New iMac with FUSION Drive

[Jeff Babb]

What does this mean to me? When I hit render on a :30 timeline in FCP 6 do I still have time to mow the lawn?

[cmgoodin]

If "ReadyBoost" was so good why is the Mac the No. 1 selling desktop computer in the US this year?

I love that Reality distortion field that the Fruity computer company emits. Yeah Apple may have the Number 1 selling "desktop" in the US this year, i.e. the 2 iMac Models. That's only if you are comparing single SKU sales. However if you compare to all models of Windows desktops sold, the iMac is a single digit percentage. This is because Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer and all the others may have 50 to 100 models to choose from and no single one sells like the only 2 models of desktop that Apple users are forced to buy. I haven't talked about the Mac Pro since it has been a dead man walking for 3 years..

[Boomboom]

What does this mean to me? When I hit render on a :30 timeline in FCP 6 do I still have time to mow the lawn?

... well I guess you'll have to sell a part of your loan ...

[Marc Wielage]

I haven't talked about the Mac Pro since it has been a dead man walking for 3 years.

I wish you were wrong! Many people in post (picture and sound) are very nervous about the long-range prospects for the Mac Desktops. Apple has not done much to reassure their pro customers that they're going to keep making them.

And just this past week, Avid announced they're trying to find a new owner (after a change of management and several layoffs). If Avid and Digidesign go under, this could be an enormous problem...

[Jeff Wexler]

I wish you were wrong! Many people in post (picture and sound) are very nervous about the long-range prospects for the Mac Desktops. Apple has not done much to reassure their pro customers that they're going to keep making them.

And just this past week, Avid announced they're trying to find a new owner (after a change of management and several layoffs). If Avid and Digidesign go under, this could be an enormous problem...

Avid is in trouble? I thought Avid owned Avid and then Avid bought everything else: Digidesign, Euphonix, etc. Is there some giant parent company that owns it all?

As for the MacPro (I have 3 of them), I think what Apple is planning is that there will be new models that will be possibly even more capable than the aging MacPro tower line, and will probably be more like a high end iMac with more I/O. If you look at the history of professional use of Mac computers, remember how important all the expansion slots were because so many things professional setups had to do required processor cards, video cards, expanded I/O, etc. As the computers themselves evolved, processing and video support was happening in the box, the expansion slots were not necessary, professionals were doing things on their laptops that only a few years before would have been taxing an older Mac Pro tower.

[cmgoodin]

The direction Apple is going is for thinner (for no reason) desktops like the new iMacs. Thin and sealed is a bad way to package a high end machine that may be required for fast or real-time video processing. High end Multi GPU video cards have 2 4-inch fans and some even have liquid or water cooling. That kind of hardware will never fit in a laptop with a puny 1" low volume fan or in a thin all in one computer like the iMac that also has to dissipate heat from the High Rez LCD display and quad core CPU.

[Jeff Wexler]

The direction Apple is going is for thinner (for no reason) desktops like the new iMacs. Thin and sealed is a bad way to package a high end machine that may be required for fast or real-time video processing.

I agree. I was just putting in my take on the direction Apple is going and I think we can all agree that there is a general trend away from products that serve the professional market. Apple's bottom line is helped by the other trend which is the ever changing definition of what is considered "professional" work --- when we see traditional news media relying on video clips for lead stories, clips supplied by amateurs shooting with their iPhones, who need PRO gear anyway.

[OmahaAudio]

...if you compare to all models of Windows desktops sold...

Why would you make that comparison? That would be like comparing the sales of the Honda Accord to the sales of every other automobile available in the US and saying that it's a failure.

The direction Apple is going is for thinner (for no reason) desktops like the new iMacs. Thin and sealed is a bad way to package a high end machine that may be required for fast or real-time video processing.

There is a valid reason for thinner. It looks good and that's something the PC crowd just don't understand.

The key to the "sealed" idea (and it's hardly sealed) is Apple's Thunderbolt port. It will allow what are, essentially, extension chassis that will let you plug in all sorts of graphic, storage and other cards. So you don't have to buy the full-blown Mac Pro if you don't need one to start with but you can build its equivalent over time.

[Jeff Wexler]

There is a valid reason for thinner. It looks good and that's something the PC crowd just don't understand.

The key to the "sealed" idea (and it's hardly sealed) is Apple's Thunderbolt port. It will allow what are, essentially, extension chassis that will let you plug in all sorts of graphic, storage and other cards. So you don't have to buy the full-blown Mac Pro if you don't need one to start with but you can build its equivalent over time.

