Fast-paced executives and impatient souls might be happy to hear this one. On Monday, Intel unveiled a technology, called Robson cache technology, that uses the NAND flash memory to not only boot the laptop up in a flash, but also to open programs almost immediately.
The curtains on the technology were lifted at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei. Besides time, the new Robson also saves the laptop's battery life.
“You get power savings because there's no need to spin the disc when you access applications,” said Intel spokesman Mooly Eden.
A demonstration of the technology at the forum showed a Robson-powered Centrino laptop opening Quicken in 2.9 seconds as against the 8 seconds that a regular laptop takes. Adobe Reader was ready for use in 0.4 seconds as compared to 5.4 seconds that other laptops require to open the program. The computer also went from sleep to active state with a lightening speed.
Laptops equipped with the latest technology rely on the standard NAND memory instead of using the hard drive for boot-up. According to Eden, a Robson card is capable of holding standard NAND flash memory ranging between 64 MB to 4 GB.
Asked when the technology would hit the shelves, Eden said the time-to-market depends entirely on hardware manufacturers. “It's up to the OEMs to decide how it will be implemented. My guess is that enterprise users will likely see it first,” he said.
Meanwhile, Robson, though developed by Intel, was loaded onto Samsung, Toshiba, and other NAND memory chips as Intel produces only NOR flash memory chips. Earlier in the year, Microsoft and Samsung had also unveiled a prototype hard drive, which wrote data onto a 1 GB flash memory chip, thus contributing to lower usage of power.
