Imagine Battlefield 2 starting up in just a few seconds. Imagine significantly extending your laptop battery's life. Intel's Robson disk caching technology may do more to save power and speed up your system than a faster CPU.
Accessing a disk drive is hundreds of times slower than accessing main system memory. Flash memory is slower than the DRAM used for system memory, but it's still far speedier than pulling data from rotating magnetic media. If you've ever waited for a large game level to load, you'll know what we mean. There you sit, with the hard drive light flickering, staring at a progress bar on the screen. For this, you've paid $50?
But it's not just a matter of loading applications faster. One of the major sources of battery drain in a notebook PC is its spinning media. If you could get data from a large flash memory cache instead of spinning up the hard drive, you'd save a lot of power. Boot times would speed up substantially, too. Since a flash cache is nonvolatile, powering up from hibernate would be quicker and use less power than coming out of hibernation using the hard drive. Add the fact that hibernation uses less power than standby mode, and you can see the potential for big power savings.
ExtremeTech
But it's not just a matter of loading applications faster. One of the major sources of battery drain in a notebook PC is its spinning media. If you could get data from a large flash memory cache instead of spinning up the hard drive, you'd save a lot of power. Boot times would speed up substantially, too. Since a flash cache is nonvolatile, powering up from hibernate would be quicker and use less power than coming out of hibernation using the hard drive. Add the fact that hibernation uses less power than standby mode, and you can see the potential for big power savings.
ExtremeTech
