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Hardware Intel Unveils Next Generation Turbo Memory
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - August 14, 2008 3:26 PM

46 comment(s) - last by Narcofis.. on Aug 19 at 9:09 AM

Analysts say Turbo Memory will gain no traction

Since Microsoft launched Windows Vista, there have been a number of complaints from users regarding usability of the operating system and other problems. One of the most common complaints about operating system is the sometimes sluggish response times in machines with inadequate amounts of memory onboard.

Microsoft tried to address some of the memory utilization issues with its ReadyBoost capability, which allows users to plug-in compatible flash drives to speed the system up. The catch is that many people who try to take advantage of ReadyBoost reported no real gains in performance.

Intel saw the opening for technology that would help accelerate Windows Vista and introduced its Turbo Memory. Intel Turbo Memory hasn't proven too successful to date and has found little support with PC manufacturers. In fact, HP has openly stated it saw no value in using Intel Turbo Memory in its notebooks.

News.com reports that Intel has introduced a new version of its Turbo Memory, which aims to transparently optimize Windows for flash memory storage. The new version offers a dashboard for Windows and allows the user to choose and control what applications or files are loaded into Intel's Turbo Memory. Intel calls the ability to pick and choose what files are loaded into Turbo Memory "user pinning."

Programs and applications that are data intensive will see the most benefit from the new Intel Turbo Memory according to Intel. Turbo memory is also said to be capable of accelerating gaming, digital media editing, and productivity software.

The goal for Intel Turbo memory is to address the shortcomings Windows has taking full advantage of flash storage devices. Avi Cohen from Avian Securities told News.com, "The more interesting way is to have it (ability to take full advantage of flash storage) built into the operating system. I don't think it (Turbo Memory) gains much traction because I don't think users want to sit there and start selecting what goes where. It was a valiant effort by Intel to accelerate the move toward solid state on PC."

Intel's Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group, says that Intel "has shipped millions of units" of Turbo Memory. Winslow expects Turbo Memory to show up in many manufacturers’ high-end notebooks.

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What happened to marketing

By kbehrens on 8/14/2008 3:45:24 PM , Rating: 2

Couldn't Intel come up with a better name than "turbo memory"?

RE: What happened to marketing

By ZaethDekar on 8/14/2008 4:14:48 PM , Rating: 2

wasn't that used back in like the late 80's early 90's?? I remember the 'turbo' button on my XT. but i thought I remember turbo memory also.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By AFMatt on 8/14/2008 9:13:12 PM , Rating: 2

Hahaha.. I remember those days. It was so you could run older software that couldn't handle your new speedy 33Mhz processor!
You know, maybe some Mobo manufacturer should resurrect the Turbo button.. Only this time, it is used to overclock at the click of a button.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By ImSpartacus on 8/14/2008 9:46:07 PM , Rating: 2

That would be cool, but their are too many unknowns. If you could program the button to do a specific pre-set oc then it would be fine, but then you ask yourself "Why don't I run this all this all the time?"

I think there's a market for that kind of thing with set hardware. I think I heard of one of those netbooks (eee clones) that could have it's atom slightly oc'ed when it was ac bound then underclocked when it was on battery. In that case I think a 'turbo' button would work great.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By atlmann10 on 8/14/2008 11:49:49 PM , Rating: 2

MSi has it on there current (Centrino 2) Notebooks and I think a few others do too. The 5 click does high energy medium standard medium2 and gaming settings it hink are the 5 clicks. Asus may have it on there two new ones to the m50 and m70 I think there called.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By murphyslabrat on 8/15/2008 1:05:40 PM , Rating: 2

I know Asus's C90 series has a similiar feature with four states: two underclocking states, normal, and a 20% overclocked state.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Hare on 8/17/2008 5:36:05 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
If you could program the button to do a specific pre-set oc then it would be fine, but then you ask yourself "Why don't I run this all this all the time?"

