Com-Central.net

March 10, 2006
Intel's Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance
By Victor Loh and Loyd Case

Accessing a disk drive is hundreds of times slower than accessing main system memory. Flash memory is slower than the DRAM used for system memory, but it's still far speedier than pulling data from rotating magnetic media. If you've ever waited for a large game level to load, you'll know what we mean. There you sit, with the hard drive light flickering, staring at a progress bar on the screen. For this, you've paid $50?

But it's not just a matter of loading applications faster. One of the major sources of battery drain in a notebook PC is its spinning media. If you could get data from a large flash memory cache instead of spinning up the hard drive, you'd save a lot of power. Boot times would speed up substantially, too. Since a flash cache is nonvolatile, powering up from hibernate would be quicker and use less power than coming out of hibernation using the hard drive. Add the fact that hibernation uses less power than standby mode, and you can see the potential for big power savings.

Several efforts are underway to enable this. Microsoft is trying to convince hard drive makers to build hybrid hard drives, which add large flash memory caches to the hard drive itself. But this adds cost to a hard drive, and it could be years before hard drives convert to this method completely.

So why not add a flash memory cache directly to the system? Intel is proposing to do just that, with its Robson flash cache technology.

In the Real World

Synthetic benchmarks are all well and good, but Intel also demonstrated how Robson might perform in a real-world scenario. During the Digital Home Keynote, two gamers loaded up Battlefield 2. Both were systems equipped with Pentium 955 Extreme Edition CPUs and ATI CrossFire X1900s. One system implemented Robson, the other was stock.

The system with Robson booted Battlefield 2 and loaded the level nearly 30 seconds ahead of the standard system. While it's not quite the competitive advantage for gamers that the demo suggested, imagine working with large Photoshop files, 3ds max or other applications with large memory footprints that swap a lot of data to disk. Or imagine substantially faster bootup into the operating system. All of these seem pretty attractive.