Next week Apple will have a product event, presumably to announce the next generation of MacBook Pro notebooks. Every year we see these upgrades. The notebooks get faster with more storage and every couple years they look a little different. This time, however, there will be another change — the addition of a new type of peripheral data port called Light Peak that promises, at 10 gigabits-per-second — to be the fastest-yet connection between a Mac and a storage device or even from one Mac to another. And this latter use is key because in addition to Light Peak-equipped MacBook Pros, I expect to see next week a Light Peak Mac Mini. Now that’s interesting.
Light Peak was Apple’s idea in the first place, promoted to Intel by Cupertino as an interface to replace FireWire 800, USB 3.0, SCSI, SATA, you name it. There are precedents for Apple proposing new connection technologies like this. That’s how both FireWire (IEEE 1394) and WiFi (802.11) came to be. Like FireWire, Light Peak uses a daisy chain topology, so most computers will only need one or two Light Peak ports. But unlike FireWire, Light Peak will come in both optical and copper versions, with the machines to be announced next week likely to have Light Peak copper, which is limited to three meters per hop.
In time the optical versions of Light Peak will offer 100 gigabit-per-second speeds over distance up to 100 meters along with a separate electrical connection in the same cable that will easily power large displays. One size fits all.
In one sense it is easy to see Light Peak as just another Apple-inspired technology intended to keep peripheral profit margins higher for a generation or two. That’s what appears to have happened with Apple’s Mini Display Port screen connector. Light Peak is also Apple’s way to leapfrog USB 3.0 for a faster, again higher-margin, platform. But there’s a lot more to Light Peak than that.
MacBook Pros will mainly use the new ports to mount external hard drives for video editing, so we can expect a drive or two to be announced next week as well. But it’s the potential Mac Mini application of Light Peak that I find so fascinating.
Remember that last year Apple stopped making xServe, its 1U server platform, seemingly abandoning the server market and causing outrage in some customers. Apple at the time made lame excuses about how it was somehow more efficient to use big Mac Pro boxes which, yes, had more processors and more cores, but still made no sense at all in a data center environment. Apple was done with the enterprise, we all figured.
Enter the Light Peak-equipped Mac Mini, hopefully next week as “one more thing.”
Remember that Mac-based supercomputer a few years ago at Virginia Tech? Apple got a lot of press from that installation first using G5-based Mac Pro boxes and then Intel-based xServes. But the installation was definitely non-trivial, as was the software.
Now imagine a supercomputer built from Light Peak-equipped Mac Minis. You’d unpack the Minis, plug them into power, plug them into each other with one Light Peak cable each, then load your software in one of the Minis, reboot them all and go out for a frosty beverage. That’s it, thanks to Light Peak, xGrid, and Grand Central Dispatch.
Xgrid has been built into OS X for years, offering some nice loosely coupled multiprocessing capabilities that few people have taken advantage of. Grand Central dispatch is now built into OS X that allows high efficiency task scheduling not just on the local multi-core machine, but down to individual program threads between tightly coupled machines (think FiberChannel). But Light Peak makes FiberChannel look slow, is inexpensive (FiberChannel is not), and is super easy to set up. And don’t forget Apple has invested gigabucks in that huge North Carolina data center — a data center that is schedule to open very soon.
Start with a Light Peak-equipped Mac Mini. Need more horsepower? Just get another Mini and connect with Light Peak. Grand Central will automatically distribute the load across multiple devices. A 2U rack will hold eight Mac Minis that, tightly coupled, will run rings around an Xserve. Better yet, given a good high bandwidth connection, OS X will be able to access applications and data in the cloud as though it were local.
This combination of seamless local and cloud computing could open up whole new markets for Apple which you may also have noticed has started opening Business Stores.
It’s not that Apple doesn’t want enterprise business, they just want to support the enterprise market from the same simple product line, selling Mac Minis by the ton. With Light Peak, xGrid, Grand Central Dispatch and Mac Minis used as compute bricks, organizations will be able to build servers of any size, automatically backed-up from the woods of North Carolina.