Pretty much all Abit, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus etc motherboards support this. There's really no need for a hardware button as you can do this with the software that came with your motherboard (or use Clockgen, SetFSB or any other tool).

Why not run it all the time? Because there's no point if you aren't close to 100% cpu utilization, you would pretty much just waste electricity -> more heat -> more noise. Current CPU's drop the multiplier very little when idling so another way to save electricity is to just drop the fsb and processor voltage dynamically.

Why use a "turbo button" when you can have small utilities do this in the background automatically.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By AstroCreep on 8/14/2008 9:47:19 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
...You know, maybe some Mobo manufacturer should resurrect the Turbo button.. Only this time, it is used to overclock at the click of a button.

Somebody did a year or two back. Forgive me for being scant on the details, but I want to say it was Gigabyte who used it for a series of notebooks that they made.
They had a 'turbo' button that enables some software-based overclocking. Click it again to set it back to normal.

I guess it didn't pan-out too well as it's not something we've seen since.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Solandri on 8/14/2008 4:20:37 PM , Rating: 2

Supercharged memory?

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RE: What happened to marketing

By corduroygt on 8/14/2008 4:35:02 PM , Rating: 2

Performance is out efficiency is in these days.
So, hybrid memory would be better :)

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Adonlude on 8/14/2008 5:02:17 PM , Rating: 2

Turbo memory sounds pretty efficient to me. C'mon, it's not like they made supercharged memory.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Solandri on 8/14/2008 6:21:12 PM , Rating: 2

Technically, I suppose if it's overclocked, it's supercharged.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By jadeskye on 8/14/2008 6:49:18 PM , Rating: 2

ultra-mem!

mem-brain!

yeah i'm out >_>

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Jeff7181 on 8/15/2008 1:04:37 AM , Rating: 2

Nope, it's blown.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Arribajuan on 8/15/2008 10:59:35 AM , Rating: 2

only if voltage is up!

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Cr0nJ0b on 8/14/2008 4:21:06 PM , Rating: 2

They could have used maybe Memory dx, that's got a ring to it. And they could have a button on the side of the machine that would engage or disengage this function to speed up memory or let it run at regular speed. My guess is that HP didn't push the turbo button when they did their testing.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By PointlesS on 8/14/2008 4:41:15 PM , Rating: 3

Intel XTREME MEMORY to the MAX!!!

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RE: What happened to marketing

By ZaethDekar on 8/14/2008 5:37:55 PM , Rating: 2

and next in Strongbadia:

Will the Cheet succesfully clone himself to have a female companion?

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RE: What happened to marketing

By amanojaku on 8/14/2008 7:18:50 PM , Rating: 2

XTREME MEMORY? Sounds like pornographic storage from Seagate...

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RE: What happened to marketing

By Omega215D on 8/15/2008 3:48:11 AM , Rating: 2

Sounds like the perfect companion to the future Apple P-P-P-P-PowerBook!

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RE: What happened to marketing

By kyleb2112 on 8/14/2008 6:51:34 PM , Rating: 3

RAD RAM!
If you're going back to the '80s go all the way baby.

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RE: What happened to marketing

By mezman on 8/18/2008 2:57:46 PM , Rating: 2

Super Mega Ultra Grover Memory?

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RAM + SSD = no need for "turbo" anything.

By therealnickdanger on 8/14/2008 3:47:44 PM , Rating: 5

Just about any budget can afford 4GB of DDR2-800 nowadays. As SSDs continue their descent in pricing while continuing on to push the limits of SATA II bandwidth, Intel's TurboMemory will die.

RE: RAM + SSD = no need for "turbo" anything.

By TomZ on 8/14/2008 4:00:00 PM , Rating: 3

The main potential benefit of Turbo Memory that can't be done with DRAM is acceleration of the OS boot process by storing a portion of the OS in flash memory.

