This weekend was all about Braidwood. For those not in the know, Braidwood is the reincarnation of Intel’s Turbo Cache memory. The buzz started with an article from Objective Analysis posted on InforWorld, here.
While the article was let’s say a nice report, it lacked on the technical part as the details on how it functions are very sketchy. This made me wonder what could you gain from using 16Gb of SLC memory on a mainboard. No, it is not intended to act as a harddrive and boot windows from it, but rather to act as cache memory between the harddrive and the system.
I guess we should look at the two operations a harddrive should perform, read and write. When writing the processor has most of the time the data in the memory and it sends it in chunks to the harddrive, this stores it in it’s cache memory and in mean time starts the spinning of the platters to begin the finding of a place to write the bits. Unfortunately this process is a long one, somewhere around 10ms, whereas the processor can get information from the memory under 1ms and thus at some point the processor has to wait for the harddrive to finish the writing and then it sends the next chunk. If we would have some more memory available on the harddrive, the processor could send more chunks and thus not wait until the harddrive finishes. This cache would be the SSD integrated in the mainboard, so we could see some improvements here, especially on many small files that need to be written. Of course for the user the feeling would be that yes, the files were written but the hdd led would still blink for a while, until the cache is emptied.
On the read part … well, there is not much where a greater cache can help, maybe only to store some very often used files such that reads on the harddrive are limited.
Somehow I don’t buy the panic the article starts spreading (OMG the SSD market will crash, there is no need for SSD’s anymore) . Jeez, while I think there are some improvements coming out, the harddrive is still an issue. It can only write so quick and read so quick. The initial begin of an operation will take the same amount of time, no matter the cache dimension or speed.
Also there is another big point to be made. While an SSD costs around 200$, to get the new turbo cache you would have to go through an upgrade to an I5 processor and a compatible motherboard, and that would set you down around 300$ and you still don’t get the same performance improvements.
Just my 2cents …
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