News - Intel sheds lights on Braidwood memory acceleration

[HEXUS]

I/O acceleration to offer significant performance boost to upcoming Intel boards, starting with Core i5.

Read more.

[borandi]

So essentially an off chip L4 cache?

[kalniel]

So essentially an off chip L4 cache?

No - that would imply it's between CPU and RAM. This is between hard disk and RAM.

[scaryjim]

So my 1TB SATA hard drive can now come with a 16GB cache. Wonder how prohibitively expensive this will be, considering that it needs to be *much* faster than a SATA drive to make it worthwhile...

[Biscuit]

sounds interesting but yeah price is gunna be an issue. Id be interested to know how it actually caches files, like do you select which ones it caches or does it figure it out automatically.

[this_is_gav]

sounds interesting but yeah price is gunna be an issue. Id be interested to know how it actually caches files, like do you select which ones it caches or does it figure it out automatically.

It'll just use the existing ReadyBoost and SuperFetch features of Vista and Win7 I'd imagine, using a driver to trick the OS.

Price will be an issue for most, but then, I doubt this is aimed at most, it's aimed at the enthusiasts, those who otherwise might have 8gb+ of RAM to take advantage of the SuperFetch goodness. If i5 and i7 were being launched at the same time, I doubt the 'budget' i5 boards would even have seen it, it being filtered down for the next generation instead.

[kalniel]

So my 1TB SATA hard drive can now come with a 16GB cache. Wonder how prohibitively expensive this will be, considering that it needs to be *much* faster than a SATA drive to make it worthwhile...

It doesn't need to be faster in sequential speeds, only access latency and random read/write, which co-incidentally suits flash down to the ground. If you've got something large and sequentual then I expect it'd just pass right through.

Think of it as a hybrid SSD/mechanical and it's not far off, using the strengths of both when appropriate.

I/O has long been a bottleneck and I think targeting that will make a big difference to the every day 'feel' and speed of a system.. however it's only a very temporary stop gap until SSDs become mainstream.

[tarqueen]

It doesn't need to be faster in sequential speeds, only access latency and random read/write, which co-incidentally suits flash down to the ground. If you've got something large and sequentual then I expect it'd just pass right through.

Think of it as a hybrid SSD/mechanical and it's not far off, using the strengths of both when appropriate.

I/O has long been a bottleneck and I think targeting that will make a big difference to the every day 'feel' and speed of a system.. however it's only a very temporary stop gap until SSDs become mainstream.

If having an SSD makes this redundant then surely they'll have to be pretty cheap to be anything like worthwhile otherwise you might as well put the cash towards an SSD instead

[kalniel]

If having an SSD makes this redundant then surely they'll have to be pretty cheap to be anything like worthwhile otherwise you might as well put the cash towards an SSD instead

Correct. But SSDs need a capacity in the hundreds of GB before they will be considered mainstream - this only goes up to 16GB so I think cost will be in their favour (for the same performance).