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No Intel Turbo Memory for Desktops Until Next Year
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."
So does this mean they found a new place for the turbo button?
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
Well, I imagine that, as you'd probably expect, turbo memory involves something spinning around really fast. The delay is probably related to difficulty with machining tolerances and excess vibration.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What the hell?; The inquirer posted an article about how MSI is going to bundle MSI to bundle Intel Robson cards with motherboards: http://theinquirer.org/default.aspx?article=40178. Who to believe? Bit-tech.net or TheInquirer.org..... I'm personally going with the inquirer...
There is no reason for Intel to make this move just yet. Now that they are completely dominating AMD in the desktop segment, why not hold it as a safe card against AMD next time they come with something new?
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?
Full Tilt
A front page, full text synopsis about a product delay, and the summary doesn't even bother going a little further into depth what this mystical "turbo memory" is?
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.
Full Tilt
As I recall, a turbo uses a lot of hot air to set things spinning, and then blows it out the back end. Seems just right for slashdot these days.
You might have gotten a +5 Funny, but you laughed at your own joke in your post. That's just sad.
It is taking longer than expected for the OEMs to add the new button to the front panel layouts.
Is it too much to ask that you explain these words you use as not all of use know what EVERY and ANY mean.
From what I've heard, Turbo Memory won't be supported by Windows XP, only Vista. Like a lot of sane people, and even most government agencies, I won't even think about running Vista until sometime next year, when they release a Service Pack or two that unfucks a lot of Vista's inherent shittiness.
Is there/will there be support for it in OS X or Linux? It'd be nice...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The turbo memory is not 'turbo' memory, until air is forced across the memory to allow more cooling, then it can be overclocked without stability issues. Its a blower that runs from a belt, off the spindle motor of the hard drive. Oh wait...
While "most worthless story ever" is a huge overstatement, the criticism is justified. I knew that Intel were pushing flash cache on the motherboard, but I didn't know (or forgot) that they called it "turbo memory." It would only have taken a few words to change the summary from opaque to transparent for me.
/. submissions. We get something like:
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 bunch of UI improvements, including LERs and SEDs and a BRS. Lead developer Dead Beef says 'This is a huge milestone for us on the way to 1.0.'"
This is fine for the 3% of us who know what Furball is. The rest of us are left guessing that it is probably software.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
It's a short submission on a relatively new technology. Regardless of our collective information gathering technologies, the lack of any explanation demonstrates nothing beyond laziness on the submitter's part.
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" appeals to nebulous popularity, which falls flat on its face when you notice the number of comments the story has generated thus far.
Turbo Memory is a cooler than DDR2 but I prefer Super DDR2 Turbo Hyper-Fighting Edition... it's SO much better than DDR3.
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.
Unless the Robson spec requires an NDA and custom IDE commands, then we'll hear lots of moaning about WinHardisks.
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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#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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6188522.html
c .aspx?i=2985&p=4
Apparently it's not all it's cracked up to be.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdo
Apparently just more marketing hype.
As far as I can tell, Turbo Memory is nothing more than flash RAM on the PCIe bus. It isn't what does the caching, Vista is. Vista has a deal called "ReadyBoost" that caches data to flash. You don't need this stuff, any fast USB flash drive will work. The USB interface works fine since max transfer rate of flash is pretty low. It is used for its fast access times. Basically Vista does a whole ton of caching, and does it aggressively.
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.
Despite what MS says... http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,3928 7431,00.htm
Can't say for sure, but since this disk is 'internal' Vista might disable the encryption/decryption overhead for it. On external drives they need to encrypt the data to prevent loss of sensitive information.
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.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
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?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nothing stopping Linux from using it efficiently.
It would be nice to have dedicated flash memory for the operating system of your choice. I have no idea how this would work with linux or OSX, etc etc, but somewhere to store page files or hell, even the entire OS (although I'm guessing that would take a bit of work on the OS side). I guess it would make the motherboards much more expensive, so hell, even a slot to put in an SD card or something would be pretty handy..
I wonder if this throws up any issues for certain types of encryption, such as On-The-Fly disk encryption. I believe some of these encryption schemes send certain data to RAM, maybe even master passwords, in the assumption that the data will not survive a power cycle. Non-volatile memory could potentially be problematic for such designs.
But wouldn't that make it 'supercharger' memory?
You might be surprised what you can learn if you are only willing to look.
"RAM is volatile unless you constantly supply power." Yea, that's why we've had NVRAM for decades (Magnetic core memory, anybody?) Now it's going to PCRAM, which is perfect for storage but sucky for massive amounts of read-writes (even though trillions of read/writes is nice for storage, a normal game blows through that in a day or so, making it impractical for just general processing as a form of standard memory.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.