“I think Apple’s going to be offering instant-on computers in the very near future. Make that near-instant. Faster than normal, anyway. And some of these may just be the integrated music and video home-media boxes people have been predicting ever since the iPod redefined Apple’s game,” Seth Jayson writes for The Motley Fool. “Robson is the name… that Intel has given its upcoming technology to integrate NAND flash into computers. It will load important chunks of the operating system into flash memory, where it remains even when the machine is powered down. On restart, a computer won’t need to go through so much of the usual laborious process of grabbing data from the hard drive, loading it into RAM, reporting it to the Men In Black, and so on. Intel has so far been showing off this technology in laptops, where it promises to provide longer battery life. But there’s another related benefit.”
Jayson writes, “It might be possible to get these things to start up instantly — or nearly so… So Intel’s got simple, desirable, potentially market-shaking technology that could make computers turn on as quickly as our toasters. It uses flash memory. Apple’s already working with Intel for Macintosh processing chips. And Apple also just happens to have paid Intel’s joint venture a $500 million advance to start making flash chips… It’s my bet that Apple will not only move in this direction but also get there before the rest of the crowd.”
Full article here.
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Now, as any PowerBook, iBook or really any Mac OS X user will tell you, Mac OS X machines are kind of “instant-on” already. Just “Sleep” by closing the lid or by choosing “Sleep” from the Apple Menu instead of shutting down and when you want the Mac “on”, just open up your PowerBook’s or iBook’s lid or jiggle your desktop Mac’s mouse (or hit any key on the keyboard). With insanely great uptimes, Macs are just “on” or “off” (asleep) these days.
That said, what Jayson describes would be true “instant-on” for Macs and it would pave the way for reliable, quick-to-power-up Macs and Apple appliances. Like a stereo receiver or a kitchen appliance, your Mac or any Apple appliance or component (DVR – flash for the instant-on OS, hard drive for the storage – perhaps?) would just be “on” with a press of the power button and “off” with another press. Just think about all of the possibilities beyond the Mac that exist in the living room and elsewhere for Apple to use this technology. And it would be just like Apple to do it first.
Blah, blah. I said this two or more days ago.
instant on is more important for PC users because they have to reboot so often to clear memory, recover from crashes. Also, I notice that PC people often shut their laptop down when leaving Starbucks rather than just closing the lid.
I don’t see this as any advantage. What MDN says is true that the Mac wakes up from sleep very quickly but can actually pause until the hard drives spin up, then its up and running. OS from Flash may be able to save this spin up time but I would bet there is something on the hard drive the OS will want and then it has to wait to spin up anyway. From Power up, the OS has to actually assemble itself, that is what takes so much time at power up, not the spin up or access to drives. I don’t see where Flash would change this. If it could then you could store what ever you were going to store in Flash on the drive and power up into an assumed assembled OS. This could be done now and Intel is doing work in this area, but it doesn’t need Flash. Even on a PC you can enable Hibernation which is the same as this would be.
This would be awesome. Not to mention all the other benefits that could come with this…. with dual core chips… have one core sift through the NAND and the other sift through the HD…. or does it not work like that?
numlock, I don’t think a restart would be instant. A restart would be from scratch. If your XP box is locked up, the data in the NAND ram would be corrupted. Maybe?
I think you all (MDN included) are maybe missing it. He means instant on from a dead start – like when you turn on your computer in the morning. Not from a sleep mode.
In the PC world, it’s often called “hibernation”. Sleep mode requires power to be applied because the contents of RAM need to be preserved, where hibernation writes the entire RAM to disk and thus is a no-power state.
It takes a long time, though, to restart from a hibernated state, since all the data has to be reloaded into RAM from the disk, which takes a while. If the data was in flash, the startup would be very fast.
Apple would create a more sensible system than what a PC has, though. Imagine a Powerbook that sleeps as usual when you close the lid, but after an hour or so in the sleep state would silently write the RAM to flash and turn off completely. This would be completely transparent to the user.
He´s discussing instant on from a startup, not sleep mode.
Honker,
Did you miss this part of MDN’s take? MDN isn’t missing anything:
That said, what Jayson describes would be true “instant-on” for Macs and it would pave the way for reliable, quick-to-power-up Macs and Apple appliances. Like a stereo receiver or a kitchen appliance, your Mac or any Apple appliance or component (DVR, perhaps?) would just be “on” with a press of the power button and “off” with another press. Just think about all of the possibilities beyond the Mac that exist in the living room and elsewhere for Apple to use this technology. And it would be just like Apple to do it first.
