The “Break it Down” Blog

For those of you waiting on Intel’s Turbo Memory (ReadyDrive, ReadyBoost, etc.) bit-tech reports that manufacturers have given a resounding “Not until 2008 at the earliest” to the question of “When?!”.

The idea behind “Turbo Memory” and all this jargon is simply this:

Use flash-memory attached to the computer via a PCI-Express slot as a “faster than the hard drive” cache.

You could almost think of it as an “L4″ cache if you will. L1 cache is ultra-high-performance on-chip cache, L2 is very high performance off-chip cache but still on the chip’s platform, and then you have system memory that you could think of as L3, then this Turbo Memory would be L4, and then as a last resort the computer would request the information from the hard disk.

This is similar (the same?) as Vista’s ReadyBoost technology that takes a sufficiently fast USB drive connected to the computer, and uses it in exactly the same way.

Then you see the new push from hard drive manufacturers to integrate Flash-based memory directly into the drive to speed up the disk performance as it can pull more information not just from it’s 8 or 16mb cache, but it’s larger Flash memory as well integrated onto the drive. Infact I believe Samsung’s is already on the market and can be bought from Newegg while Dell’s new XPS m1330 already integrates a completely Flash-based hard drive (no spindle) that increases performance about 25% and lowers power consumption (no hard numbers).

Honestly I don’t think this love-affair with Flash is going to bring night-and-day differences, for the gamers out there hoping so, but it will be a nice boost for load times for most applications for the impatient among us.

Update #1: Interesting, Sony is suing Microsoft saying that they do not support Intel’s Turbo Memory spec.