Kishan Jainandunsing
(March 2006)
IDF Spring, March 2006, San Francisco – Intel unveiled and demonstrated a caching method it calls Robson, which slashes application and data load times from a hard disk drive, as well as OS boot times and power consumption. All these are significant benefits for vertical embedded applications.
The Robson technology forms a cache between system memory and hard disk drive and addresses predominantly the mechanical latency of a hard disk drive. The technology consists of 2 parts: (a) NAND Flash memory between 64MB and 4GB and (b) a software driver. The memory interfaces over a PCI Express link to the chipset. The software driver anticipates disk block reads and caches these in the non-volatile memory. Since the memory is non-volatile, the computer can preserve it's state before powering down and not only come up in the same state, but do that almost instantly. Starting from non-volatile memory instead of the HDD reduces power consumption and since HDD-writes are buffered and only written later, disk access and power consumption are further reduced.
The research results presented by Intel, running MobileMark, show an improvement in disk access latency from 6.7ms to 2.6ms on average and a power consumption drop from 1.18W to 0.49W. The company demonstrated the technology on both desktop and mobile platforms. In the laptop demos the Robson equipped laptop opened Adobe Reader in 0.4 seconds, while the other notebook required 5.4 seconds, roughly a 13.5x faster response time. With reagrds to Quicken, the Robson laptop opened the application in 2.9 seconds vs. 8 seconds for the laptop without Robson. Roughly a 2.8x faster response time. In the desktop demos with Penium Extreme Edition CPUs, starting the game Battlefield 2 and loading the desired level happened 30 seconds faster on the system with Robson technology. It's unclear whether or not Intel will be licensing Robson widely, only making it available to Intel OEMs or restricting it to Intel-branded motherboards.
It's unclear how Intel is planning to make Robson available. It is also not clear if the company will make the technology available in its products for vertical embedded markets and for different operating systems then Microsoft Vista.