That is a good point. Few people realize the full potential of the Thunderbolt port. Too many people are just complaining that they can't plug their old Firewire 400 drive directly into Thunderbolt without having to buy something new (like an adapter).

[cmgoodin]

That is a good point. Few people realize the full potential of the Thunderbolt port. Too many people are just complaining that they can't plug their old Firewire 400 drive directly into Thunderbolt without having to buy something new (like an adapter).

Thunderbolt is not much of a solution. Sure it's fast, but It ends up bing a kludge and if you want to add a couple of periferals like large hard drives, capture card, and firewire adaptor Giabit ethernet and an HD monitor you end up having to buy $150 to $200 worth of the Apple proprietary Thunderbolt cables and adapters to daisy chain a bunch of periferals together. Plus you quickly exceed the power handling capacity and end up having to also connect additional power supplies for each periferal. I haven't seen any Thunderbolt Hubs and a lot of periferals like those from BlackMagic Design only have a single port so must be at the end of the chain. All those periferals would easily fit in the PCI express slots of a Tower machine it Apple decides to update them with newer processors.

I also wonder about the robustness of the Thunderbolt connector. They are very tiny and have no Locking mechanism.

Not even a magnet to hold them in so I wonder what happens to your external HD array when you re-position your laptop and accidentally knock loose the TB cable when the drive is writing data.

What's really funny is that Apple used to advertise the first iMac and make fun of all the cables the PC tower used.

check this early commercial I worked on.

That's my own personal PC in that spot. I do admit that we found the longest wires we could for each periferal to make it look a lot worse. All the PC cables were tangled and clumped. The iMac cables were carefully arranged and coiled. We even ironed the iMac's modem phone line so it would lie flat. Now with the new iMacs and Thunderbolt and Firewire and USB running to all the external "Upgrades" for the iMac, the tables have turned.

[Marc Wielage]

Avid is in trouble? I thought Avid owned Avid and then Avid bought everything else: Digidesign, Euphonix, etc. Is there some giant parent company that owns it all?

Latest headline:

Avid Investors Begin Their Selloff Of Multimedia Giant

The stock just went down 14%, and the parent company is nervous. It would be disastrous for the post industry if either Avid or Pro Tools suddenly just ended. If both went, my head would explode.

[johnpaul215]

Back to the Fusion.... it looks like it's not a conventional hybrid drive, but two separate drives that the OS stitches together. That's why the SS part of the Fusion is bigger than the hybrid drives out there. That's also why the published speed tests from Apple are closer to SSD speeds than what people get from hybrids.

[Tom Duffy]

re: Fusion. If only Apple had said "we looked at all the technologies for combining HDD and SDDs to get the best of both worlds, and didn't find anything that fit with our needs for reliability and simplicity, so we tasked our engineers with taking the best bits of all the existing versions, and by golly they did it".

I'd have tons of respect for that. Instead they hand-waved it and gave it a shiny new name to keep everyone guessing about what is actually under the hood.

[studiomprd]

" to keep everyone guessing about what is actually under the hood. "

like "superdrives"

[Jeff Wexler]

re: Fusion. If only Apple had said "we looked at all the technologies for combining HDD and SDDs to get the best of both worlds, and didn't find anything that fit with our needs for reliability and simplicity, so we tasked our engineers with taking the best bits of all the existing versions, and by golly they did it".

I think that IS exactly what they did but for all the reasons that are abundantly obvious for just about every company (and especially Apple) they wanted to give a name to what they had created. The "fusion" of 2 drive technologies to work seamlessly and dynamically under the intelligent supervision of the core operating system is not something that the previous traditional dual drive hybrid systems were doing.

[Tom Duffy]

Yes, they did create something unique. It's the hand-waving that loses my respect when the technical media has to cover 5 versions of "but didn't they just copy X and give it a new name". New technology, or new spins on existing technology is exciting, hiding the details is against my philosophy, that's all.

[Jeff Wexler]

New technology, or new spins on existing technology is exciting, hiding the details is against my philosophy, that's all.

I think this has been discussed enough, but my reading of the explanations of what the Fusion Drive technology is all about and how it works, was not hand-waving and was not a new spin with a new name on existing technology. Apple was not the first by any means to get two different drives, a conventional spinning hard drive and a solid state drive, to work together to accomplish improvements in speed, performance (and in some instances reliability and redundancy), but the Fusion Drive technology does represent a significant improvement. Fusion Drive benefits again from the advantage that Apple has over all the other computer companies because Apple so tightly controls all aspects of their products, hardware, software, operating system, etc. As many times as Apple has been criticized for their closed system, Apple has been celebrated for the level of integration and ease of use that can be achieved over competing systems (primarily computers running some version of Windows).

