Hacker News Reader

Comment by OneWhereWhy | Hacker News Reader

The thing that intrigues me the most is this:

"Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6..."

This is the first personal computer I've noticed that has PCIe Gen 6 storage. I've only seen enterprise PCIe Gen 6 SSDs up until now. Gen 5 SSDs in consumer devices already have high temperatures and thermal throttling, so I'm worried about how Apple's implementation will perform (I know they don't use off-the-shelf SSDs anymore, but I'd imagine the temps would still be a problem).

View on HN

Im curious, how often is SSD / storage speed performance really useful? I feel like for many people it's akin to gigabyte wifi in that its nice to have, but not really particularly necessary

Boot time, loading game time, mostly.

It's nice when using large sample libraries so you can stream them off the drive without as much caching in memory. Local LLM workflows probably also benefit from being able to run models too big for RAM off the drive.

I bet this is a lot of what is driving it on the DC side, and just in general bringing disk closer to RAM as far more conventional database type workloads.

Apple’s “LLM in a flash” paper [1] sheds some light on why this can be a big deal, especially if they are working on codesign of model and hardware in this dimension.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11514

It's very important. Every time you launch an app or open a file it's critical for performance. Also when memory runs out and the OS swaps to disk it makes a huge difference.

it's very very important, not at all something you can compare to WiFi.

data processing, LLMs, model loading, MoE loading, etc, etc relies on very fast storage to keep your GPU saturated.

When I was booting from a spinning disk, at that time it took over a minute to boot. I upgraded the system to SSD later, and that same system took less than 20s. That was 10 years ago.

Another example as a developer, one particular large project took an hour to build on a spinning disk, on a SSD it takes 2mins

So, yeah, it's really noticable improvement

The big deal of a decade ago about SSDs wasn't throughput, but random read/writes. HDDs can be astonishingly fast, but by their very mechanical nature, they suck at jumping from sectors to sectors to gather small files, which is typical of booting an OS.

Unrelated to disk, I've definitely been thinking about this more on the network side recently. I upgraded to 1.4/900 home fibre a while back and then got a modern Unifi UCG/U6 wifi setup, and while I do get 1.4GB down from my hardwired workstation in an explicit speed test I have yet to get anything close to that on real-world workflows. Torrents, container-pulls, backups, all of it seem to cap out around 20-50 MB/s.

So while have having this massive almost-symmetric fibre pipe is cool on paper, I haven't felt a huge need to install 2.5G gear all over the house.

It's definitely important for editing video and doing VFX work, and lots of the editors/VFX folks I know are using Studios. Raw footage from cine cameras now can be 50-100 MB per second now that we have 12 or 18K cameras, and even the low-quality proxies people work with are still pretty heavy, so in-memory caches aren't really an option and stuff is constantly being read from (and cached to) disk.

Should make a big difference when you're running your system off swap cause RAM is too expensive :P

I think this is wrong - it will likely be PCIe gen 5. Apple doesn't say PCIe gen 6 anywhere and this doubling would be from the previous Mac Studio, which probably had PCIe gen 4. So this would match what happened on macbooks recently - upgrade to PCIe gen 5.

I think someone made incorrect conclusions and everyone just copied them.

Apple did say PCIe Gen 6 - in the original version of the press release. That's where the quote came from. But they have now changed it to exclude the reference to Gen 6:

"Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture, delivering industry-leading read and write speeds for rapid project loading, file transfers, and loading huge LLMs."

Here's the original, archived press release from August 25th (look under "Blazing-Fast Storage and Pro Connectivity"):

https://web.archive.org/web/20260825130329/https://www.apple...

And here's the first modified version that the Wayback Machine has, from August 26th:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260826020313/https://www.apple...

So it seems like Apple made a mistake in this case. I agree with you that it will likely be PCIe Gen 5 - that's much more logical.

oh wow, I only saw the later version. Such a mistake!

I just barely got used to gen 5 and haven't even heard of gen 6 yet. Gen4 should be enough for most people these days, but it's good to see progress.

Apple puts the NAND flash controller on package, so it cooled as part of the SoC/CPU as they share an IHS. Given it is part of the fabric it only has to maintain signal coherence on millimeter to micrometer scales, while enterprise/consumer NAND PCIe have to adhere to standards which force them to signal at 800-1200mV and keep that signal stable for centimeter scale distances.

Basically, Apple gets to cheat because they shove everyone onto the same IC & make the OS that runs on this SOC.

They wound up with this design because these chips are descendent from the iPhone 4, where the whole motherboard was 1 inch.

Vertical integration is unbelievably effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com