Apple is out-Googling Google.
I find the premise of Lightpeak a bit confused.
It’s an Intel desire which was dream’t up by Apple thats been gestated by Intel, that will be pioneered by Apple.
Is it for storage, is it for networking, video or does it do all of this plus more with bells on? If the answer to that is yes, why cobble the interface with copper?
Is this just Apple/Intels way of bringing it the market with planned obsolesce built in or will this allow differentiation between consumer Lightpeak speeds and then a Pro Lightpeak business come enterprise.
Sure the one cable fits all model has rarely worked as hoped, USB came about as close as anyone thought it might to unifying our connected PCs.
I’m very pro Apple but of late have been looking at Apple through very sceptical glasses. They upset a lot of enterprise customers in the UK by ditching rack mountable form factors and as Bob asserts the idea of wedging in a Mac Pro is absurd, someone pass the KY.
As end users will we all be required to pay Apple 30% of our annual business based on the licence usage of the Lightpeak interface?
Formally I felt, I say felt as I’m in the UK and only have anecdotal evidence of this, that Apple fought hard for the educational market in the US. It was a war that when Steve returned was key to Apple’s survival. Enterprise was like a dirty word, associated more with the lost days of a Scully Apple and it felt that rather than creating advocates in business Apple would go very much education and consumer only.
You need to do more than occasionally drop a new story on Apple.com with a few PHD types talking about how the Mac Pro allowed them study which animals were better at Poker based on neural pathway modelling…wow monkeys who’d a thunk it.
Why not now focus on business? Nothing big, say a separate area in an Apple store would be a start.
It’s not great to be an after thought and yet Apple’s server ideology which differed so greatly to say Dell and HP (a buy once and forget) seemed so attractive.
As Margaret Thatcher’s husband said, Success has many fathers, but failure is a bastard son.
Let’s hope that Lightpeak ends up like a 80’s comedy series with Paul Reiser and Greg Evigan trying to remember who exactly was responsibly for cute little Ms Lightpeak.
No need to be confused about LightPeak. It has the chance to be an incredible connection. It can support multiple protocols: FireWire, USB, DisplayPort, eSATA, etc. Imagine having to deal with only one port on your MBP, and having a simple hub that fans out into multiple breakout points. It could be pretty awesome.
I’m in audio production/engineering, not film, but the potential for this technology is really huge in my field.
Also, the copper vs. glass thing isn’t necessarily a “cobbling job.” It’s a way to transmit power to a peripheral device, which can’t really be done over glass.
did the Cringe writeup not mention that the optical interface will have copper in the connector for power? sure it did. easily enough to run SSD drive pucks if it can run a display panel.
heck, I can see a two-fiber connector with ceramic hotmelt tips and two spring-metal leaves on each side for under $10 in quantity. two bucks to connect it at whatever island is above water this week, and two bucks a meter for the combo cable.
I can tell ya, you just stream data with a tag field in the header down a ten gig pipe, ignore what isn’t yours, you can mix down your 48 tracks, render video, and run the internet backbone from new york to palo alto on that pipe and there’s room for chuckleheads to insert real-time snark on all of it as they monitor the stream.
and still plenty of bandwidth.
I like the sound of LightPeak
Interesting ideas . . . I wonder though if, in our networked Web 2.0 world, the hardware per se matters much, or even the stand alone applications running on devices. Maybe we will be getting our eBooks from web portals, or desktops tools from web portals, our entertainment from web portals etc..
In this world the one interconnection technology that really matters is between whatever device you have and the internet. That bit should be fast, free and ubiquitous. And if it’s free then it needs to be publicly funded, like the country’s roads are. Didn’t Hillary Clinton say that Internet access is a human right? I’m 100% on board with that.
(Bob, do you mean “LightPeak” instead of “LightPoint” in the third-to-last paragraph?)
