X-bit labs

Started by: Hok | Date 01/23/08

Comments: 3 | Last Comment:  04/22/08

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1. I wonder how this configuration will increase the pc speed in Vista:
- Motherboard with Intel Turbo Memory (1 GB)
- HDD with hybrid flash (256 MB)
- Super Fast Flashdisk (4 GB)
If three of that combine, how much the pc performance will increase?

Will increase or decrease?

It seems to me that for saving data to the HDD the fastest way is to use the system RAM for cache. I can’t see how slow FLASH memory can improve performance.
Many years ago in the 486 days there were some IDE cards with 1MB/2MB/4MB buffer. Guess what the (486) Computer with 8MB of system RAM was the fastest vs the computer with 4MB of system RAM + 4MB of HDD buffer.
I guess it was a matter of time for someone to revive something like this. I guess marketing companies like Intel and Microsoft like to charge more to us for names like “Turbo” just for fun.

2. I don't know......it doesn't seem that slow when you use a flash drive for large saves and transfers.
It's like anything else, if there's a dedicated onboard part then it should run better - it doesn't need to go through the bus and back; given that many-GB flash is now so cheap, not sure why they'd only put 256MB on.

If it's designed right then it should be a big performance increase to have a larger cache onboard; DDR2 is really cheap now also. There's a lot of design options. You need to balance the amount of data held and sent on to be written say, with the spindle and head speeds. Maybe use solid state and an efficient indexing / tagging (of the data saved) to reduce seek times. I wouldn't rule out seeing motherboards that have slots for some extra component-dedicated RAM.

And the solid state hdd's do perform very well on reads.

You can't draw comparisons between machines when one has half the RAM of the other. If those were being compared then they'd have to be the same hw doing the same operations, one with the extra cache and the other without.

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