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No Intel Turbo Memory for Desktops Until Next Year
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Jun 07, 2007 08:26 PM
from the buy-our-laptops dept.
from the buy-our-laptops dept.
Might E Mouse writes "While Intel's 3-series chipsets support Robson/Turbo Memory, the general consensus amongst motherboard manufacturers at Computex is that we're not going to see the technology on the desktop until next year at the earliest. Working modules are on display at the show, but they're not going to be available to buy for a while."
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No Intel Turbo Memory for Desktops Until Next Year
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Turbo button (Score:5, Funny)
Turbo Memory is... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://covertinferno.org/)
Intel Turbo Memory lets your notebook actually learn your habits to provide better system response. That's because it stores frequently used information near the processor, where it's more quickly available. Better CPUs run better with Intel Turbo Memory.
This entirely new system innovation for Windows Vista PCs is based on Performance Intel® NAND Flash Memory (like the memory in an iPod* or USB 'thumb' drive), together with supporting software. It works alongside your system's RAM to increase the efficiency of data movement between the processor and hard disk.
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemor
Re:Turbo Memory is... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.legalresourcecentre.ca/)
This entirely new system innovation for Windows Vista PCs is based on Performance Intel® NAND Flash Memory (like the memory in an iPod* or USB 'thumb' drive), together with supporting software. It works alongside your system's RAM to increase the efficiency of data movement between the processor and hard disk.
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemor
Sounds like slow off chip cache, a la certain L3 Cache made of flash memory. I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed? Does it really help anything? It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
Re:Turbo Memory is... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.slashdot.org/)
If you're familiar how electronics works, you obviously understand that really big writes and reads that pass through this unit, will actually slow down, not speed up. You will have the latency of the card in addition to the latency of your hdd.
One more card in your machine is one more thing that can break, and people who have used the NAND units (available so far) a bit more know that at some point they will start to break down. It has been written in their specs too, read those if in doubt.
Perhaps the NAND trick is a great idea for laptops that suspend/resume a lot, but for other machines, just buy the ram. It's probably cheaper, it's faster, it's not locked down behind the iron curtains of Intel, and most importantly, it's already there.
Re:Turbo Memory is... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.vhemt.org/)
Yes. Laptops sell more than desktops these days. Apparently it also does a lot for the time it takes to boot.
Go and compare prices of 2GB DDR2 and a 2GB Compact Flash, you'll notice there's quite a big difference.
Intel, which is one of the few hardware companies that actively work for open drivers, when the rest are trying as hard as they can to lock everything up.
Yesterday I was browsing for a new laptop (well, I only bother with thinkpads), and guess what? Turbo Memory.
Re:Turbo Memory is... (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed?
High throughput, low latency. Don't know about cost.
It's basically the perfect hibernate cache that doesn't require power to maintain it's state, and will give near instant uptimes. You could also gain a bit from caching disk reads.
It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
RAM is volatile unless you constantly supply power. Because of this you can't rely on the information to still be their when you come back to a full power state.
Basically this little device would allow people to turn off their PC completely, and power it back up into a fully functional state. You can sort of do that now, but it means either maintaining a little power to the memory to maintain state, or spending an interminable time writing out to disk.
Of course, that means that driver writers need to actually support resuming from sleep, which many today don't properly support.
TheInquirer.org contradicts this.. (Score:5, Informative)
No need for more positive marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.insidebet.com/)
Intel would gain almost nothing on claiming another performance victory over AMD since it is widely known that their Core 2 Duo/Quad CPU series outperform AMD by a lot. So by releasing more technology that increases performance by a very small margin is like for AMD to announce the 1% speed bump with AM2 over 939.
From another view, I think it is interesting to see that the laptops receive cutting-edge technology ahead of the desktop market. Could this become a trend in the computer industry?
Re:No need for more positive marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Mmm, so what? (Score:3, Informative)
(http://jjjiii.livejournal.com/)
Is there/will there be support for it in OS X or Linux? It'd be nice...