I think Cringe must’ve edited the article & didn’t post a comment here — that, or you’re hallucinating 😉 (I saw the same typos in my feed reader & was going to comment.)
I find it interesting that in the very long article in Wikipedia, Apple’s name is mentioned only in a reference called “Light Peak Technology not Apple Idea”. Also, about half way into the page, they comment that PoE is an already-in-use competitor that works over existing cat 6a cables. Of course doing the same thing using a newer technology that is smaller, lighter, and less expensive to produce would be a good thing.
I recently bought a new LG phone so I could finally combine my mp3 player with my phone after using my Creative Zen Nano for the past 5 years. I was expecting an improvement over the slow usb 1.0 transfer speed only to find the speed was only 25% of the old device. Better in theory is not the same as better in practice.
This is where you went wrong,
“I recently bought a new LG phone…”
Reviews were excellent for a GoPhone type phone. What would you use that allows me to have a combined cell phone, camera, and mp3 player but only pay $100/year as long as I average about 1 call per day (25 cents each) of actual air time? I don’t need data since my umpc with Win7 does all that and more.
No. He lost me when he wrote that he found something interesting in Wikipedia.
Hehe, man your really confusing what Grand Central Dispatch does.
It is not for inter machine communication but for inter core communication on a chip.
Basically it is an easier way of doing multi threaded programming but is all on one machine.
Doing inter machine communication is not trivial to program and even Apple is not making it easier since most real user with real problems to solve use the open source variants Apple used to build XGrid.
But a nice idea anyway.
Nice idea indeed, and it is key to the radical implications Cringely postulates. Without GC providing this…and you’re right that it doesn’t work across machines…the implications are far less significant. That is, there is no turn-key scale-out solution because of LightPeak in a Mac Mini. Certainly would be nice. 🙂
I have a couple Mac minis at Macminicolo.net acting as servers. If I had a way to “LightPeak” them together and share tasks, etc, that would be incredible.
I’m about to embark on the same route and ‘can’ my VPSs that always seem to need a ‘call in for over saturation’. Seems like my current, though reputable hosting provider is really packing on the users per machine lately.
How is macminicolo.net working out for you?
The mac mini (and Macminicolo as a provider) have been awesome. Easily better than the VPS I was on. Especially like know that no one else has access to the machine…at all.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Imran Ali and Robert X. Cringely, Cringely2tw. Cringely2tw said: Attack of the Minis: Next week Apple will have a product event, presumably to announce the next generation of Ma… http://bit.ly/hszrkS […]
There’s one spot that LightPeak can go that is not emphasized.
Optical Cable Phone line re amplification! ( every 10 miles the fiber signal needs to be re boosted ) and an on the chip solution would save billions for the telcos make fiber across large distances cheaper in dollars, power needs and maintainence costs.
When I first heard of LightPeak, in 2009, I sent an email to the Australian Prime Minister who was going to speed $40 Billion to make a NBN (national broadband network). He is a great social climber and I suggested he make friends with Intell and be the first to use LightPeak for a nation. And save $2 to $5 billion in the process.
His advisers were more expert than me and so decided to waste $5 odd billion of tax payers money!!
Tax payer’s waste is often a companies profit.
BAZZ, what on earth? You think you could use lightpeak to build the NBN. It certainly doesn’t come as a surprise that NBN-Co’s experts were more expert than you.
optical regeneration: it’s generally 25 miles between repeaters, and there is this little wonder called the universal repeater. all optical. all lambdas in the 1300 neighborhood. in fact, what it is, is a laser in a box, and everybody’s lightspans run around it on bare unjacketed fiber. up to 48 lambdas on a glass pair, and they all get regenerated at the same time with no crosstalk, for all the pairs in the box. no optical/electronic/optical transitions. the telcos have had that at least since the early 2000s, and they’re widely, widely used.
you only have to break it down to electronics if you are putting a mux or a roadm in there to ramp data on or off the glass now.
