I'm beginning to understand why Apple and other OEMs are not jumping through their butt to accommodate the incorporation of SSDs in their products. Particularly Apple, because they're just a couple of months away from the gold release of Snow Leopard, their new 64-bit Operating System.
The exciting thing about the 64-bit system is that it will accommodate lots of DRAM memory. Hundreds of gigabytes of DRAM memory. Samsung just brought out a 32 Gigabyte DRAM memory chip. If I had a 64-bit processing chip in my Mac Mini, with a 64-bit operating system and two memory slots I could install two 32 gigabyte memory chips in those two slots and have twice as much DRAM as I have data on my hard drive.
The flash memory used in the SSDs is not nearly as fast as DRAM memory. Actually, with just 32 gigs of DRAM in my Mac Mini I could upload all the data on my hard drive into memory when I boot up, and the hard drive wouldn't even be used. I got twice as much stuff on my hard drive as I need or like to have.
Except for a faster boot-up with an SSD, once the bootstrapping happened, my little Mac Mini would be really, really, really swift. It will be like having a RAM cache in a PCI slot, but the memory bus controller to the CPU is or will be on the block of the processing chip itself. The DRAM memory bus is closer to the fire of the CPU than the SATA bus.
This new operating system will be out in September and on sale for the fabulous price of $24. But, my Mac Mini only has a 32-bit CPU in it. It's possible to upgrade to a 64-bit chip, but that doesn't solve the problem of the slow Intel motherboard video chip set don't get the video system up to snuff. The newer Macs now use a Nvidia chipset that's nearly twice as fast as the Intel chipset.
In other words, I'm planning to buy a new computer ti accommodate the 64-bit operating system, but it could be a used one if it's got a 64-bit CPU and the price is right. The video system is important in Snow Leopard because of a new software development that allow the operating system to use the video graphics chips for extra processing power when they've not busy doing video. It can also use the CPU for additional video processing power if the CPU is not busy.
Presently, I can't foresee why a home user will need any more computer power than is expected to be on the market in the next three months. The enterprise and corporate worlds will always need more, but for the home user, once you have more usable DRAM than you have data on your hard drive, and multiple processors of various hue and cry running directly from the memory system, speed for the foreseeable future, even for games and perhaps holodecks will not be as much of a problem.
My friend Rainey got some shocking news and called me yesterday morning. His ex-wife, who was his high school sweetheart, and the mother of his three nearly-grown kids, died in her sleep last night, and her daughter found her when she went to wake her up to take her to school. The autopsy is scheduled today. I went over to his house before dark and stayed there until three this morning. I should have left earlier, but I didn't know when enough was enow.
The woman's death was shocking to everybody. Mid-forties. Very unexpected. My friend's and his children's lives are changed forever yesterday. I don't have any experience with something like this. Both of my ex-wives are alive and kicking at last notice. He decided to have a few drinks to see if it would help him get his true feeling out on the table so he could deal with them. His emotions seemed so amped he never really even got woozy from his drinks. Balancing this out and incorporating it into his new reality might take longer than can be expected because he can't know what to expect.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
