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- netdroid9, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13It looks like Vista'll use this too. This looks like it could be a pretty good idea :).
- jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Awesome, especially if operating systems start taking advantage of this (namely Linux) we will have almost instant boot times.
- Rigbymatt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+91st quarter 2007 with core 2 duos in MBP, 10.5 designed specificially for it, 2 second boot time.
that would be coooool - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9"thankfully Vista has complete support for NAND drives and Microsoft have really been pushing the use of it. They will welcome it with open arms."
Actually, you're wrong. And I'm sad that it's true.
Microsoft's support for NAND is at the end of a Hard Drive controller, meaning that as a driver tree:
SystemRoot->South-Bridge->SATA-Controller->HDD0->NAND-Controller->NAND-Cells
Intel's NAND will be set up differently:
SystemRoot->South-Bridge->NAND-Controller->NAND-Cells
Intel's is by far the more elegant solution, and the easier one to support, but Microsoft's unwilling to support it, namely because they think their idea is better, and because the hard drive companies have eaten it up. Meanwhile, consumers get screwed with un-upgradable flash-on-disk.
But, I'm sure Intel will write a driver for Vista, and Apple will write a driver for Mac OS X to support either branch (after all, it's merely a memory mapping issue these days), but it's just one more thing to make x86 computers ugly.. - burnttoys, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Err. AMD did "invent" x84-64 in much the same way as Intel invented IA32. Besides neither "invented" this technology. Intel are just bolting 2 pieces of their tech together under the Centrino brand.
You can pretty much do this now if your laptop has a CF or PCMCIA card slot that is bootable.
More interesting would be to know exactly how the OS is going interact with this thing. Will it look like a IDE HD interface (albeit very fast) or IEEE1398/USB attached storage or does it just appear memory mapped.
Personally I think it would be best used as a hibernate file with the BIOS able to copy the contents to RAM and restart execution. Afterall, how many times do you really want to reboot? Assuming the flash is good for at least 100,000 write operations that's a lot of powering up/down. - tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5If you wait until Q2 2007 to buy a laptop, there will be someting *other* upcoming new feature that will make you want to wait. When you decide "it's time," just buy based on what's available, not what's on its way.
- Vindstille, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As tempusrob said. When Santa Rosa comes, some others "most have" feature will come. For ex. will processors with four cores come in the second half of 2007
- cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -2/+5Dabellah, thankfully Vista has complete support for NAND drives and Microsoft have really been pushing the use of it. They will welcome it with open arms.
- yabos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Erm, with no access to the 10.5 kernel source or any hardware to test how would anyone know?
- akashra, on 10/12/2007, -4/+62nd Quater of 2007? Whhhhaaaaa that's too long to wait!
Oh how I wish the MacBook Pro would come with this standard, sooner rather than later. - massysett, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Can somebody explain how this is better than RAM...is it cheaper? The article says that what's so great about this is that Windows will use it for Superfetch, which just looks like a disk cache to me. So why not just plug a GB of RAM into the system?
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's just another storage medium. Faster than your HD. Slower, but cheaper, than RAM. Perfect place to hibernate to. NAND is non volatile, so cutting the power to it doesn't mean the data disappears like it does with RAM.
- iZealot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yay a first Gen apple product....
I mean Yay.
no
YaY!
Thank you for calling Apple Care..... - crpietschmann, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://duggmirror.com
- msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1NAND memory retains it's data when it loses power (think of your USB thumbdrive), RAM does not. It's not going to be cheaper (probably on par with regular memory prices at this scale of production), but it opens the door for some interesting things.
For laptops, this could extend battery life by a large amount. By using "Superfetch" which is probably just a disk cache, but done in larger chunks, the harddrive spends less time spinning. Beyond battery life, temperatures inside the laptop could be slightly reduced, and the operating system *should* react faster. Hard drives are extremely slow compared to memory, so if you could boot from a NAND chip instead of a hard drive, you could boot up or have hibernate/powersaving modes react faster and perform better. - nixdoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Incidentally, there was news few months back that Apple has placed an "open order" for flash drives, and that had caused a "shortage" of flash media in the market. Many people thought it was for iPod nano, but few were speculating Apple would place the flash disks in their computers for faster booting etc.
The iPod nano speculation has come to be true, I dont' know what happens to the other speculation. Are Intel and Apple collaborating on doing this together? - nixdoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Cool? Definitely.
Except it's going to drive costs up! But we'll definitely have faster machines! - nixdoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was in the same boat as you... whether to wait till Leopard arrives, or to get kicking right now with Tiger! I chose the latter, because technology gets obsolete faster than you can imagine. Though older machines function beautifully, they're not considered as "cool". If you can live with the "uncool" factor, you should buy whatever works for you!
- cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -1/+2lukeo, simpleton's should not bother themselves with code-names then. Code-names or working names are for enthusiasts who can handle the stress of remembering what Conroe, Woodcrest and Kentsfield are! It's not that hard.. really.
- analogvoid, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I don't need a laptop but I do want one eventually. So, I want to wait for Santa Rosa rather than buy one now. I fear that It will be this time next year before we see this technology in the Macbook Pro line, though.
- cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -3/+3My mistake geminitojanus, thanks for clearing that up. What a shame! :(
- psyberweb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0nice.
- billybob476, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I guess and advantage might be that it's non-volatile.
- prosperolt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1@millixaw - i believe it's been well established AMD & Intel take different approaches to their system architecture now...less you forget although Intel has the performance crown now, it was AMD who had been the innovator of the two the last 2-3 years...
- millixaw, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4No doubt AMD will soon copy this technology, add one thing to it and suddely all the fanboys will think AMD invented it (much like x86_64).
- fxscreamer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I remember this being announced in Fall 2005. Samsung was supposed to be the maker for the laptop hybrid drives. Apparently, like anything...it got delayed until now. I remember some test using PCMark showing a boost of something like 40,000 points over a standard hardrive test (being around 10K-20K). Thank god for solid state finally coming. The hardrive bottleneck will soon be the way of the dodo.
- Dabellah, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Considering it to be a completely new technology in regards to the incorporation on the mainboard to be standard, I would say second quarter of next year is actually pretty fast in introducing it. Hopefully Vista already has some support built in for this funcitonality and we can start using it right away.
- fredag, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1It would be great but how likely is this really though? Does anybody that has a developers copy of 10.5 see any evidence of this in the code?
- lukeo, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Robson, santa rosa, snowgrass... what with Yonah and Memron and godknows what other stupid code names are floating about, no wonder a simpleton like me has trouble knowing what is being talked about!!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3that's cool
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