Look I don’t know the specifics but chip Electrical to optical that LightPeak is is the same thing ( OK within broad parameters { Easily modified by Intel engineers to fit the standards*}) as Telco re boost needs.
But Charlie’s wrong all companies paying for stuff want it better and cheaper.The seller doesn’t care but the buyer does! That’s the problem of monopolies! And the beauty of capitalism! Except in USA military and USA big banks and USA PCs!
And a modified chip for telco needs with the whole caboodle made by Intel would reduce cost a lot.
Look LightPeak has on chip conversion of optical to electrons.
Some years back these things cost $15.000 each not bad for costs per 25 miles.
If Intel reduced them to $150 that makes your Internet costs even cheaper!! Oh except for the guy still using old technology!
Look cost is on scale 100 million new PCs with LightPeak and 4 million (SAY) telco LightPeak boxes (100 million Miles) is a lot better than old 4 million only re boost.
* Standards are meant to improve!
Apple out Googling Google. I’d like to actually see that.
Google has become to soft and spongy. It’s like Microsoft in the late 1990s. It looks invulnerable, but its main profit center, Websearch and ads, is getting out of shape and Google hasn’t made a penny doing anything else.
Have you noticed how bad web searches have become? Forget about searching for anything with the word “review” in it. Looking for information on any consumer appliance is just full of spam, and news is almost worthless. Google searches (what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah…) suck.
Page rank is getting gamed left and right. I don’t know if Google even cares. After all, the main form of search spam are pages full of (guess what?) Google ads. Why should Google even care if they make money no matter how bad the search results are.
Maybe its about time that someone with 50 billion dollars to burn and a clue about user interface simplicity shows the world how its done.
IBM’s Watson has shown that it’s possible to have computers process reams of information and actually have some understanding what they are seeing. Maybe be able to judge a page not just how many links it gets, but signal to noise ratio, and coherency of the content.
Of course, if “coherent content” becomes a search rank requirement, Wikipedia will be pushed down way to the bottom of the results.
Yeah, unfortunately, the Google of Old, which was a useful research tool, has turned into the New Google, an advertising and data mining machine.
As for the topic at hand, I doubt Apple will out a mini with LP any time soon. This is another one of Bob’s offbeat, but enjoyable stabs in the dark.
There are minis being used as servers (and specialized racks to house them as well), but it’s not a market I see Apple purposely targeting. What’s out there is a tangential result started by others.
I too have given up trying to google reviews. The links send you to bogus webpages.
Hummm . . . semantic web . . . not sure if I believe in it or not, and I didn’t have a chance to watch Watson on Jeopardy.
@Cringley… Thanks. Nice story and you left a great impression on simplifying the usage scenario. However, I am not sure Grand Central Dispatch will work just like you have envisaged? Of course, no one says Apple can not write new capabilities that match/exceed your visualization of what can happen with the mac-minis in cahoots. If it does happen, the data center business can get disrupted some more. Would Apple care to get that reputation though?
And I’ll be first in line to buy a crate of them. I like this almost as much as my iPhone grid server idea, or my android tablet grid idea. Only, of course, this is much cooler. Thanks for the heads up, Bob.
This thing, if real, does have the Jobs finger print on it – 1 single cable connects everything, 1 single cable only between 2 devices, very much inline with typical Apple design.
Most of may be led to believe that think all computing will be run from the cloud in the future, but Apple may have more ideas than that. Who knows? 5 years from now, a fancy home, an office, a building or community may be connected to and ran by a local supercomputer if one wants it. We’ll have to see what software solutions will be built to take advantage of such grid. Never lose any work, ever! (unlike the Apple ][ that chewed up my term paper), even in emergency, sudden lost of power or internet connection, the Grid automatically has multiple copies of your work on other node.
Sources: ‘Light Peak’ technology not Apple idea
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10363956-64.html
whose idea was what? everyone is saying something different..
success has many fathers. failure only has one goat.
