When Will Apple Silicon Support PCIe 5?

[sideshowuniqueuser]

THere are no conventional NVMe SSDs in a Mac. Apple's SSD is not a conveniental NVMe SSD. It may present to the user at the OS utilities as such, but it is not. There is no NVMe SSD slot in any of the plain Mn powered Mac systems at all. Not in the Mn Pro or Mn Max either.

The modules in a Mac Studio or Mac Pro are NOT SSDs.



For the Mac Pro are no native M.2 slots on that system either. To add a M.2 (or other standard format SSD; ES1 , U.2 , etc. ) you would need a card. If select a card with a PCI-e v5 to v4 switch on it is already enables that you could put two x4 PCI-e v5 SSDs in a Mac Pro and it would work ( in a x16 PCI-e v4 slot. x4 v5 == x8 v4. 2 * x8 = x16 . Done. )

You can't to 3-4 v5 SSDs , but 1-2 is already covered. It won't be the cheapest possible path, but the Mac Pro at $6K is already not the cheapest possible path.

right, so how does the "not ssd" talk to the rest of the system?

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Apple does not use off the shelf PCIe NVMe SSDs. The "rules" you've internalized from PCs do not apply.

Apple integrates their own SSD controller directly into the M-series SoC. It connects to the internal "Apple Fabric" bus that links CPUs and high bandwidth peripherals to DRAM.

This SSD controller connects to flash modules over standard x1 PCIe links, one per module. (No, it's not a proprietary offshoot of PCIe, @deconstruct60, please don't confuse things like you so often do. Lots of your post up there was just nonsense.)

An Apple flash module is several flash memory die packaged together with a PCIe-to-NAND bridge IC designed by Apple. These bridges are not full SSD controllers - they don't implement the flash translation layer which does all the LBA-to-physical mapping and wear leveling. They just make it possible to read and write flash memory over PCIe.

The number of x1 PCIe lanes available for flash modules depends on which SoC you have. For base M1/M2/M3, it's 4 lanes (so, 4 modules maximum). For M1/M2/M3 Pro/Max/Ultra, it's 8 lanes, or 8 modules maximum. This means Apple already has the potential for SSD throughput equivalent to Gen5 x4 M.2 SSDs - gen4 x8 is the same bandwidth.

Getting angry because Apple hasn't jumped on PCIe gen 5 yet is silly. There's not much market penetration of gen 5 yet, and the most important thing which might make use of it (GPUs) isn't a big deal on Apple Silicon since Apple has chosen to not support third party GPUs.

where do you get all this info from?

 

[Appletoni]

Just wondering if/when Apple Silicon will support PCIe 5? By extension, when will Thunderbolt support PCIe 5 as well?

What will a MacBook 2024 offer compared to the high-end maxed out laptops 2024?

It was 2013 when i upgraded from 4 to 8 GB. And 2021 when i got 16GB. So i guess it will be another 30+ years till i will be in need for that 3 digits amount of ram

forums.macrumors.com

 

[mr_roboto]

where do you get all this info from?

Mostly from following key people in the Asahi Linux porting project on social media. Hector Martin has posted a lot of info he's discovered about the SSD architecture while reverse engineering Apple Silicon Macs.

 

[Melbourne Park]

While GPU coupling is not going to happen, fast external storage should be a benefit with M processors for some Mac buyers. And those are the ones who buy the high end Macs. A new gen Ultra without T5 will make then hesitate because another revision will have to have T5. And Thunderbolt "share" seems very attractive for small work groups. Or perhaps, the iPhone guys are really calling the shots and Apple will never gain T5. And Thunderbolt is Intel ... I'm not sure how well Apple and Intel get on these days.