Intel Centrino Pro - Robson demonstration

I would like to see a third laptop in that presentation, just to the right of the machine with “Turbo” Memory - a machine with a real 2gb of ram.

Obviously this is a way to bodge around not having enough ram in your system using cheap Flash memory as a paging drive. But if you consider yourself “pro” enough to buy centrino “pro” - shouldnt you know how much ram you need in your machine?

It's very clever marketing - sell the “pro” goods to people who don't know how computers work, but they really should rename it “centrino cheapskate oem”

f

funnelhead
I would like to see a third laptop in that presentation, just to the right of the machine with “Turbo” Memory - a machine with a real 2gb of ram.

Obviously this is a way to bodge around not having enough ram in your system using cheap Flash memory as a paging drive. But if you consider yourself “pro” enough to buy centrino “pro” - shouldnt you know how much ram you need in your machine?

It's very clever marketing - sell the “pro” goods to people who don't know how computers work, but they really should rename it “centrino cheapskate oem”

f

Funnelhead,

I don't think you understand everything the Pro has in it - Mobile vPro and such too.

This is one feature, which is pretty negligable cost to the system but adds performance. There is a load of things which will make the Pro offering a pretty sweet setup :)

The other advantage with this is power saving - using flash instead of a HDD for getting data to the ram makes a big difference :)

Robson is designed to augment RAM not the HDD

It will increase performance even if you have 2GB ram :)

Do not confuse this with TurboCache which was a cheap bodge in essence :)

So a meaningful comparison in the way that you suggest would means would be to have a 3rd laptop there with a multi-way RAID0 array of 15Krpm/16MB cache drives… good luck with finding such a laptop :mrgreen:

Good marketing, but it's like ReadyBoost - it's not a replacement for memory, it's a means of allowing Vista to play with things more efficiently.

It would make a difference to a machine with 2GB RAM, and quite probably 4GB, though the effect will become much more diminished the more RAM you have.

My only worry is that it will lead to companies such as Adobe, famed for their bunging half of their Reader into memory on startup, just abusing it and loading pre-caching all-sorts. It's a measure to alleviate that problem, not to encourage more companies to do so. I'd like the choice please, OpenOffice like.

Sorry, got a bit side-tracked there, and moved onto RB rather than Turbo Memory.

ok i can see how having a flash drive to load common apps into at startup would reduce subsequent hard drive access and prolong battery life. That is cool, though i do worry about that being abused as gav does by lazy or unscrupulous companies (cough, adobe)

As for using this to increase performance - well i thought the machine was just using the flashmem to hold the paging file rather than the HD - if this is not the case, then what does it do?

Always happy to learn more!

f

funnelhead
As for using this to increase performance - well i thought the machine was just using the flashmem to hold the paging file rather than the HD - if this is not the case, then what does it do?

That's ReadyBoost, not Robson :)