATA (mini-SATA) card (50.8mm long by 29.8mm wide by 3.75mm high); and a traditional 2.5-in laptop SSD.
The M.2 and mSATA drives are geared for use in tablets, ultrathin netbooks and thin clamshell-style notebooks, while the 2.5-in is designed to run in a typical notebook.
The M.2 and mSATA cards include 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacity versions. The 2.5-in. SSD adds to the latter a 960GB model.
Micron would not release pricing of anything but the 960GB, 2.5-in model.
The M500 SSD comes with native, hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption.
The drive is also compliant with the Opal 2.0 Storage Specification from the Trusted Computing Group. The Opal specification provides for a secure boot capability (pre-boot authentication).
The M500 is compliant with Microsoft Window eDrive, also known as Encrypted Hard Disk Drive. Microsoft eDrive can be used With Windows 8, RT and Windows Enterprise OSes automatically encrypt a drive by using TCG and IEEE 1667 transport standards.
Additionally, Micron's new SSD includes a power loss data prevention feature that uses internal capacitors to store data for up to one microsecond after a system shutdown.
"We don't use DRAM as a buffer on our SSDs; that's used for page table management," Thiel said. "But we've all had software hang on us when we've hit to power button, and that's when data in flight is not saved. This addresses that."
The 2.5-in. Crucial M500 SSD is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2013 through global channel partners. The M.2 and mSATA drives are expected in the second quarter of 2013.
Last year Apple said the fusion drive was released because SSD was expensive. However, reality is that you can buy 512GB SSD drives at really affordable prices that any home user can afford. Maybe that's the reason why SSD starts at 768 GB on the iMac, in order to make SSD expensive and fool customers into the fusion drive, where Apple can get more margins.
I feel they just realized they cannot keep current prices of the 512GB SSDs for the Mac Pro, so they need to introduce bigger units in order to keep same prices, where margins are high.
Apple doesn't get what's the problem on the Mac line. Margins are a compromise that must be carefully driven. The Mac product line cannot be designed from a bare margins strategy, but from demand. It's fine if you've a box starting at $3000, but without considering it a competitor with the other Mac products, because it isn't (ie: don't tell customers that if they want a 2GB GPU or a SSD unit they've to pay $3000, because they won't, they'll move to Windows or Linux rather than paying $3000). You must offer such options on $2000 Macs, without fearing cannibalizing the Mac Pro. And yes, you need to release an iMac without display, without fearing cannibalizing the Mac Pro. You want Mac sells, not Mac Pro sells. And the only way of having Mac sells is to offer what desktop users want, with a price not higher than 30% of what they would pay for the same configuration on a PC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Why would Apple be making SSDs?
Followup: Can I get a bare Apple-branded SSD for less than the cost of my house?
And does Apple branding on drives really mean that Apple made them? I have plenty of hard drives with the Apple logo on them; that doesn't mean Apple made them.
And for clarity's sake, this is the 'from Apple' configuration. Anyone can buy four 4TB drives and have 16TB in their Mac Pro right now.
People may have forgotten that Apple bought the flash memory company Anobit a year ago and are probably about to revolutionize the flash drive industry.
Originally Posted by bdkennedy1
People may have forgotten that Apple bought the flash memory company Anobit a year ago.
If Apple has used that to spin some magic and get SSDs up in capacity and down in price by enough that a 2TB model is viable even in the Mac Pro as a BTO, that would be extraordinary.
Apple is known for extraordinary.
Surely the whole point of Apple offering a 2TB SSD drive or array would be for bandwidth. I still have two XServe RAIDs in my facility and they cost way more than $8000 - which is probably what you would spend to put 4 of these alleged drives into a MacPro. Shoot, Apple is still selling Promise RAIDs starting at $15k for the non-Thunderbolt models.
So if they can sell the alleged 2TB SSD for around $2k I don' think they's have any problems selling them. If you are going to be cutting 4k video clips (which FCP X supports) you are going to need some bandwidth. An 8TB SSD internal RAID will do nicely.
Put an affordable 2TB SSD in a MacBook Pro and I'll be in heaven. In a Mac Pro I could always have redundant striped 10000RPM RAIDs in a 2x2 configuration for 8TB of fast, dependable storage.
Why the HELL do people think the retina MacBook Pro hasn't been selling? There simply isn't enough storage.
How about we forget about the Mac Pro and make it so that Mac minis can be shared via Thunderbolt for x-san to utilise the available hardware on the "chain".
Cheap, reliable, expandable and AVAILABLE !!
"It should be noted that AppleInsider is unable to vouch for the veracity of the publication's statements and offers the following information for purposes of discussion only."
This should accompany all of Kaspers Slave posts. Especially analyst post.
Too funny.
AI has developed a conscience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tonton
Put an affordable 2TB SSD in a MacBook Pro and I'll be in heaven. In a Mac Pro I could always have redundant striped 10000RPM RAIDs in a 2x2 configuration for 8TB of fast, dependable storage.
Why the HELL do people think the retina MacBook Pro hasn't been selling? There simply isn't enough storage.
Why the hell do people think the Macbook Pro hasn't been selling? A 3.5" drive won't fit in an MBP, btw.
Maybe they think the CPUs won't be able to strut their stuff if disk bandwidth is a bottleneck. In a way the Mac Pro doesn't make sense without these drives.
Apple doesn't use their own hardware for their datacenters. Heck, they don't use their own software; it's all supplied by Microsoft / Amazon / Oracle et cetera
Indeed much faster, that's why I got the PCIe card for my MP. Follow JeffDM's link to OWC and read reviews.
But definitely getting cheaper, slashed by about $100 every 6-9 months
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
As long as you keep data on HDD and put the OS + Apps on SSD I'm failing to see the point of a 2TB SSD. But times are changing, and if we 'enter the UHD / 4K video era' we might need larger storage solutions, not fater throughput. The 48 minute docu TimeScapes is 330GB, thus 117MB/s video so current 4TB HDD can only hold 12 of those 4K files.
Apple doesn't use their own hardware for their datacenters. Heck, they don't use their own software; it's all supplied by Microsoft / Amazon / Oracle et cetera
Indeed much faster, that's why I got the PCIe card for my MP. Follow JeffDM's link to OWC and read reviews.
But definitely getting cheaper, slashed by about $100 every 6-9 months
Outside of enterprise level SSD drives, the Read/Write caps are 550MB/sec performance. There is a reason you see nearly 400 models for SATA III on Newegg and 7 PCI Express models of SSD on Newegg.
The SATA III bandwidth is 6Gbits/sec. No SSD drive is ever saturating that bus.
This up-to 1GB/sec PCI Express Card from Intel that is a 400GB SSD Drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167125
costs $2,049.99
This Corsair 480GB with up to 545MB/s/495MB/s read/write at $594.69
has the following IOPS advantages:
Quote:
Max Sequential Read
Up to 545MB/s
Max Sequential Write
Up to 490MB/s
4KB Random Write
Up to 55,000 IOPS
MTBF
2,000,000 hours
The overpriced POS from Intel:
Quote:
Max Sequential Read
Up to 1 GB/s
Max Sequential Write
Up to 0.75 GB/s
4KB Random Read
Up to 90,000 IOPS
4KB Random Write
Up to 38,000 IOPS
Sorry, but only a fool chooses PCI Express for the theoretical bandwidth expansion while eating it hard on actual IOPS and costs.