[Tom Duffy]

It's hand-waving because several technical media outlets had to dissect the limited description given out by Apple to find out what was going on under the hood, and ended up guessing parts of it anyway. That we are having this discussion at all shows that the description is lacking on a technical level.

I'm not disagreeing in any way in my comments that this time Apple created something new, I'm trying to praise them for that, just not the presentation of it.

Whether it is a significant improvement, we'll have to wait and see how it performs in real life.

[Jeff Wexler]

Apple wants to sell computers, obviously, that is the first consideration. Explaining to the general public in great detail what they are doing under the hood is a totally different matter altogether. If the "technical media outlets" had to do some dissecting and some guessing, does that make Apple a bad company (or even guilty of not releasing a detailed technical paper during a product announcement event)?

[Jeff Wexler]

I just read 7 articles speculating about what the Fusion Drive is, and you are so right about all the dissection and speculation, but it is also so obvious the agenda of bashing Apple for announcing something insanely great, giving it a clever name, and then hoping that we don't discover that it is really something that's been around in the Windows world for centuries. Many of the articles are so blinded by this agenda that their own description of what the Fusion Drive is turns out to be so far off the mark and not really an accurate description of what it is and how it does its thing. One article had such serious internal contradiction, stating at first that this is nothing new and then stating that this is a proprietary system from a company that we cannot trust (Apple) in the enterprise. It's all over the map. Ars Technica seemed to have a pretty good description soon after the announcement (and no, I don't want to hear again that Ars Technica can't be trusted... the article has a lot of common sense and fairly accurate detail so I think it is useful).

Apple's new iMac

announcement today included an interesting bit of information on an upcoming technology Apple calls "Fusion Drive." According to Phil Schiller this morning, the technology takes a relatively small solid state disk and a relatively large spinning hard disk drive, then "fuses" them together into a single drive.

Speculation in the Ars forums started immediately, with most wondering if "Fusion Drive" works the same as current hybrid disk drives. Those incorporate some amount of NAND flash inside a traditional hard disk drive as an extended cache. Others speculated the Apple technology resembles something like Intel's Smart Response Technology, which uses a dedicated SSD (of up to 64GB in size) as a transparent cache for a larger hard disk drive.

Technical details are scarce, but based on Schiller's descriptions, the answer to both of those questions appears to be "no." Apple's Fusion Drive does not appear to function like an SSD-backed disk cache, but rather seems more like a file-level implementation of a feature that has existed for some time in big enterprise disk arrays: automatic tiering.

Most big disk arrays have different types of storage—some slow spinning disk, some faster spinning disk, and some solid state storage—and some have the ability to monitor what data is being accessed the most and can automatically move that data to a faster tier of disk as needed. These features typically operate at the block level, below the files, and can be done on large or small chunks of data, depending on what's hot and what's not. Auto-tiering also includes the ability to take data that is no longer in demand, or no longer "hot" and demote it down off of fast disk and onto slower stuff. In this way, a file that doesn't get accessed very often might be stored on slow SATA disks, but if a hundred people need to open it repeatedly over a short period of time, it will get pulled up and kept on SSD until it's not needed anymore.

Based on Schiller's explanation, Fusion Drive sounds similar. In a caching solution, like Intel's, files live on the hard disk drive and are temporarily mirrored to the SSD cache as needed. In an enterprise auto-tiering situation, and with Fusion Drive, the data is actually moved from one tier to another, rather than only being temporarily cached there.

Schiller noted that out of the box, a Fusion Drive-equipped Mac will have its core operating system components and preinstalled applications placed on the SSD side of the house, while documents and applications live on the slower spinning disk. As you open files and documents and install applications, the operating system makes note of what you're doing and how often you do it, and the things you use most often are promoted up onto the SSD. This is done transparently, and you see the SSD and hard drives as a single volume.

This is almost certainly done using Apple's

Core Storage logical volume manager, introduced in OS X 10.7. As a volume manager, Core Storage has the chops to weld the two separate drives together into a single entity and handle the relocation of files between one tier and the other. I say "files" because it's almost certain that the implementation here is file-level instead of block-level, since a single user doesn't need the granularity that a block-level tiering solution would provide—as users, we tend to care about files and applications. OS X needs only a method of keeping track of how many times and how often a file or application is used and then can automatically have that file slipped onto fast SSD or slow disk when it crosses an upper or lower threshold. The tracking might be implemented through Core Storage attributes or through an external on-disk database like Spotlight and document revisions.

