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Intel Spills Beans On Santa Rosa Notebook Platform
Steve Kerrison writes "From the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing comes news of the successor to the Napa notebook platform. Santa Rosa, which will head up Intel's notebook technology line-up until 2H 2008, beefs up almost everything seen in Napa, from graphics to WiFi. 'Santa Rosa carries Robson Technology, now known as Intel Turbo Memory, the flash-based disc-caching system that speeds up loading times of frequently-used data. Santa Rosa is an obvious continuation of the Centrino series. There will also be another Santa Rosa Centrino variant — Pro — that covers the business features found on Intel's Q-series chipsets, namely vPro.' Intel's Core2 mobile processors remain a key part of the platform, as you'd expect, with 45nm 'Penryn' CPUs making their way into the Santa Rosa refresh in 2008."
This must be rough for Intel. Spilling beans on a computer is bad enough (have you ever TRIED getting beans out of electronics? It's a nightmare!), but spilling them on a development prototype? Somebody had to get fired for this debacle...
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There are three technologies (that I'm aware of) for using flash to cache disk. There are 'hybrid drives' where the flash is part of the hard drive, there's the Windows Vista method which uses a separately attached flash memory (typically USB), and there is this "Robson Technology" where it is on the motherboard.
It really seems to me that the 'hybrid drive' is the Right Thing to do. The cache contents is useless without the drive, and the drive is potentially corrupt without the cache contents, so why make them separable? With appropriate firmware, the hybrid drive can make the existence of the cache transparent to the OS, so no OS support is required (but you can allow the OS finer control over the cache if it does support it.) You also automatically add more cache as you add more drives.
(Incidentally, I hope MS doesn't have a patent on this - I thought of it years ago, and I'm not even an engineer.)
I can see the Windows method as a useful 'stop-gap' to get the benefit with a non-hybrid drive, but if you're buying new hardware anyway, why would you want to put the cache on the motherboard instead of the hard drive? The only advantage I can think of is that if you have multiple drives, you can dynamically allocate how much cache is associated with each drive, according to usage patterns.
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To clear things up- both SATA and PCIe employ 8b/10b encoding. Each byte is trasmitted as a 10 bit symbol. So 3.0Gb/sec = 300MB/sec.
First Gen SATA = 1.5Gb/sec = 150 MB/sec
Gen 2 SATA = 3.0Gb/sec = 300 MB/sec
First Gen PCIe = 2.5Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, so x1 = 250 MB/sec full duplex (marketing types sometimes say this is 500MB/sec)
Gen 2 PCIe = 5.0Gb/sec bidirectional per lane, x1 = 500 MB/sec full duplex.
I guess the big difference here is that PCIe is full duplex, SATA is not.
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