Teardown reveals that Spring 2011 iMacs use an unreleased Intel chipset

This week’s iMac teardown revealed something very interesting: the use of Intel’s new Z68 chipset. Normally this wouldn’t seem like much–a new computer has a new chipset–but the Z68 wasn’t supposed to be released until next week. Dates vary, but publications have the chipset’s official launch ranging from May 8th – May 11th, giving Apple at least a week jump on the competition.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Intel release a product early with Apple. Thunderbolt, the high-speed port on new iMacs/MacBook Pros is a version of Intel’s Light Peak that launched on Apple hardware and the 2011 MBPs were some of the first Sandy Bridge laptops to hit retail. This goes all the way back to the original MacBook Air, which launched with a curious new Intel processor back in January 2008.
So what’s so cool about the Z68, aside from Apple getting it a few days early? The chipset packs a little something known as Smart Response Technology which is able to use an SSD as a sort of super cache for a hard drive. This could theoretically mean mechanical disk storage at near SSD speeds, at least under the right circumstances. Apple alludes to this combination on their sales page but doesn’t say anything about performance gains or the ability for Smart Response to see the drive pair as a single disk.

Wondering why no new iMac owner has said anything about this yet, and we’re just making guesses? These haven’t gone public yet. The normal shipping time for an iMac is 2-4 business days, but with an SSD it’s 4-6 weeks.

All the speculation about this overlooks something troubling: OS X doesn’t ship with TRIM support until 10.7 (Lion). The TRIM command is important as an SSD gets entirely written over, otherwise there can be performance degradation. It’s not terrible, but it’s worth factoring in. So what will happen over time with the SSD component of the hybrid drive system? Also, the Smart Response seems to be designed for smaller SSDs (TechPowerUp notes 20GB), which makes sense given the cache functionality. So why does Apple offer only a 256GB, $500 model? We’ll have to wait 4-6 weeks to see.

Intel sure does seem buddy-buddy with Apple these days, it’ll be interesting to see where that leads…