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
replyIt'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.
replyApple’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.
replyShould make a big difference when you're running your system off swap cause RAM is too expensive :P
replyWhen 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.
replyAnother 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
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.
replySo 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 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.
replyIt'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.
replyI 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.
replyit's very very important, not at all something you can compare to WiFi.
replydata processing, LLMs, model loading, MoE loading, etc, etc relies on very fast storage to keep your GPU saturated.
Boot time, loading game time, mostly.
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replyApple 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.
replyBasically, Apple gets to cheat because they shove everyone onto the same IC & make the OS that runs on this SOC.
Vertical integration is unbelievably effective.
replyThey wound up with this design because these chips are descendent from the iPhone 4, where the whole motherboard was 1 inch.
replyI 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.
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