Apple is currently mum, though with the announcement still less than a few hours old, we're sure more information will begin to trickle out shortly. It seems certain, though, that this is not a caching implementation like Intel's but rather actual movement of files between physical disks by the Core Storage volume manager.

[cmgoodin]

They are probaly keeping quiet about the details to keep from being sued. It sounds exactly like "Ready Boost" (Not as cool a name) the Mirosoft Non Volatile Ram speed up found in all versions of Windows since 2006. Or they licensed the technology from Microsoft and don't want that little detail in the press. Apple is good at taking off the shelf technology and putting a Hyperbolic name on it. Like "Power Book" instead of notebook and "FireWire" instead of iLink or IEEE1394 and "Thunderbolt" for lntel Light-peak.. Now "Lightning" for "high speed serial port with power.

[soundslikejustin]

They are probaly keeping quiet about the details to keep from being sued. It sounds exactly like "Ready Boost" (Not as cool a name) the Mirosoft Non Volatile Ram speed up found in all versions of Windows since 2006. Or they licensed the technology from Microsoft and don't want that little detail in the press. Apple is good at taking off the shelf technology and putting a Hyperbolic name on it. Like "Power Book" instead of notebook and "FireWire" instead of iLink or IEEE1394 and "Thunderbolt" for lntel Light-peak.. Now "Lightning" for "high speed serial port with power.

One correction there: Lightpeak was the in-development codename for what was released as Thunderbolt. "Though the Thunderbolt trademark was registered by Apple, full rights belong to Intel which subsequently led to the transfer of the registration from Apple to Intel."

[Jeff Wexler]

They are probaly keeping quiet about the details to keep from being sued. It sounds exactly like "Ready Boost" (Not as cool a name) the Mirosoft Non Volatile Ram speed up found in all versions of Windows since 2006. Or they licensed the technology from Microsoft and don't want that little detail in the press. Apple is good at taking off the shelf technology and putting a Hyperbolic name on it. Like "Power Book" instead of notebook and "FireWire" instead of iLink or IEEE1394 and "Thunderbolt" for lntel Light-peak.. Now "Lightning" for "high speed serial port with power.

Let's try and keep the accuracy and history of all of this correct. The only part of your post above that is correct is that Apple has given some pretty cool names to several things. Starting with the little things, "notebook" was not even a generic term in use when the first "PowerBook" came out, and why does Apple's "PowerBook" bother you so much more than IBM's "Think Pad" name? The PowerBooks derived part of the name from the use of the Power PC chips co-developed by Motorola with Apple. As for Firewire, I will agree it was a really cool name and it was the name that Apple gave to the serial bus interface initiated by Apple and developed with the IEEE P1394 Working Group in 1986. Once standards were established, other manufacturers utilized Firewire and either kept the name or referred to it by its standards designation, the boring IEEE 1394 name. Sony used a variant of the standard IEEE 1394 and called it "iLink" for their products --- a catchy name for sure but not as cool as "Firewire" (but WAY cooler than IEEE 1394).

Lastly, whether the Fusion Drive is just "Ready Boost" with a cooler name remains to be determined.

[johnpaul215]

Fusion is not Ready Boost, and it looks like you can sort of make your own:

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/31/apples-new-fusion-drive-works-on-older-macs/

There was a LOT going in at that press event, so so I'm not surprised Apple didn't get into details of Fusion drive. They explained how it works in simple language, except they didn't make it clear that it uses two drives, and not a new magic hybrid drive that gets speeds current hybrids can't. Anything beyond that is probably too technical for a press event.

[johnpaul215]

PowerBook was the portable PowerMac, as Jeff said, to describe the PowerPC processor. Apple was really into promoting the PPC chips they were running back then. This was also the time of the licensed clones, and they too were into explaining the capabilities of the PowerPC chip, and debunking the "megahertz myth".

My interaction with iLink was that it was different than the FireWire a lot of us still use. The iLink I always used (on a camera) had a mini fw connector, and I understand it didn't output any power. That meant you could not use iLink to connect to, and power, an external drive. That's something most Mac, and Deva, users do with FW400 or 800. I know that mini FireWire had a standard (non-Sony) name, because it was also on the PD-6.