JustSomeGuy1

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JustSomeGuy1
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  • RAM in iPhone 13 unchanged from iPhone 12 models

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    Despite the previous poster's claim, it seems likely that CPU performance is not significantly improved - lacking more facts, my money is on Andrei's analysis (in AnandTech), maybe 5-6%. But there are two wildly divergent ways to look at this.

    It is possible that this is simply the result of a brain drain. That's a popular take in the press, right now. It's not clear how that analysis lines up with other known facts, like the massively improved NPU.

    There is another possibility though. Apple is now designing a pair of cores for use not just in the phone, but also in the Mac. What are the needs of those two devices?
    - For the phone, the biggest need is NOT more CPU performance. It's lower power use, which leads to greater sustained performance or longer battery life.
    - For the Mac, it *is* more performance. But Macs are very different from phones, even the laptops. They can afford to burn more power on increased clock speed, unlike phones... IF the chip has the ability to run at higher clocks. It seems likely that the A14/M1 does NOT have that ability, simply based on the MBPs not clocking past 3.2GHz even when on wall current. (This is normal - every chip design has a maximum beyond which it can't go, no matter how much power you throw at it.)

    The A-series chips have sped up from ~2.3GHz to ~3GHz over the last five years, since the iPhone 7, but most of the performance has come from widening the cores. But this leaves a ton of performance on the table- they should be able to get at least 4GHz, and possibly close to 5GHz, out of the process node they're using now, with a newer design. (Power requirements prevent that in the phone, of course.)

    Now... what would such a redesign look like? Really, you'd want to try to preserve the IPC of your existing design while allowing for higher clocks. And you'd probably also want to increase your caches to compensate for the fact that every cache miss is going to cost more cycles (as each cycle is quicker). Once that design is done, if you don't need the max performance out of that chip in one situation, you'd run it slower and pocket the power savings.

    This looks like it might be what Apple has done. They're claiming better battery life, despite a high-refresh-rate screen, a brighter screen, and a doubled system cache. And oh yeah, that doubled cache seems telling.

    So, I think we can't really know what's going on at Apple until the new Macs ship. And maybe not until a new desktop (27" imac and/or Pro, not so much the mini) ship. If my guess is right, what we're seeing is Apple being very smart about maximizing the RoI on a single pair of core designs (high-perf & high-efficiency). They get better power efficiency in the A15, which is their primary design goal this time around, while being able to drive the cores much faster (4-4.5GHz, maybe?) in the M2 Macs. That would give the cores +25%-+40% performance PER CORE from clockspeed. You'd lose some performance due to longer pipelines, cache misses, etc, probably made up for by the larger cache (which might be where the +6% is coming from in the A14).

    Next month will be *fascinating*.
    FileMakerFellerwatto_cobra

  • Asustor Lockerstor 2, Lockerstor 4 review: Quiet, speedy network storage for your Mac or i...

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    No, that was clear, but that's transfer speed, obviously (and uninterestingly) bottlenecked by the ethernet. That's why I specifically said "access time".
    The loaners haven't gone back yet, so I can try a few things. I'm not expecting to see any difference at all versus SATA SSDs or hard drives for prosumer or small business, tbh,
    Yes, testing that is a pretty big commitment. That's why I was only suggesting the possibility - you'd have to think carefully about what kind of workload to test, and how to generate it. The most likely way you'd see big effects from the cache drives in real life would be in multiuser access patterns for small files. The sort of thing you're more likely to see in an SMB context, and not so much at home where you're unlikely to ever have more than one or two simultaneous accesses.

    Come to think of it, you'd also likely see it with large games, for example, if the NAS had 4x rust - games often have tons of small files, and keeping the commonly accessed files in the hot storage tier would have a big impact. But who would ever do that in the first place? You'd want the game on your local SSD. So this is a really artificial test setup, and not likely all that useful.

    watto_cobra

  • Asustor Lockerstor 2, Lockerstor 4 review: Quiet, speedy network storage for your Mac or i...

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    Mike Wuerthele said:
    There is no practical way to assess the bolded with any guarantee of future accuracy quantitatively or qualitatively. As a general rule, we stay away from Internet-connecting products made by companies with too many adjacent consonants in their name -- you see them all the time on Amazon.