I think the mac mini will continue as is, however we’ll see a ‘Mac’ that follows the same form factor but bigger with i7 power to start displacing the Mac Pro.
I think I know the reason why Apple appeared to abandon their enterprise products. It’s that any attempt to market them would damage their most valuable asset – their cool funky brand image which is essential for their mass consumer market. Steve Jobs in a suit and tie talking about servers running corporate databases and spreadsheets? Never. Not even Steve’s charisma can make that seem sexy.
This doesn’t mean that Apple’s iThings can’t be bought for business use. The suits are a big market for the iPad (mainly because few other people can afford them). A lot of them might have bought an iPad as a sort of executive toy and then discovered that it can do almost as much as a laptop and is easier to carry around.
In the same way, if Apple can sell a lot of Mac Minis with Light Peak for home use then maybe a lot of people running businesses will realise that it’s all the hardware they for the office too. As Bob suggests, then there’s no need for Apple to have a separate enterprise division selling separate products, and it all fits in with Steve Jobs’ general minimalist approach.
is to slow and sucks way too much for this.
is to short and unclear
is too many too errors.
As a telecom engineer who works with 10G interfaces all the time I have to ask how this Light Peak concept is superior to existing technologies such as 10Gbase-CX4 (10G over copper, but split up inside the cable into 4 coaxes), or any of the numerous 10G optical standards. You still have to solve the fundamental problem of sending a high bandwidth signal over a lossy channel using either encoding techniques, multiplexing across parallel channels, or pre-emphasis/equalization no matter what you do. Engineers have been working the 10G problem, starting with backplane transport, for close to a decade now. The more general been faced since the first days of the telegraph over a century ago, and formalized by the late great Shannon after WW2.
So someone can someone clue me in as to what the big deal is from a physical interconnect point of view?
Rupe
The big deal is that it’s Apple. Therefore, the technology cannot fail, it can only be failed…
rupe, since it’s Apple, it’s a cheap no-brainer that will require cheap components. carrier-class stuff is about a grand a laser, SFPs about $500 a laser. I would expect this stuff would not get into mass production for consumer use unless it cost about $50 max a transition.
“or any of the numerous 10G optical standards.”
Because it’s a 100G optical standard?
Aside from that, LP is positioned as mass-market hardware like USB, so the economies of scale should kick in and it will be affordable – unlike the various technologies you mentioned.
True enough, you can take a lot of cost out of carrier grade optics since it
won’t need to be NEBS qualified (mostly meaning meant to handle environmental
extremes well outside the range expected of consumer electronics). You
can get a multimode 10G XFP right now for about $150 in volume. Maybe you could get a consumer grade PC mount version of that in commercial volumes for 1/3 that price.
Still one has to ask (and I know this question has been asked in many different guises over the years in hi-tech) does anyone really need 10G connectivity in a local network type application? I ask the question because that’s pretty much the
highest bandwidth interface we offer on our switches which get sold into
our customer’s networks. We’re talking a trunk sized interface.
Given the file sizes we’re likely to see in the coming years, does it really matter
to a consumer if his file gets transferred in a tenth of a second instead of a second? Will the consumer devices at either and of the link be able to source and sink the data at these rates without buffering them?
And 100G? Come on…
Rupe
Lightpeak will probably be minimalized just like firewire was and USB 3.0 despite being inferior will still be the defacto standard in new PCs so the prices of Lightpeak storage will be beyond premium prices like Fibre Channel is now.
As an Enterprise center I do a TON of network home folder file serving with all of my users (1200) on 500 Macs. and about 10 Xserves with direct attached storage. You can’t tell me that a dozen cruddy little Mac Mini’s will take the place of an Xserve with three fast local raided 10k RPM drives and dual gig ethernet ports for redundant network connections and redundant everything else including spare parts kits.
