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No Intel Turbo Memory for Desktops Until Next Year

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

7 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Turbo Memory is... by phantomcircuit · · 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/turbomemory /index.htm">Intel® Turbo Memory

    1. Re:Turbo Memory is... by Vellmont · · 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.

      --
      AccountKiller
    2. Re:Turbo Memory is... by pipatron · · Score: 3, Informative

      Perhaps the NAND trick is a great idea for laptops that suspend/resume a lot

      Yes. Laptops sell more than desktops these days. Apparently it also does a lot for the time it takes to boot.

      just buy the ram. It's probably cheaper

      Go and compare prices of 2GB DDR2 and a 2GB Compact Flash, you'll notice there's quite a big difference.

      It's not locked down behind the iron curtains of Intel

      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.

      and most importantly, it's already there

      Yesterday I was browsing for a new laptop (well, I only bother with thinkpads), and guess what? Turbo Memory.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  2. TheInquirer.org contradicts this.. by lippyjka · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Mmm, so what? by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!
  4. HP rejected Turbo memory because it didn't work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6188522.html

    Apparently it's not all it's cracked up to be.

    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc .aspx?i=2985&p=4

    Apparently just more marketing hype.

  5. No, probably Vista only by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.