mjtomlin

Calamander said:

Let's talk about real world speed...

Blackmagic report 5,000 MB/s

Real life folder - 10,000 items, 4.4GB 


Manually tested this, it took 37 seconds to copy - translates to 120MB/s

That's around 40x slower than the max speed

So I am thinking in real life, the SSD speed is not the bottleneck for almost all operations, except maybe speed tests and things that work with huge volumes of data. Video,, 3D, and so on.

For the rest of us - we'll never notice if the SSD is 1,000 MB/s or 5,000 MB/s because either way the Finder is limited to 120MB/s for some reason. 

The Finder is not limited to 120MB/s. There is a lot of file system overhead in allocating space, creating nodes and error checking for thousands of items, especially if some data needs be moved around to prevent data fragmentation.  Copying a single large file would be much closer to actually testing the speed of the SSD.

However...

I do need to point out that APFS does not actually copy data until it needs to. Simply copying a file (on the same physical volume) in the Finder does not mean that data has been duplicated and rewritten in some other area of storage. The actual copy doesn't occur until one of the "files" has been modified.

So for instance you duplicate a file 5 times in the Finder. All that's initially created are new nodes that all point to the same block of data in storage. So no data has been "copied" yet. Now let's say you open the fifth copy and make changes and then go to save it... Only then is that block of data copied and saved with any modifications. That fifth node now points to this new block of data and the first 4 "copies" all still point to the original block of storage.

escargot said:

Aaroncz said:

Apparently the M2 Pro Mac Mini base model (16GB ram, 512GB SSD) only has a single 512GB Nand chip.  However the 14" MacBook Pro has a 256 nand chip on either side of it's motherboard in the 512GB ssd model (maybe*).  So the 14" MacBook Pro gets almost double the disc speed in the Blackmagic test because it's in a raid configuration (maybe*). 
Here's the motherboard of the M2 Pro Mac Mini (single 512GB chip in green rectangle).  It looks to be flat on the table - no second nand chip on the other side.

Thanks for sharing that link, it was very informative.  However, I believe you are mistaken about the NAND chip on the Mac mini.  They show both sides of the M2 Pro 512GB board, and you can see very clearly that there is a chip on both sides, meaning that there are 2 NAND chips for the 512GB model, not one.

"Chip count" is not the way to extrapolate speed. Chips can be formed into banks with each bank on a single data bus (channel). So whether there's one, two or eight chips in a single bank, it will always be the same speed.

keithw said:

The 2023(?) ASi "Mac Pro" must either be able to reach the 166,946 GB5 GPU results either with on-chip GPU cores or by a discrete graphics card like the existing Intel Mac Pro, otherwise, why bother to even release it?

I think this is why we haven't seen the new Mac Pro yet. The new GPU design for the A16 was supposed to see a huge performance increase (>50%, mainly due to implementing hardware based ray tracing), but it had to be pulled because apparently it wasn't meeting efficiency standards*. So If I had to guess, the M3 is going to skip the A16 and be based on the A17 generation of cores, so we should see a fairly substantial performance increase in the M3 and finally get the ASi based Mac Pro, which will be the first system with M3 generation SoCs with M3 Ultra and M3 Extreme.  (Both the A17 and M3 will also use TSMC's N3 process bringing further performance and efficiency enhancements.)

*This is the issue that's going to have be addressed at some point in the future... trying to develop a single core for both mobile and desktop applications. More than likely, that new GPU would've been fine in a desktop system where thermal ceilings can be lifted with active cooling systems. I think Apple will eventually start "optimizing" actual CPU and GPU (more so) cores for their intended systems.

It can't be that 'personalization' in the Apple ecosystem equals 'tracking' outside of it,

Umm, it absolutely can when Apple sold the user the product and that product offers certain features that need to know what the user is doing. Features that the user expects to work in a certain way. Personalization, organization and automation cannot work if there's no access to user data and actions.

The main issue shouldn't be about tracking it should be about why tracking is necessary and what that data is being used for and advertisers only need it for one reason.

mac_128 said:

benji888 said:

But, the real story is the Lisa, without Lisa, there would be no Mac. The Macintosh was a revamped Lisa...Lisa was $10,000.

The reality is that the Lisa would have likely been the Mac had Jobs not been forced off the team. It's of course infamously allegedly named Lisa after his daughter. Jobs started that project, and only turned his attention to the Mac as a competitor after he was ousted whilst looking for something else to do. For all practical purposes, the Lisa was the Mac, and the Mac is the Lisa 2.0 -- it's a direct evolution. Only the marketing of the product was different, until they buried the Lisa in a landfill in Utah, and introduced the Mac Plus as a replacement business computer boasting similar features.

I wouldn't say that. The Lisa was much more advanced (preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a hierarchal file system, hard drive support, supported higher memory) than the Mac. The Mac was a much "lesser" system and had to be to bring the cost down.