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A comment on The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive reality.

Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by megaman8 on Friday September 07, 2018 @07:00PM (#17938286)
As a consumer, I'd rather see them make faster hard drives. I think that's a much bigger impact than faster CPUs. I remember when i got my mac book pro 2015. the hard drive was so much faster than 5 years earlier. I can now boot up in less than 20 seconds. and my IDE opens in less then 4 seconds. getting those two numbers down to 1 or less would be a much bigger improvement, IMHO.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by skunkworker on Friday September 07, 2018 @07:40PM (#17938447)
Faster or lower latency? Right now traditional SSDs are extremely high bandwidth when transferring sequential files (approaching 3.5gbyte/s read and 3gbyte/s write) but they lack the random 4k IOPS to lower the perceived latency on disk.

Intel's Optane is the first consumer SSD I've seen that has high performance 4k read write IOPs not unlike memory, but even if you use that as your boot drive we are starting to put pressure on other part of the system. Soon the SSDs will start to have higher performance than their PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and some already need a x8 slot when striping nvme SSDs.

Take a look at https://www.anandtech.com/show/12951/plextor-demonstrates-4w...

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by loeg on Saturday September 08, 2018 @01:43AM (#17939604)
> Faster or lower latency?

Yes.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by eps on Saturday September 08, 2018 @04:41AM (#17940091)
Only if at a cheaper price though!
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by lazyjones on Saturday September 08, 2018 @04:05AM (#17940011)
This is hilarious for people who used to boot their OS instantly from ROM in 1985 ... The main culprits here are OS bloat and inefficient boot procedures, not the performance of the storage system.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by walkingolof on Saturday September 08, 2018 @06:02AM (#17940272)
To be fair, you did not boot into an OS those days, booted into a single threaded REPL with a library, a “slight” difference...
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by nicole_express on Saturday September 08, 2018 @08:24AM (#17940574)
In 1985, the Atari ST came out and that same year supported booting into its (single-tasking) GUI OS from ROM, quite a step up from the BASIC REPLs I assume you're referencing here.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by Kim_Bruning on Saturday September 08, 2018 @08:43AM (#17940623)
Indeed O:-) You may have had to wait until as late as April 1989 to have a credibly decent GUI and (collective) multi-tasking straight from ROM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#RISC_OS_2

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by afarrell on Saturday September 08, 2018 @04:20AM (#17940048)
But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed.

> OS bloat

Results from tradeoffs against other things and is not going away.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by panic on Saturday September 08, 2018 @05:36AM (#17940220)
Hardware has been getting faster for decades; somehow software always manages to slow it down. I don't think there's a way to win this race without either changing the tradeoffs or building a software culture that actually cares about performance.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by CarolineW on Saturday September 08, 2018 @06:27AM (#17940328)
As the quotation goes: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by lazyjones on Saturday September 08, 2018 @05:15AM (#17940169)
> But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed

You have options. I used to have a Windows PC for all tasks (with these annoying issues) and have since moved to an iPad for most tasks, a PS4 for games and a MacBook for programming (which I admittedly don‘t do much anymore). SSD speed is not relevant anymore, booting has been replaced by opening/picking up/starting from hibernation.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by gbil on Saturday September 08, 2018 @08:16AM (#17940554)
What stops you putting your xOS PC in standy/hibernation ? I believe you compare different situations/needs
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by ryanmarsh on Friday September 07, 2018 @07:13PM (#17938339)
You’re not wrong but I just bought the 2018 MacBook Pro (i9, 6 core) to replace my 2016 TB MBP. Both had an SSD but the new one blows the doors off the old one (video encoding, compiling code).

What I could use now is more memory on or near the CPU maybe like the iPhone A7+.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by brickmort on Friday September 07, 2018 @10:50PM (#17939123)
the boot times on these new MBPs are crazy. If you look away for just a moment, you can miss the restart entirely and you'll be left wondering if it restarted or not.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by sumnulu on Saturday September 08, 2018 @04:34AM (#17940072)
That login screen after restart is basically fancy boot loader screen. After authentication your disk is decrypted and the slow parts start. You will notice that that login screen is some what different for restart and sleep.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by craftyguy on Friday September 07, 2018 @08:06PM (#17938601)
The new one is probably an nvme attached directly to PCIe, and the other is probably connecting over SATA. These days, no two SSDs are the same.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by GeekyBear on Friday September 07, 2018 @09:41PM (#17938917)
They are both NVMe.

Apple bought a company that developed NVMe SSD controllers and has been producing it's own custom controllers for a few years now.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/...

The 2018 MacBook Pro is just using a newer high performance version of the controller.

>The T2 is also Apple’s SSD controller, so this means that the MBP is getting a SSD upgrade. Apple is now offering up to 4TB of SSD storage on the 15-inch MBP and 2TB on the 13-inch model. And judging from some of the numbers the 4TB iMac Pro has put up with the same controller, the 15-inch MBP stands to have chart-topping SSD performance.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13073/apple-updates-macbook-p...

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by stephengillie on Friday September 07, 2018 @08:56PM (#17938774)
I got a Lenovo Carbon X1. I have to charge it as often as a phone, and smart sleep settings make it seem like it's always on. I can just leave the IDE open, so it loads in 0 seconds.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by squirrelicus on Saturday September 08, 2018 @05:10AM (#17940158)
A company called Micron is developing non volatile storage to fill the latency gap between pcie storage and sdram. Almost certainly requires new mobo architecture and might require more trivial kernel changes, but nvme tech is already pushing the limits of the north bridge.

In 20 years we'll probably see this in line production. In 40, we might see non volatile storage replace volatile memory for most use cases except things that need to be volatile, such as symmetric crypto keys.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by erikpukinskis on Saturday September 08, 2018 @12:20PM (#17941456)
My 2013 MacBook Air screen recently died.

I just bought a new one off eBay from the same year.

Teenage me would not understand. But I think personal computers peaked years ago.

The reason this is possible is I have opted out of “modern” development tools and I write all my own code with a minimum of dependencies. If I was using webpack and Docker I would have to buy a 2018 machine.

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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by fspeech on Friday September 07, 2018 @07:07PM (#17938315)
Do you mean faster SSDs?
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by loeg on Saturday September 08, 2018 @01:45AM (#17939605)
I think OP means any non-volatile, 1TB +/- an order of magnitude storage. Most of us don't care what the physical media is as long as it's durable and fast.
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by sombremesa on Saturday September 08, 2018 @02:31AM (#17939745)
On a MacBook, you can pretty easily create a temporary RAM based virtual disk. Just drop your IDE app in one of those? Could probably make it a script that runs on startup
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Re:The US chip industry starts to wake up to new competitive... by cliffordthedog on Saturday September 08, 2018 @01:09AM (#17939517)
They are constantly working on faster and cheaper SSDs.
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