dailytech.com — At the Intel developer forum this past spring, Intel announced that the company would include 1GB of flash memory integrated into its upcoming mobile chipsets. The technology, dubbed Robson, is part of the Santa Rosa Centrino platform, expected to launch in the second quarter of 2007.
Oct 19, 2006 View in Crawl 4
geminitojanusOct 19, 2006
"thankfully Vista has complete support for NAND drives and Microsoft have really been pushing the use of it. They will welcome it with open arms."Actually, you're wrong. And I'm sad that it's true.Microsoft's support for NAND is at the end of a Hard Drive controller, meaning that as a driver tree:SystemRoot->South-Bridge->SATA-Controller->HDD0->NAND-Controller->NAND-CellsIntel's NAND will be set up differently:SystemRoot->South-Bridge->NAND-Controller->NAND-CellsIntel's is by far the more elegant solution, and the easier one to support, but Microsoft's unwilling to support it, namely because they think their idea is better, and because the hard drive companies have eaten it up. Meanwhile, consumers get screwed with un-upgradable flash-on-disk.But, I'm sure Intel will write a driver for Vista, and Apple will write a driver for Mac OS X to support either branch (after all, it's merely a memory mapping issue these days), but it's just one more thing to make x86 computers ugly..
fxscreamerOct 19, 2006
I remember this being announced in Fall 2005. Samsung was supposed to be the maker for the laptop hybrid drives. Apparently, like anything...it got delayed until now. I remember some test using PCMark showing a boost of something like 40,000 points over a standard hardrive test (being around 10K-20K). Thank god for solid state finally coming. The hardrive bottleneck will soon be the way of the dodo.
prosperoltOct 19, 2006
@millixaw - i believe it's been well established AMD & Intel take different approaches to their system architecture now...less you forget although Intel has the performance crown now, it was AMD who had been the innovator of the two the last 2-3 years...
nixdoctorOct 19, 2006
I was in the same boat as you... whether to wait till Leopard arrives, or to get kicking right now with Tiger! I chose the latter, because technology gets obsolete faster than you can imagine. Though older machines function beautifully, they're not considered as "cool". If you can live with the "uncool" factor, you should buy whatever works for you!
billybob476Oct 19, 2006
I guess and advantage might be that it's non-volatile.
izealotOct 19, 2006
Yay a first Gen apple product....I mean Yay.noYaY!Thank you for calling Apple Care.....