From Apple’s M1 laptops to any other: this is not the festive season to get yourself a laptop
By: Dimitris Vayenas
Tags: Pcie, Apple, Gpu, Virtualization, Laptop

PCIe version 4.0’s imminent arrival in our laptops, is well worth our wait

Please wait for the arrival of PCIe v.4 enabled laptops with much better CPUs and GPUs, just around the corner. Here is the story on how and why, I took this decision for myself.

How.

In my previous article I described how my initial enthusiasm on the prospect of getting an ARM-powered Mac ended up, after close inspection, in dismay and anger.

My disappointment was exaggerated from the fact that I was almost certain that I will get the Apple M1 powered MacbookPro; I was a Mac user for the past four years, while the principal architect of the RISC-based ARM architecture was one of my teachers at the University. But I was disappointed when I realised that it was unable to meet — today- my needs and was keen on getting an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 instead.

So I took on Medium, to share the experience to… “get it out of my chest”.

To my surprise my article was read by thousands! It actually received more attention than all my previous articles.

One of the great things about Medium is that those of us who express our opinions publicly, are also recipients of advice from our readers and fellow authors!

Why.

Some of the authors here wrote (and keep writing) some extremely informative articles about the future of SoC processors like M1. For example, one member, found proper to expand to the idea I posited in my original article that Apple ought to use the SoC concept in its server farms.

More touching was the making of new friends, such as joining the facebook group of British computer engineers/scientists, with links to Manchester who were intrigued by the article.

Other members had more practical tips to offer: One of them, suggested to skip the Asus ROG G14 and move to a Clevo-based design that has:

more powerful processor: the 5900X instead of 4900HS — (approx. 25% faster this is)

more powerful GPU — Nvidia’s RTX 2070 vs Nvidia’s 2060 (30% more bandwidth and 15% more TeraFlops)), coupled with

much faster NVMe hard drive — the Samsung 980 Pro that offers speeds of up to 7000MB/s vs. 1800MB/s that the cheap NVMe drive that comes with the Asus G14 .

The Catch.

But this suggestion had a “minor” snag: Although the drive can potentially read at 7000MB/s, the bus in the motherboard that connects it to the processor is PCIe v.3 that can only transfer the data with speeds of up to 3500MB/s (just about the speed of the Apple M1).

To make full use of the speed you will have to have a PCIe v4 enabled motherboard. But no such motherboards for AMD enabled laptops are currently available!

Tip: Obviously, one can use two drives set at RAID 0 in order to “game the system” and get actual speeds of about 4500MB/s but these were still not good enough.

Why the disk transfer speed is so… important?

The disk stores all the programs and files in our computers, even our Operating Systems for the time being. I am writing “for time being”, because soon enough, we are bound to see part of the “disk ROM like storage” being integrated in the SoC as well.

I mean, if I was Apple, the next thing to do, having followed the SoC path, will be to store MacOS as close to the CPU as possible. And then have the… “hard disk” to just store the user’s programs files. Effectively, the OS will become the “BIOS” of the conventional Intel architectures.



Just think that the time to load your… Windows, with a 7000MB/s drive can be reduced to less than 3 seconds (depending on the BIOS settings of your motherboard).

But here is one more intriguing possibility that can help save energy:

Right now, we are used to put our computer to “Sleep mode”, which means that actually works consuming say 80–90% less energy than while “awake”. Many of us have stopped to shutdown our laptops, due to the bother of actually re-opening all these numerous windows and applications. We want to keep working from exactly where we paused. So, we opt to leave our kits forever open. Costing enormously to the environment.

The Virtualisation paradigm of “saving state” can be the saving grace of the industry.

One of the many things that we enjoy is that we can save the status of our Virtual Machines, shut them down, and restart them from where we left them. It might sound as a miracle to the uninitiated, but it is a key -if not common- feature in the VM realm.

One of the reasons I need a hard read/write speed in my kit is for this functionality, as the status save can take about a minute in a conventional SSD with write speed of 500MB/s.

