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."

Comments

Turbo button

[tknd]

So does this mean they found a new place for the turbo button?

Turbo Memory is...

[phantomcircuit]

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

Re:Turbo Memory is...

[Vellmont]

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.

Re:Turbo Memory is...

[moro_666]

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.

TheInquirer.org contradicts this..

[lippyjka]

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...

No need for more positive marketing

[eebra82]

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?

Re:No need for more positive marketing

[qwijibrumm]

Because AMD has the same thing being introduced (hyperflash is believe they are calling it). Intel is making a bit of noise, and it is a good thing, but it is not a unique thing.

Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever.

[eebra82]

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.

Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever.

[Belial6]

Is it too much to ask that you explain these words you use as not all of use know what EVERY and ANY mean.

No, probably Vista only

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:This has to be the most worthless story ever.

[PopeRatzo]

With the exception of a small fraction of Slashdot readers, most of us are in fact capable of gathering information without a problem.

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?