In San Francisco today, Intel officially launched its Santa Rosa mobile chipset which touts, among other things, using flash memory to speed up computing tasks. Intel calls this ‘Robson Flash’ memory and to show off its speed, company representatives ran a technology demo which had the Robson-equipped notebooks running more than 100% faster than a traditional computer. But are those numbers too good to be true?
Using side by side laptops, Intel’s Chief Mobile Technology Evangelist (how would you like that title?) Mike Trainor showed us a benchmark which took pictures from Google Earth and then processed them through Photoshop Elements. The Robson flash memory-equipped laptop finished the test in about 71 seconds which was more than twice as fast as the non-flash laptop.
Such an increase is definitely impressive, but does the benchmark accurately simulate how a regular person would work? The benchmark appeared to slam several pictures at lightning speed into Photoshop, something that would play to the strengths of flash memory because the pictures would already be stored in flash for fast opening by Photoshop. Realistically though, we think the average user wouldn’t capture dozens of pictures and then open them all in Photoshop in one fell swoop. Trainor said that Robson Cache gains the most benefit when the regular system memory is stressed and overloaded, something that almost certainly happened in the benchmark. Users that never stress out their laptop memory would presumably see little or no gains in performance.
Early performance tests of Robson Cache even show a startling reduction in performance. Anandtech, a popular hardware enthusiast website, tested a generic whitebook Santa Rosa laptop and found increased boot and system hibernation times. The laptop also scored lower in the PCMark system benchmark. You can read their review here.
Source: TG Daily