Com-Central.net

Intel's Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance :: Archived
Resolve issues with your computer problems here or read about the latest computer parts and information.

Forum Index › Hardware

Topic Archived

View previous topic :: View next topic

Author

Message

Shadow_Bshwackr
Janitor

Offline
Joined: Jan 21, 2005
Posts: 7019
Location: Central Illinois, USA

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 11:48 am
Post subject: Intel's Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance

Thank goodness there are guru's who work at making our systems faster and it looks as if Intel has concentrated on the HD bottleneck issue. Can you say Booting from RAM (Flash memory)? Yep, that's what Intel is up to...:wink:

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.

To read the whole article: Click HERE!

Shades
Forum Tree-Rat

Offline
Joined: Mar 07, 2005
Posts: 6475
Location: 3rd Branch up, 'Ye Olde Oak', Green Wood.

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 2:20 pm
Post subject: Re: Intel's Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance

Or I-RAM for my US brothers & sisters.

Mmmmmmm.... sisssssterzzzzzz

_________________

Skwerl's place.

Com-Central's cutest, fluffiest, twitchiest, tail.
CPU > Intel i9-9900k (o/c 4.9GHz); COOLING > BeQuiet! Dark Rock Pro 4;
MOBO > ASUS PRIME Z390-A; RAM > 2x32GB Corsair LPX 2666MHz;
GPU > Gigabyte GEFORCE GTX650Ti PCI-e 3.0 2Gb GDDR5;
AUDIO > Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music (plus - Universal Audio UAD2 Quad Custom accelerator);
HDD > 3x1TB+ M.2. SSDs; LCD > DELL - S2419HGF (1920x1080);
PSU > 650W be quiet Straight Power 11 - 80+ Gold;
CASE > BeQuiet! SILENT BASE 601; OS > Windows 11 Home Advanced (64-bit).

Forum Index › Hardware
Page 1 of 1

All times are GMT - 6 Hours

Archive Revive
Username:
This is an archived topic - your reply will not be appended here. Instead, a new topic will be generated in the active forum. The new topic will provide a reference link to this archived topic.

Select Language

Login

`±`Recent Visitors

`±`User Info-big

Com-Central.net

Select Language

Login

±Recent Visitors

±User Info-big

`±`Recent Visitors

`±`User Info-big