    This is Asus. They've been around for a while, and as JustSomeGuy1 mentioned, some good, some bad. So, In year zero of a new product, what do you say about long-term support for an internet-facing device? A year ago, I'd have said that Western Digital network attached storage devices were fine based on what the company had provided to date for support.

    But then, all of a sudden, there was a problem: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/02/western-digital-offering-data-recovery-trade-in-for-hacked-my-book-live-devices

    For what it's worth, the system software at the core of the previous Asustor devices - ADM - dates back to 2011 or so. So far, so good.
    I totally agree with you. (And, LOLed at your first paragraph.) I'm just saying that this is a really important point, and worth covering in a review, even though you can't provide any sort of guarantee. So in this case, for example, I think it would be worth a few sentences to talk about ADM and its history.

    Also - more of a suggestion than a criticism, since you clearly weren't focusing too much on performance in this review - it might have been nice to test how the NVME SSDs improve access time (if at all, this is an important but often-badly-implemented feature) for spinning rust. I have yet to see a good implementation of SSD caching in anything smaller than enterprise-grade storage systems, and it can make a huge difference for some use cases.
    I probably wasn't clear enough about it, but: "On a wired 10-gig network, with both a SATA SSD RAID, and a hard drive RAID, we saw about 285 megabytes per second read and write on the 2.5-Gig network, and 120 megabytes per second on the Gigabit network -- and about the same with a NVMe SSD for caching installed."

    Really no difference at all.
    No, that was clear, but that's transfer speed, obviously (and uninterestingly) bottlenecked by the ethernet. That's why I specifically said "access time".
    watto_cobra

  • Asustor Lockerstor 2, Lockerstor 4 review: Quiet, speedy network storage for your Mac or i...

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    Mike Wuerthele said:
    There is no practical way to assess the bolded with any guarantee of future accuracy quantitatively or qualitatively. As a general rule, we stay away from Internet-connecting products made by companies with too many adjacent consonants in their name -- you see them all the time on Amazon.

    This is Asus. They've been around for a while, and as JustSomeGuy1 mentioned, some good, some bad. So, In year zero of a new product, what do you say about long-term support for an internet-facing device? A year ago, I'd have said that Western Digital network attached storage devices were fine based on what the company had provided to date for support.

    But then, all of a sudden, there was a problem: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/02/western-digital-offering-data-recovery-trade-in-for-hacked-my-book-live-devices

    For what it's worth, the system software at the core of the previous Asustor devices - ADM - dates back to 2011 or so. So far, so good.
    I totally agree with you. (And, LOLed at your first paragraph.) I'm just saying that this is a really important point, and worth covering in a review, even though you can't provide any sort of guarantee. So in this case, for example, I think it would be worth a few sentences to talk about ADM and its history.

    Also - more of a suggestion than a criticism, since you clearly weren't focusing too much on performance in this review - it might have been nice to test how the NVME SSDs improve access time (if at all, this is an important but often-badly-implemented feature) for spinning rust. I have yet to see a good implementation of SSD caching in anything smaller than enterprise-grade storage systems, and it can make a huge difference for some use cases.
    watto_cobra

  • Asustor Lockerstor 2, Lockerstor 4 review: Quiet, speedy network storage for your Mac or i...

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    Mike, good overall review. I think you missed one major aspect of this, though, except for a tiny mention at the end: ongoing support.

    This is a serious issue because a device like this requires serious LONG-TERM support. For an example of how this sort of product can go wrong, look no further than last week's news about zillions of WD My Book devices being remote wiped due to security flaws not being patched.

    This device runs a Linux OS whether you install a fully accessible interface to it or not, and a pile of app code on top of that. Over time flaws will be discovered, and probably (if the devices gain any traction in the market) exploited. Will Asus support it long-term? I have no idea. They make a LOT of things, most of them of good quality and a few not, but supporting their own distro of Linux - which is effectively what we're talking about here - is a whole new thing for them. I'd be cautious.

    That doesn't mean you should always buy Synology instead. But it would be a big factor in any decision I'd make about this sort of gear. (Though in general, I'd build my own - I'm not exactly their target market.) And thus I think it should have been a bigger part of the review. What's their track record with these devices? How long have they been in the market? What's the support like? Do they have any track record with other software-heavy products? Etc.
    dewmewatto_cobra