Sure.. IF XGrid worked with small little files like you see in home folders I might consider it but it doesn’t, it’s meant for very large video files. With Apple’s abandonment of “real” enterprise hardware I’m forced to look to Linux and Windows to run the next iteration of my core with Macs only playing a trivial role in Open Directory management and nothing else.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. USB 3.0 isn’t even a standard yet and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Intel has said it wont be implementing USB 3.0 until next year. That give them and Apple a year to get Light Peak going and then on Intel’s new boards will be Light Peak with USB 3.0.
I agree that 99% of users won’t end up going this way and it’ll end up like Firewire.
On the other hand, what if the fast disk was not local to the mini, but SAN connected via the 10gb pipe? That lets Apple avoid becoming a SAN provider and still let enterprise users get real disk.
If they can get it to work as you describe, I can see a whole host of solutions for the enterprise: a shelf of Mac Mini’s slid in vertically could be a supercomputer with plug and play expansion, or compete against blade servers from HP and IBM, or could be used as Apple’s VDI solution.
Assuming the form factor stays roughly the same, you’d need a 4U shelf to store, what, ten across? And in a 42U or 47U rack you could get at least 10 shelves of Mac Mini’s? With some ingenious industrial design, you could slide the shelf in length-wise and get three shelves in the normal 19″ rack space, for 300 multi-core processing units in a rack…The NSA and Lawrence Livermore would give both nuts for that.
I am looking forward to the release of the ipad 2, hopefully that will drop the price of the ipad 1 enough for me to justify buying something that sits on the couch 99% of the time and gets used for about 10 minutes a day.
The way I see it.. LightPeak becomes the ‘stack’ technology for home services. I see the ‘cloud’ model working as a near line storage model of the old harddisk/RWOptical/WORM type… intstead being flash/SSD (portables) ‘synced’ 11N/WiFI to in/home hard drives stacked on a MacMini/AppleTV/TimeCapsule Stake all using LightPeak, which is is all ‘synced’ to a MobileMe account (or if you punch a hole and trust your ISP, served up directly over the InterWebs).
a 3 m copper cable would be just fine for a Mac Mini to a Apple TimeCapsule and then to a AppleTV…. Add a NAS on LightPeak if you need more storage, and set up an offsite archive with a timeCapsule spooling off older files to the NC area. And then allow downstream caching of all your shows (or your likely purchases) on a ‘caching’ partition set up off your AppleTV onto any hard drive.
Then Apple moving into P2P for serving up content (you got a cache of data on a server ‘close’ [on the same subnet]…. feather that box into a content serving algorithm (stealing a low priority upload.
and then use XGrid to provide local compute services to your laptop devices (photoshopping on the server).
So, I see SOHO and family computing model (why have 16 copies of content in your house on 12 devices [1 laptop/2Personal devices and 4 backups], when 2 can do?) as a ‘just works’ plug and play computing model.
I currently have a Mac Mini (Core Duo) as home AV/Web server, with a couple 1GB drives hanging off (850GB of iTunes content), wired to a an Airport router and an Apple TV (160GB). I then have various laptops and desktops through the house connecting to iTunes library on server wirelessly. So far, it all works but faster wired networking and hard drive attachment would be nice.
Will be interesting to see how Lion Server is for home use. I’ve tried Server 10.4 but didn’t really need all the options it supplied. At one point, I did try networked home directories but that was back in 05 and wireless and G4 Mac Mini just wasn’t fast enough. Maybe a new Mini Server will finally be able to do this? Would be sweet sitting down at any machine in the house and having my layout there.
The problem with getting rid of XServe was not that the Mac Mini lacks grunt. The problem is you need enterprise features like fail over power supplies and redundant disks. Some new faster technology like light peak doesn’t matter to the enterprise unless it solves those kinds of problems somehow.
Why would the Mac Minis not provide failover at the system level? NAS solves the storage issue.
The problem I see with Mac Minis is they are fairly underpowered compared with Xeon servers, but for some workloads they’d do fine.