We would anyone need instant-on when super stable MacOSX really doesnt require that you shut it off.
Mine stays on all the time. If I didnt update and install software I’d never reboot. Still not a bad technology for laptops.
Most of you guys and gals need to slow down and read MDN’s take again. They are talking about Apple appliances, not just Macs, where this technology could be very useful.
Sleep mode still uses a certain amount of power. If I leave my TiBook sleeping, the battery will be flat after 5 days or so.
Instant on means that I can have it actually switched off for several days and still performing with a full charge when I start using it.
On a desktop Mac, it will mean that less power is wasted than with a sleeping Mac, but you still get to use it pretty well instantly. Some don’t worry about issues of that type, but to others it’s important and could be a big plus for Apple.
The flash memory would also be a way of saving power. When running from batteries, everything destined for the HD (including virtual memory) would be stored on flash until after a certain time, stuff would get saved to disk. That way the times that the HD would need to be accessed, and thus battery power would be signifcantly lowered.
Am I one of the very few who seem to be able to see this portion of the MDN Take?
Just think about all of the possibilities beyond the Mac that exist in the living room and elsewhere for Apple to use this technology. And it would be just like Apple to do it first.
Sooner than most think, hard drives will give way to flash. First in notebooks, then in desktops, I think. Imagine the power and weight savings alone. Greater flash capacity is coming more quickly than most people think – huge investments are being made. And you can thank Apple driving it, too.
And it would be just like Apple to do it first.
I think you’ll find the real importance to the Intel/Micron/Apple deal here. Apple has to be the shrewedest investor in complementary technologies in the world.
Example:
iPod. Apple bought Toshiba’s entire production run of the HD used in the original iPod. Competitors were unable to develop competing products because there weren’t any HDs available to them.
iPod nano. Apple bought all of Samsung’s remaining production capacity (40% of total) for the nano. Competitors were/are unable to develop competing products because there aren’t any NAND chips available to them.
Instant on. What if the deal involving Micron, Intel and Apple is part of a grander plan to lock up the supply of Robson chips for the next two years.
Even if MSFT tweaks its OS to partially load onto Robson chips, Dell et al couldn’t develop a CPU that used the technology, because Apple had cornered the supply.
Intel has been chaffing at the bit for several years, wanting to introduce the technologies it has developed. Doing so meant MSFT tweaking its OS to avail it of those technologies. MSFT has consistently refused to do it, because adoption of the new technologies meant such radical changes in Windows that legacy programs couldn’t run on the new version of OS.
I don’t think Intel is afraid of losing Dell and other box makers to AMD. Not in the short term anyway. Long term, I think Intel believes Apple is going to be a major force in desktop computing, and is going to do what it can to help. After all, Apple is going to become that major force using Intel technology. Dell at el, will have to come back to Intel just to keep pace with Apple.
I have one already.
I open the lid and bingo its on and ready to go !!
Jeez, most of you who say “blah blah”, “big deal”, etc sound like our Windows friends. Potentially doing away with the hard drive is a huge step. Hard drives are the slowest part of a computer, so besides “instant on”, the overall performance of a system will be truly as fast as the CPU and buses. Not to mention that computers, as we know them, are evolving and putting your computer to sleep may be fine for how we know computers to be nowadays, but this is a mark of true progress (which is far overdue in my estimation). As I always tell my clients: “It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, but when“.
So how many flash NAND chips will it take to match the current 60,80,100gig drives? And how much will it cost?
Blah, blah. I said this two or more days ago.
It’s called MacDailyNews – they don’t say which Day, however. Take it in stride. Motley picked up the story and added their speculation just today.
I wouldn’t be all surprised if Apple pulls out a new appliance in the near future, however…
It should be remembered that Apple need to solve the issue of slow processors in their laptops. That’s why the intel deal is so important. Hopefully by January we’ll be hearing an official announcement of the first retail Mac using Intel processors.
Flash and other stuff may be included or they may just want to get a basic machine out now and deal with the fancy new features later.
Big deal!
Faster safe sleep, perhaps?
Also, in some ways this reminds me of hybrid cars, with the electric motor supplementing the gas motor in situations where the gas motor lags.
Dave,
It’s really not so long ago… in the grand scheme of thing things… that we were using card punch machines and core memory…. please take at this link to see an example of how far (VERY FAR) we’ve come in such a short period of time….
http://williambader.com/museum/vax/pdphistory.html
I promise you.. it won’t be very long before you’re question is answered (and you may regret you asked it) ….