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Comment by megaman8 | Hacker News Reader

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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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...

> Faster or lower latency?

Yes.

Only if at a cheaper price though!

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.

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.

> 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 SSD speed is not relevant anymore, booting has been replaced by opening/picking up/starting from hibernation.

What stops you putting your xOS PC in standy/hibernation ? I believe you compare different situations/needs

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.

As the quotation goes: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

To be fair, you did not boot into an OS those days, booted into a single threaded REPL with a library, a “slight” difference...

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.

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

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+.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you mean faster SSDs?

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.

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

They are constantly working on faster and cheaper SSDs.

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