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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."
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
You might have gotten a +5 Funny, but you laughed at your own joke in your post. That's just sad.
I don't know if I'd believe either source fully, but bear in mind the Inq's article is a photo from Computex, where lots of products that are not officially for sale yet are being shown. If I took everything I saw at Computex as something I could get immediately, then I'd be busy comparing Barcelona vs. Penryn servers with DDR3 RAM, and that ain't happenin' for at least 4 months.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
I don't know which miracle NAND pieces intel has invented this time, but if they still rely on the old reliable technology, it's slow. Yes sure it's faster than spinning around the disk, but i'll just prefer a 64bit amd box stacked up with as much ram as i can get, linux will take care of buffering the fs into there. Regarding the volatile thing, my machine hasn't crashed for a year, and if it crashes really bad, it can even screw up the data in the NAND, so it can't always help me, now can it ?
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.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
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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