No, probably Vista only (Score:5, Informative)
XP has pretty basic caching, it just leaves stuff in RAM. So if you open a program and then close it, XP doesn't actually zero the RAM it leaves it there. Should you open it again before the RAM is allocated for other uses, it'll use that again. Ok, fair enough, but that only helps for repeat launches. Vista does a similar thing, but actually preemptively loads things in RAM. It bases this off of your usage and thus what it thinks it needs to load the fastest. However since RAM is limited as a secondary cache, it'll use flash memory. Not good for large things, since it is slower for sequential transfers than a disk, but great for caching the first part of things. It starts to load off of flash while the drive seeks, then switched to the drive.
It looks like the Intel memory is nothing more than Flash dedicated for this purpose (looking at the laptop card on their page it is just a controller and 2 flash chips). Thus the OS itself will actually need to do the caching. Linux and/or OS-X could of course add this, but it's up to the OS maker, Intel is just providing the memory on which to do it.
Re:Mmm, so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Turbo? No Way. (Score:1)
(http://www.ultraviolent.com/)
Nice tech (Score:2)
(http://benow.ca/)
They've figured out the nand deterioration over time with bitspreading/badbit mapping then? ... enough to rely upon, I'd imagine. What about the speed issue of nand? How does the speed compare to DDR2? PCI-E 16x is a boatload of bandwidth, tho with resume getting better it might make more sense to put in a crapload of ram and a good vfs cache. Do any of the current fs's support tunable memory caching?.. ie use 50% of the 16G of memory to cache stuff that's read? The low-power resume of ubuntu is awesome... ~10s to get back to where it was, with no much power draw when off. I could see nand being of advantage in mobile and other low power situations, but for desktop, aren't we close to already doing this? Another alternative would be the gigabyte iram. With a vfs overlay it'd smoke, but still only over 1.5GB SATA II.
HP rejected Turbo memory because it didn't work. (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently it's not all it's cracked up to be.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdo
Apparently just more marketing hype.
Vista does not support Turbo Memory yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Sony *almost* has this. (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 18 2007, @04:28PM)
Seems like a decent deal in a market where most products are nearly obsolete before you get them home. Having this chipset gives me the ability to upgrade to 4GB RAM if need be. From what I hear of Vista, I may just want to do so.
Why stop at Turbo memory? (Score:1)
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.insidebet.com/)
With the exception of a small fraction of Slashdot readers, most of us are in fact capable of gathering information without a problem.
You could spin this in either direction, but fact of the matter is that this news is very interesting to some readers and covers technology we have read much about already. So if you don't know much about this innovation, why complain? It's like covering a story on PHP updates: most people won't understand much about the news and the terminology used in that news item. Does that mean that the author is responsible for explaining every single shortcut to those who don't do PHP?
There will always be a lack of information in EVERY news item on EVERY piece of article you can read from ANY source, simply because it is news, not an encyclopedia.
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.glasshead.net/)
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://thewaxwingslain.com/)
Uh, that's what I thought I was doing by coming to Slashdot.
Not mentioning the meaning of "turbo memory" makes for a very poor summary. "Turbo" gets applied to everything from automotive products to razor blades. Today, it is descriptive of nothing. PHP has been around a while so there is at least a reasonable assumption that interested people know what it is or at least can categorize it accurately.
"Turbo memory" isn't even available yet, so why would anyone assume we know what it means?
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Every SLASHDORK needs turbo memory. (Score:1)
Hmm, Robson depends one something called ReadyDrive so the OS can hint to tha harddisk what should be cached -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyDrive#ReadyDriv
ReadyDrive is a feature of Windows Vista that enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernation in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.
In June 2006, David Morgenstern wrote an article for eWeek suggesting that ReadyDrive might sacrifice data integrity for speed and battery savings.[2]
The drive-side functionality will be standardized in ATA-8
Looks like Linux will need to wait for the standard, unless Microsoft are feeling generous.