But I agree with you - I find Intel's suggestion of using Turbo Memory for acceleration application loading somewhat puzzling. I wonder whether that will really provide much value compared to the DRAM-based pre-loading that Vista already does. I doubt it.

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RE: RAM + SSD = no need for "turbo" anything.

By Alpha4 on 8/14/2008 6:06:41 PM , Rating: 2

The Jet whore in me is wondering if that thing can cache the entire pool of Battlefield 2 maps.

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RE: RAM + SSD = no need for "turbo" anything.

By cheetah2k on 8/14/2008 7:35:28 PM , Rating: 2

Why not just buy a Gigabyte iRAM drive with 4gb, load on XP Pro and BF2 and your away.

Ever seen XP boot in under 5 seconds? iRAM does it best!

(umm.. desktop only tho..)

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RE: RAM + SSD = no need for "turbo" anything.

By Starcub on 8/15/2008 5:03:25 PM , Rating: 2

Robson sits in between HDD's and DRAM in terms of cost and performance -- the new version is supposed to have BW in the 100MB/s range, and of course, access times are still a few orders of magnitude faster than HDD's. Keep in mind that the Robson techs are meant to accelerate traditional HDD load times, so SSD's will eventually obsolete them.

Right now I'm on a system with 4GB of mem and my computer stutters (w/o Robson) if I try to do anything while Vista is indexing/optimizing my HDD (which is often since I configured Vista to use those techs). If I'm playing X3 and I load a new map, or if a bunch of ships spawn in my viewing area, there is a noticable pause as the files are load from disk into memory. I would expect the O/S to preload the necessary programs into DRAM, but evidently there is O/S <--> application miscommunication, or maybe the DRAM is being held by other processes.

In any case, Intel is going to allow the user to specify what programs get loaded into the cache. This should help alleviate performance problems that might exist due to Robson algorithmic or O/S memory management limitations.

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Wonder If??

By SpaceRanger on 8/14/2008 3:34:35 PM , Rating: 5

Rambus is gonna find some way to claim they had patents on this....

RE: Wonder If??

By Tegrat on 8/14/2008 3:39:56 PM , Rating: 5

We just did...

Thanks,
Rambus Inc.

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MS's biggest problem with Readyboost is...

By SiliconAddict on 8/14/2008 6:04:53 PM , Rating: 2

The fact that they didn't explain what the hell it did. I'm still seeing people who think that its designed to boost overall system performance. It isn't. Its designed to boost app start up times, and yes. Prior to SP1 RB sucked. SP1 fixed a number of problems with RB. The biggest being that the system deleted and recreated the cache on the chip after restoring from hib because it couldn't read the data file because the encryption hash had been lost.
RB is a solid concept, its not some magic bullet for speed.

RE: MS's biggest problem with Readyboost is...

By Chadder007 on 8/14/2008 7:21:49 PM , Rating: 3

Having more RAM that is just as cheap is much better to have than using a flash drive for ReadyBoost.

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RE: MS's biggest problem with Readyboost is...

By SiliconAddict on 8/16/2008 5:32:27 PM , Rating: 2

Again another person doesn't get it. RB is dedicated to that startup. The entire thing is designed for startup. Dropping more RAM in there will not cache specific app startup files.

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Application pinning is a usefull idea

By DallasTexas on 8/14/2008 6:16:19 PM , Rating: 2

Pinning a slow loading application like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom is a great idea for someone like me that launches this every day.
I can see pinning Firefox, Outlook and other frequently opened apps for lightening fast load restarting from a power off state.
This is a great idea.

RE: Application pinning is a usefull idea

By joeymac on 8/14/2008 8:29:27 PM , Rating: 2

For me Photoshop CS2 loads in about 5-10 seconds. That's with 4GB (3.3GB) and a Q6600 on 32bit Vista. That's not a lot. I have a video running, and a task bar full of open apps.
I can deal with that till proper 100GB+ SSD hard drives are affordable.

