Intel's "Robson"

[The_Wolf_Who_Cried_Boy]

This one snuck through to the keeper (From March 10th).

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1936630,00.asp

Intel are planning to introduce a motherboard based flash memory hard drive cache called Robson.

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.

It's original intent was as a power saving measure for mobile hard drives but it seems just as well suited to desktops for fast booting et all (even if initially somewhat capacity constrained) .

 

[nutball]

How does the price of flash compare to standard DDR memory? Flash obviously makes sense for mobile platforms, but I wonder whether for desktops a battery-backed DDR RAM solution might not prove more cost effective (in a £'s per GB sense).

Even today the faster boot-up times are a moot point... you can get them right now with your friend and mine S3(STR).

 

[Zaphod]

It's original intent was as a power saving measure for mobile hard drives but it seems just as well suited to desktops for fast booting et all (even if initially somewhat capacity constrained).

They're not alone in having that idea.

 

[Davros]

No they're not

Hyperdrive 200x faster than a conventional hard drive.

The Worlds fastest commercial Hard Disk Drive has arrived
Fits into a standard CDROM bay
PATA and SATA connectors
133MHz bus speed
Solid state technology
Takes up to 8 DDR1 Registered ECC memory sticks up to 2GB per stick.
Max capacity is therefore 16GB
External power connector so that is keeps data when PC is turned off
Battery backup connector so that is keeps data in the event of a power cut
UPS can be added to external power supply or to battery connectors for long power cuts
Auto backup to optional board mounted portable hard disk in the event of a power cut
Very Low power Sleep mode automatically activated when PC power is lost
Seek time is 40 microseconds completely Silent!


http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

 

[ANova]

Nice, but very expensive.

 

[dizietsma]

I quite like the idea it has to be said. Things are deinitely moving this way and the advantage of having it on the motherboard over the hard drive or a pure NAND hard drive is that if they put it in an upgradable socket you could improve your performance just be swapping the "unit" out at a later date. We've all seen that NAND memory is getting bigger, cheaper and faster so this would be a good upgrade along with the cpu. Indeed, it would seem reasonable for the cpu maker to a deal when you buy both at the same time.

I find that scenerio very palatable indeed.

 

[_xxx_]

The problem of keeping the data when the power's off will prevent it from gaining foot in the market (the socketed RAM version). Flash will be nice, but we'll have to wait till the prices drop to an acceptable level.

 

[Npl]

I would rather up my System-RAM, way more usefull. In a perfect world the OS would then cache the files worked on, beeing way more usefull than a seperate pool of memory. If not, you could still install a Software RAM-Drive which lets a part of Memory act as Harddrive.

The downside compared to flash is of course is that the data is lost after powerdown. If you actually want a speedup for working with memhungry apps like photoshop, extra SyIf Motherboards would allow for keeping the RAM alive

Similar if you play a game the additional System-RAM will allow for caching - should be testing how loading times are between a System with say 6GB Ram and a System with 2GB RAM + Flash-HD, I bet apart from inital loading times the difference will be small and even in favor of System-RAM.

Seems for me, that those drives are primar for people running benchmarks most of the time. Even more so if future Motherboards would allow you to keep RAM alive (Yay resident viruses)

 

[Zaphod]

Err. Solid sate drives have been around virtually forever (at least 15 years), and have always been extremely expensive and not worth it for the consumer market.

Even now that non volatile memory is getting cheaper (dirt cheap), they're still not viable just by themselves. Thus, the use of flash in combination with normal disks emerges. The primary reason is savings in power and heat, not revolutionary speed. For a laptop 2-3W is ~10% battery life, and even for a 24/7 desktop with several disks it racks up en the end. Today you don't want to spin your disks down because it's both A) stressful for the disk so they tend to fail faster, and B) even if started back up as quick as possible – the annoyance of a couple seconds lag (and noise from the spin-up) is too big for it to be worth it.

This will allow the disks to spin down, and either not spin up at all or allow for a less stressful and smoother spin-up without the user experiencing any lag. Any pure performance increase is but a bonus. Sign me up.

 

[Npl]

Uhh, that takes a different spin of that matter then. Davros post struck my eye and I thought it was all bout performance.

 

[Zaphod]

Ah. His post is a bit off tangent to what's described by the thread starter. Several manufacturers ar playing with this, Intel has one of their 'initiatives' (Robson) going on the MB-side, and at least Samsung have announced production models for disks with the tech.

Say a buffer at >1GB for a desktop drive and a bit less for a notebook. Shouldn't increas prices too much. I know it's not totally comparable, but 1GB fast MicroSD isn't much more than €30 incl. 20-25% VAT now.