Intel's New Flash Cache Negates SSD Performance Edge

[mickey megabyte]

Is Intel's new motherboard flash poised to damage SSD demand?

Turbo memory is returning in 2010, says chipmaker Intel. Intel's original Turbo Memory, which first debuted in 2006, was less than well received. While it shipped millions of units by Intel's own estimates, reviews of the product were lukewarm. Armed with new drivers and a new plan, this time around Intel believes it has what it takes to achieve a much greater success.

Intel's upcoming Turbo Memory successor, Braidwood, will consist of NAND flash module residing on "5 Series" motherboards (used with the upcoming Westmere 32 nm processors) and serve as a cache for all reads and writes. Capacities will be approximately 4GB to 16GB, and the cost increase will be approximately $10 to $20 per system, according to analyst Jim Handy, who authored a recent report on Braidwood. The technology is set to launch in the first quarter of 2010, though it may be delayed.

source

 

[DLG]

can somebody enlighten me to what this means? wahts so special about this memory and why would it have a negative affect on SSDs?

 

[mickey megabyte]

simply put, this new hardware will take a lot of the strain away from your harddrive, and uses faster memory than the current ssds.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Sounds like lower priced SSDs in the long run, thanks mm.

 

[Antman]

Absolutely good. I am still waiting for USB3 before re-investing. Along with SATA3, this new buffer, DDR3(+?), the newer multi-core CPUs, SSDs, et al, my next system will outclass my current platform by miles and miles.

And my current system is fine enough.

Waiting patiently.

 

[holo88]

Antman, I'd kill for a built in espresso machine (hard to find, nowadays)
when you do upgrade, i'll give you my shipping info. for a nominal fee, you can rid yourself of that space wasting clunker, and make room for your brand new, sniny new, new computer....
i run an "other peoples' old ***, obsolete computers" recycling center. (HA!)(tm)
(off the books of course)

 

[Antman]

Antman, I'd kill for a built in espresso machine (hard to find, nowadays)
when you do upgrade, i'll give you my shipping info. for a nominal fee, you can rid yourself of that space wasting clunker, and make room for your brand new, sniny new, new computer....
i run an "other peoples' old ***, obsolete computers" recycling center. (HA!)(tm)
(off the books of course)

The damned thing weighs a hundred pounds. I hate working on it. And I need to. I did a crappy job applying the thermal paste when my CoolIt died.

 

[fseal]

At even 16 gig, that's pretty small. It would need to probably be atleeast 64 to really negate having an SSD. When you blow the cache it has to resd through to the HD anyway so it'll only be fast for a portion of the time.

Still if it were 64 or 126gig, it could speed up a lot of work having a larger HD.

the small 4 Gig one though, cant see that as having much effect unless you didn't actually do anything but read mail and did a little web browsing (very little). Still, that probably covers MOST peoples machine use.

 

[Antman]

At even 16 gig, that's pretty small. It would need to probably be atleeast 64 to really negate having an SSD. When you blow the cache it has to resd through to the HD anyway so it'll only be fast for a portion of the time.

Still if it were 64 or 126gig, it could speed up a lot of work having a larger HD.

the small 4 Gig one though, cant see that as having much effect unless you didn't actually do anything but read mail and did a little web browsing (very little). Still, that probably covers MOST peoples machine use.

It is not a storage device.

I can see the benefit of having a several thousand MBs of video data in cache while editing video.