So with a PCIe v.4 enabled disk we will be able to save the frozen snapshot of our Virtual Machines in less than 4 seconds, shut down completely, and reboot again in less than 3 seconds!

I hope that it is as obvious to you as it is to me, that this functionality will be great to become a common practice to the PCs as well, so that they do not consume any power at their “sleep”.

But more member advice followed…

Another member, provided me with the following tip regarding the ASUS ROG G14: He had found in an obscure South African site, the accidental leak of the characteristics of the new model.



So this chipset will have the desirable PCIe v.4 interface plus GPU’s that can be up to 5x (Five Times) faster!!!

So, what will I do instead?

Well, for starters, I am not buying the laptop for now.

After all, I am in a locked-down working from home.

Instead, I will be getting myself a desktop with Ryzen 9 5900X, 64 GB of RAM at 4000 MHz, an Nvidia 3060 Ti, and, of course, the PCIe v.4 to make the most Samsung 980 PRO drives set in RAID 0, that I hope to provide me with effective read speeds of over 9000 MB/s.

All that at a cheaper price than the laptops I was considering.

I am sure I can wait a for a few months and so should you.

Last but not least…

In the commentary about the new-era heralded by the premise of Apple’s SoC approach (please read this brilliant article here), the authors omitted to include some crucial “new” information as well as some good “old” common sense.

The new information:

The new information comes in the form of advances in material science. Graphene is another great discovery associated with my alma mater, the University of Manchester, that won a Nobel Prize back in 2010.

Graphene can be applied to copper interconnects as well with some impressive results. Thus, the era of Terahertz computing nears.

We do not necessarily need SoCs to achieve this, although all efficiencies are welcome. But the apple fans, can forget for the moment the notion that Intel, AMD and, most importantly, IBM will be doomed to irrelevance.

The good old common sense:

Engineering is the art and craft of trade-offs. This is the first lesson each and every engineering student -not just at Manchester- learns.

For the same reason that we do not have in cars, the engine placed compactly, near the boot (as the stuff that we can carry may get a petrol smell or become very warm — so that we will have to use expensive filters and insulation to avoid such incidents), the same line of logic (and discrimination) can be applied to micro-processing architectures. For example, say that you have everything in your single chip, is that truly the most efficient manner? Can your chip actually consume all the data offered by the very fast busses? What about interference in high speeds when a chip is manufactured in the 5, 2, 1 nanometer processes? How about the robustness of the chips in extreme environmental and magnetic noise conditions?

But there are on-going initiatives such as IBM’s OMI that hope to address such matters.

Famous last words…

So, it is good to get excited about progress, but it is also good to show some restrain. Unless of course we are making our living out marketing & communications -where progress of any kind is newsworthy -and not involved with/in actual engineering.

Those of us involved with scientific predictions using supercomputing architectures, know this lesson all too well.

Sometimes, is good for one to wait, while others make their claim to temporary, if not transient, glory. I was just thinking the other day that back in 2013, I was working at Oxford’s Emerald Supercomputer using an array of over 374 Nvidia’s GPUs offering the astonishing, at the time, figure of 114 TeraFlops; my specially made own PC had featured the first GTX Titan card to arrive in the UK, delivering the — low and behold - astonishing 1TeraFlop!

Nowadays, we can get 30 Teraflops from a single RTX- 3090 card. So with four 3090’s cards -worth less than 10k- one gets today the performance that ten years ago, was an over 2 Million investment (together with the building, the cooling etc.).

I am sure that for world leading institutions such as Oxford, the millions invested then to provide this computing power, were well spent.



But for the rest of us as consumers it is good to keep things in proportion and patience can make all the difference between feeling that we got a good deal from the feeling that we got ripped-off.

My investigation, with the help of the fellow members here, made me realise that by waiting to buy a new laptop a couple of months, it will make all this difference.

I hope that this post made this clear to all of you; it was the best way I thought to pay back the community here for their collective, individual, advice.