No Intel Turbo Memory for Desktops Until Next Year 75
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."
Turbo button (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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This is a common problem in
"The latest version (0.6) of Furball is finally available. It now has support for HCF, and has extended support for TLA, plus a whole bun
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In addition, this isn't even news. It's an announcement of a delay of a product I'm guessing the vast majority of people hadn't even heard of until this post. Delays of little known products aren't news, no matter how hard you try to spin it with your generic and unfounded "a lot of us are interested"
Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Then why would I need to come to Slashdot? To listen to Anonymous Cowards like you act like some kind of self-righteous prig just because they learned how to Google something?
Just admit that the author of the summary should have made some mention of what Turbo Memory is, or at least a link to a description. Not even TFA gives a satisfactory explanation. And you, AC, have added exactly nothing to the discussion.
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Turbo Memory is... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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It would appear that Turbo Memory helps with reducing the time to access hard disk data.
This seems like it would be just as useful as increasing system performance. The advantages being ease of installation and cost. The disadvantages being lower performance than standard system RAM.
Memory caching at the disk level seems like a much more promising technology
Re:Turbo Memory is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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Memory caching at the disk level seems like a much more promising technology
Except this is disk caching and needs to be solid state to be terribly useful. True, memory caching is good enough for reads, but to really push write caching you need a solid state cache so your file system doesn't die when the power gets knocked out by lightning. If you put write cache in memory (as many current hard drives can be told to do), you'd better be absolutely sure that they don't get turned off by accident.
Some storage systems from the big guys already use stricly controlled volatile write cac
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.
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[1] Note: May not exist, I haven't kept up with Flash much recently.
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It's basically the perfect hibernate cache that doesn't require power to maintain it's state, and will give near instant uptimes.
;-)
Whoa, excuse me??? (Score:2)
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AMD is also working on a "hybrid" ORNAND flash with NAND interface and NOR device complexity, but it's not that impressive.
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Oh, you mean like Windows XP already does with my most commonly used programs so that after I quit them and run a couple other things and then return to the other programs they have faster loading times?
TheInquirer.org contradicts this.. (Score:5, Informative)
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And then a bit later HULK SMASH! MSI start shipping Robson cache modules bundled with motherboards. That's the reason all the boards shipped with that funny connector on them marked "Factory test only, not a Robson connector".
No need for more positive marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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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#ReadyDrive [wikipedia.org]
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
Mmm, so what? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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I suppose the USB drive does eliminate seek time and rotational latency, but it's not obvious to me that this is a performance win. Has anyone seen benchmarks?
And yes, Turbo
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In real life, its more like: write hundreds of thousands of small chunks (few KB each) to many different locations.
The seek time dominates the performance - that's why flash storage wins here.
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Perhaps it does away with encryption (Score:2)
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also where are the firewire flash ram sticks.
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Re:Mmm, so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
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A few people, myself included, already use MTD for using graphics card VRAM as swap (server doesn't have onboard GFX on it and never uses X, so I chucked in a dirt cheap nVidia card
Turbo? No Way. (Score:1)
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Nice tech (Score:2)
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 ca
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.
Re:HP rejected Turbo memory because it didn't work (Score:2)
Vista does not support Turbo Memory yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Sony *almost* has this. (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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Stop posting at 3am while inebrei inebr iinnebir ... drunk.
Or at least finish reading up on the subject as there is no unsubmit button on /.
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Sig? what's that and where can I get one?
Why stop at Turbo memory? (Score:1)