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[…] qui amène à de nouvelles affirmations et hypothèses formulées par Robert Cringely (journaliste et auteur spécialisé informatique et bien installé dans la Silicon Valley). Dans […]
“Start with a Light Peak-equipped Mac Mini. Need more horsepower? Just get another Mini and connect with Light Peak.”
Light Peak is not trying to be a network interface, it’s for peripherals. It daisy chains up to 7 devices. I’ve seen no evidence of a light peak switch to connect dozens of minis, nor is there reason to believe such a switch would be any cheaper than a similar fiberchannel or infiniband switch.
Am I missing something but don’t you need to connection ports to daisy chain one machine to another?
Am I missing something but don’t you need TWO connection ports to daisy chain one machine to another?
Thank you. And assuming you have light peak peripherals, you’re going to want at least a couple more ports for them.
[…] be overkill for a simple external hard drive, it creates many other interesting possibilities. Robert X Cringely suggests that Apple will use Light Peak/Thunderbolt to eventually become a major force in the […]
Apple is into simplification: KISS is their philosophy. Tis why they are where they are and will design where they will be for a looong time.
I think you got it right, Bob. Apple won the the MP3 game with the iPod family. Will the same happen with the iPhone (and its brethren)? And what about the iPad (and its brethren)? Hey, Apple fills in all the gaps leaving little room for the competition to manoeuvre.
Apple likes integration and seems to own all the bits and pieces leaving the crumbs for the rift raft.
If this is all true, we could be witnessing the growth of an important monster corporation trail blazing its way into the 21st Century. It’s a brave new world with a corporation that places study and planning before quarterly profits. It has the competition jumping amok more desperate with each false start.
[…] mest spännande möjligheten med Light Peak är dock det som Robert X. Cringley spekulerat kring. I hans vision blir Mac mini server grundstenen i skalbara kluster som kopplas ihop enkelt […]
Interconnected minis reminds me of transputers.
[…] the string of innovation apparently may not have run out yet. If you like to speculate, here is a link to a Cringely post on a monster new idea that Apply may soon unfold. It involves the Apple mini […]
I for one am stunned to see this using the Mini Display Port connector. Follows are the Apple and Intel links for posterity:
https://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/
https://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/
I thought this idea was crazy until the Lion developer preview was released today.
Instead of offering a separate server version of Lion, Apple is building Lion Server directly into the OS. Lion Server guides you through configuring your Mac a server, and provides tools for both local and remote administration.
Bob’s idea just may make sense. Interesting….
Light Peak / Thunderbolt:
https://www.slate.com/id/2286406/
Bob, you need to find an engineer to review your ideas. You’re misunderstanding the nature if Grand Central Dispatch, XGrid AND lightpeak! Your idea couldn’t work without additional hardware, some very custom and one-use software and changes to some published specs.
I’d love to see apple destroy google because google is evil, but unfortunately web services is an area where Apple is merely competent.
BOB GET REAL. I have a data center. There is no way I’m going to daisy chain a whole lot of consumer grade toys like that no matter how fast the topology. I am a mac user. great consumer devices, ok in the office too.
The real movers and shakers in this area has been commodity x86 processors in blades or 1U server enclosures running virtualised/distributed platforms.
The reason the Mac 1U servers where dropped is that they where a square peg in a round hole. OSX is NOT an enterprise OS for servers. It is a GREAT OS for small single server deployments, hence the mac mini or tower options.
10 gigabit wave rays whamming through my skull will either make me very smart or very dead (cancer).
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[…] have since discontinued building these computers, but kept up selling server software. Bob Cringely hypothesised that with the new Thunderbolt connectivity standard that Apple is supporting, the Mac Mini once it […]
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[…] also reminded of Cringely’s idea for stringing together a bunch of mac minis could be implemented with the GPIO. You could get a a super-cheap, […]
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I wasn’t really a fan of the Mini but I am interested to see where Apple will go now that it’s in different hands.
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