When Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller gave us a preview of the upcoming Mac Pro at WWDC yesterday, he made a point of explaining that its solid state storage has a PCI Express interface.
Most other computers which use flash storage, including Apple’s current Mac range, have Sata interfaces. While Sata is fine for hard disks, it becomes a bottle-neck when used with the much-faster SSD storage.
What Apple didn’t tell us was that the MacBook Airs announced yesterday also have a PCI Express interface for SSD, according to Anand Lal Shimpi. ‘This is a pretty big deal, as it is probably the first step towards PCIe storage in a mainstream consumer device that we’ve seen,’ he wrote on AnandTech, noting that he’d achieved sequential read/write rates of 800MB/sec using QuickBench.
While raw CPU performance hasn’t improved the improvements made by Intel in the Haswell architecture mean that power consumption has been reduced and so battery life on the MacBook Air has improved significantly, to nine hours on the 11in model and 12 hours on the 13in version.
