Intel optimises Windows
A Volish task
INTEL HAS created an application that allows users to optimise Windows by loading programs or files via its flash turbo memory cache.
The new process, officially referred to as “pinning”, is expected to significantly boost performance of data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software.
According to Intel, custom pinning profiles can be easily created to group applications or files that match the user’s activity.
It should be noted that the Volish Vista includes a similar feature known as Readyboost. The built-in Windows optimiser is capable of assigning 250MB to 4GB of flash memory with a 2:1 compression ratio.
Intel has some pretty pictures on this pdf. µ
Comments
hmm
Looks more like a bit of hardware with driversI was hoping to have a customisable version of readyboost, doesnt look like this is it though
Let me know
... when it can be used to speed up real world game* performance and I will consider shelling out for the OS of doom until then shan't so ner :peg Enemy Taramosalata Quake Snores or Supreme Codpiece: Forged Appliance.
Always wondered about this
Ok. So how exactly does pre-loading crap to a slower media then my hard drive, or ram actually boost the speed of anything?Pin this! My rather run of the mill $99 640gb WD Drive has faster read xfer rates then most USB flash drives, further my older RAID0 setup with 2 Seagate 320gb 7200.10's is in the same boat... So somehow prepositioning data off of the faster drives, and onto a relatively slow USB key, is going to give me more performance? I could understand if the the USB keys were faster then my drives, but i'd seriously just rather have more ram, then this garbage.
Bring out faster flash drives, then we'll talk.
Great, but...
2 years too late...Waste of time
Sounds like a waste of time to me and I can't see it actually being faster then HDD with the current USB 2.0 Speeds unless this is for USB 3@ DSP "always wondered"
They may be aiming for USB 3.0 compatible drives for future systems, but I'd agree based on current products it's uselessWhat I want to see is something that lets me pre-load it into actual system RAM. Pretty much this exact interface except it goes to RAM not USB flash drives
If you follow the link...
You'll see that Intel wants to sell you a flash PATA drive that you can install in your machine and "pin" stuff to. This means that they're not talking about USB keys.ReadyBoost and Sleep mode
I tried ReadyBoost with a 4GB USB stick and I was very impressed. My middling-performance laptop was responding much quicker in some circumstances.Then I had to wander off to attend to some kid that fell down, and my laptop went to sleep as programmed. Afterwards ReadyBoost didn't work so well. It was all crash-and-burn and took an hour to store itself out.
It's not USB
Just because it's FLASH doesn't mean it's USB. There are PATA and PCIe FLASH cards. See: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemory/index.htmwhich are supposed to be 2X faster than HDDs with no spin-up latency
re: Always wondered about this
"Ok. So how exactly does pre-loading crap to a slower media then my hard drive, or ram actually boost the speed of anything?"The horrid ~10 ms read latency of a harddrive is very punishing when you're reading hundreds of tiny config files, registry entries, .DLLs, bitmaps and crap. I have no trouble believing you could achieve a modest speed up by mirroring those files on flash memory.
Of course, you could achieve an even greater speed up by globbing related things toghether like games have been doing since forvever.( e.g. .wad(doom), .pak(quake) and .gcf(source engine)).