Pylons

macgui said:

I bought a popular 2880 m.2 NVMe stick and  a three different enclosures, two 3.2/G1 and one 3.2/G2. I also got a SanDisk Ultra Extreme Pro Whiz Bang NVMe external drive.

They all seem to perform as advertised, and that disappoints me.  None of these drives come anywhere near the theoretical maximum bus protocols, to wit:

USB 2.0, up to 480Mbps
USB 3.0, up to 5Gbps 
USB 3.1, up to 10Gbps
USB 3.2, up to 20Gbps (Gen 2)
USB 4.0, up to 40Gbps

There's been some musical chairs with the USB naming convention, and I want to avoid that as I don't think it germane to my question.

The real world speeds seem to be about half the max or less. Even counting for overhead, the throughput never seems to come close to saturating the bus. To get greater throughput the practice seems to be create another protocol, get another type of drive, connector, and external case, and get a fraction of the new theoretical performance limit. Not to mention none of this equals the speed of Apple internal flash memory (no doubt part of that is due to being internal).

The tested WD drive above seems to get <1Gbps, nowhere near the TM, but that's fast? Compared to a spinner, sure that's true. But it seems like getting an external that comes close to TM is like getting 50,000hrs out of an LED or CFL. (Of course, someone here has done that.)

I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, so can someone point out the whys and wherefores of science for my missing the point? Is it a consumer/prosumer vs commercial user thing? Allowing for scary RAID performance? Off for some Tylenol. I don't know if I even got my questions right. 

Stating that USB 3.2 is up to 20 Gbps (Gen 2) is not completely right.
USB 3.2 Gen 2 (which is actually 2x1) is 10 Gbps, just like USB 3.1 Gen 2.
I found the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0#USB_3.2 very helpful.
What is 20 Gbps is USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. It is worth noting that Apple does not have any device supporting this, so USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10 Gbps is the fastest USB you'll get with any Mac.
(USB-IF has really messed up the naming! It was simplified to "Superspeed USB 10 Gbps" and "Superspeed USB 20 Gbps" 2019, but hasn't caught on yet.)

auxio said:

From what I understand, a lot of it has to do with the overhead of the USB protocol itself.  If you want to get into the technical details, there's an old discussion here about USB 2.0.  The TL;DR answer at the end states:

> Where is the bottleneck in today's implementations?

As one can see above, there is no botleneck, all raw bit-time space is eaten by protocol overhead.

At least with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 3.2 Gen 2 (and 3.2 Gen 2x2, jeez this is a mess) the encoding is more efficient at 128b/132b instead of 8b/10b.

As far as I know no Macs support 20 Gbps USB 3.x 2x2, so the Pro model will be limited to about the same 1000 MBps as the non-pro.

Also the article states that the non-pro version is faster because of the upgrade “from USB 3.1 Gen 2 to USB 3.2 Gen 2”. This is not true. USB 3.1 and 3.2 are the same. (Thanks USB IF!) Speed is determined by the Gen 1 (5Gbps), Gen 2 (10 Gbps) or Gen 2 2x2 (20 Gbps).
Yes this is super-confusing, and adds to the need for journalists to explain more to readers (and complain about stupid naming).

(Yes the upgrade from SATA to NVMe reason for speed upgrade is correct, but the USB bus is now the limiting factor.)

If I were to buy a TB3 dock it would have to be one with faster than 1 GbE networking. So far the only one available (let me know if you find any other!) is the $299 OWC Thunderbolt 3 Pro Dock, which they got by buying Akitio and rebranding their Thunder3 Pro Dock. This has 10 GbE over a standard RJ45 connector, but because that runs hot it needs a fan for cooling.
I hope that the companies mentioned in the article will soon release more docks with 5 or 10 GbE, or at least 2.5 GbE considering that the extra cost for an Intel i225-V or Realtek RTL8125 is about $3. With AMD B550/X570 and Intel Z490 boards 2.5 Gbps is becoming commonplace.
Currently I have a small USB3 dock (the ~$60 i-Tec Nano Dock LAN PD) that covers most of my needs, except that networking is only 1 GbE. I am contemplating the $200 QNAP QNA-T310G1S 10 GbE over SFP+. (I personally prefer SFP+ because it is both more power efficient and cheaper, especially MikroTik switches, but there are also tons of cheap used PCIe NICs to connect stationary PCs.)

The previous 27-inch iMac can also use 128 GB RAM, so that is not new. It is just that Apple did not offer to sell it with 4x 32 GB SO-DIMMs. You can buy 4x 32 GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs and install yourself, or have them installed by a third-party Mac seller.

Beats said:

Do you guys think Apple Silicon Macs wil come this year? If so, it would be wise to wait. I would love one for my recording studio.

I have no inside info, but my personal guess is that MB 12" or MBA 13" would be the first to go ARM, maybe late this year, and I don't expect iMac or Mac Pro until late 2021. But I hope I am wrong and we will see them earlier.

Regarding putting an ARM Mac in a recording studio I'd be very careful for the first year, until all software and plugins have been updated to natively support it. Unless you're used to always updating your software to the latest version as soon as it comes out. In my experience, from the 3 or 4 studios I have recorded in as a musician (and previously having a small home studio myself), studios are very reluctant to experiment with the latest and would rather prefer something that is already tried and tested. That said, music production is not as computationally heavy as for example video editing, and even advanced effects or VST instruments could potentially run well under Rosetta emulation.
Note that I am not saying that studios will prefer Intel Macs indefinitely. Of course they will also move to ARM, but as with anyone depending on a production environment for living, it may take a little longer for ARM Macs to get there. 

mcdave said:

So that’s the full line with a T-series chip? The end of the Hackintosh?

That’s a large CPU performance hike, Apple must be confident its own silicon can deliver more.

Quite likely the beginning of the end of the Hackintosh yes. But I guess Apple won't cut macOS compatibility for non-T machines until they are all classified as vintage.

Regarding the performance hike, I think perhaps AppleInsider may have wrongly interpreted the "65% more Amp Designer plug-ins" from Apple's page as "65% faster performance", which is not quite true. This comparison is also based on
"Testing conducted by Apple in July 2020 using preproduction 3.6GHz 10-core Intel Core i9-based 27‑inch iMac systems with 128GB of RAM and shipping 3.6GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 27‑inch iMac systems with 64GB of RAM. Tested using Logic Pro X 10.5.1 with project consisting of multiple tracks, each with an Amp Designer plug-in instance applied. Individual tracks were added during playback until CPU became overloaded. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of iMac."
where actually the double amount of RAM could have played a role.

Finally, I find it a little bit strange that 1 GbE is still standard, when 2.5 GbE would cost about $2-3 more. It is becoming very common on AMD B550/B570 and Intel Z490 boards.
On the other hand, $100 to upgrade to 10GbE is actually a very competitive price. Kudos to Apple for that! (That goes for the Mac mini as well.)

Agreeing with the previous comments. $40/year???