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RE: Application pinning is a usefull idea

By TomZ on 8/15/2008 10:16:17 PM , Rating: 2

If you open the same app all the time, then SuperFetch will already cache that for you.

And SuperFetch has the advantage that you don't have to manually specify which programs to pre-load. That seems like just another annoying thing to set up and maintain, and to remember to re-configure as your usage patterns change through time.

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Hmm

By Blitz82 on 8/16/2008 7:10:38 PM , Rating: 2

I think there's something seriously wrong when you need "Turbo memory" to run a OS. The idea that the OS will eat up 600 MB ram just to boot is so out there that I don't have words for it. An OS is supposed to provide an hardware abstraction layer and efficient distribution of the system resources. When it itself uses up 60% of your memory resources on a modern system, there's something seriously wrong. You could compare Vista to MacOS X, it provides lot of eye candy and simply just works without leaving an impact on the system resources. And no, i'm not an Apple fanboy, nor am I *nix or Microsoft fanboy. But Apple knows how to do things right.

RE: Hmm

By saen on 8/18/2008 5:05:33 PM , Rating: 2

600mb of Memory only seems like a lot to a Mac User, who has to pay $300 to move from 2gb to 4gb of ram.

Apple is sure getting those upgrade prices right.

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RE: Hmm

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 8/19/2008 8:47:19 AM , Rating: 2

Since Mac Pro's use FB-DIMM's thats an accurate number.

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I don't know if I trust....

By Megadeth on 8/14/2008 4:02:58 PM , Rating: 5

Anything regarding speeding up Windows from a guy name Win Slow

wouldn't it be better

By swizeus on 8/16/2008 11:40:30 AM , Rating: 2

wouldn't it be better to lift up the laptop memory limit to 4 GB and add more memory slot so anyone who buy laptop can throw in 4 GB of memory or even more.

Turbo Memory is a solution by intel because there seem to be not enough memory to utilize, isn't it ?

RE: wouldn't it be better

By Jackyl on 8/16/2008 1:02:14 PM , Rating: 2

I personally wouldn't buy ANY computer with less than 4GB. Not even if it had XP on it. Just add more memory and Vista runs fine. I have 8GB of DDR2-800, and Vista is extremely snappy.

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USB 3

By AlvinCool on 8/14/2008 4:54:57 PM , Rating: 2

I think maybe the person that couldn't find a use for USB3 just found one.

Winslow , lol

By mforce on 8/15/2008 8:00:25 AM , Rating: 2

This made me laugh , couldn't have picked a better name for promoting something to promote something for accelerating Windows speed.
Winslow is just perfect , he's the man with the right name for the job.
P.S. : Waiting to hear from Mr. Linfast from Intel too, of course.

What about XP?

By DukeN on 8/16/2008 1:03:47 PM , Rating: 2

Are there any benefits to using Windows XP with Turbo Mem?

Who needs turbo?

By saen on 8/18/2008 5:04:28 PM , Rating: 2

In an era of $80 4gb DDR2 800 dual channel memory packs do we even need this?

Sure the Mac fanboy, can snipe about Vista using 600mb of ram to load, but the $200 worth of ram I bought is over 10 times that amount, so who the hell cares.

Vista is super responsive on a machine with 4gb of ddr2 running a 45nm processor; I really dont see the need for this.

Now the 160GB SSD, to replace my internal drive, and a USB 3.0 external Terabyte; now we are talking.

Turbo Memory, Good old days!!!

By Narcofis on 8/19/2008 9:09:53 AM , Rating: 2

I don't like the word Turbo for the simple fact that it reminds me of my 386 and 486 which had the turbo button to clock this system down. Which I found totally useless when I was a kid. If I remember correctly the only time I ever used it was to play some very old games that I used to play on my 286. Men, this is going back a long time ago. Good old days!

They should have used a different name. I bet it would have fair better since I personally associate Turbo with a useless button from the 90's. Which is kind of ironic because Intel's Turbo memory doesn't improve performance.