David Flynn21 December 2006, 7:39 AM
... but says yes to Intel's motherboard-integrated 'Robson' flash technology for enhancing performance and extending notebook battery life?
One year on from the introduction of Intel's made-for-mobile Core Duo 'Yonah' processor in its MacBook Pro line, Apple looks set to integrate another member of the Centrino technology family into its next-gen notebooks.
This time around it's Robson, Intel's codename for an on-board module which uses NAND flash memory as a 'smart storage' buffer between system RAM and the hard drive.
The flash chip is used to store system boot files as well as the most often-used data files, which can be written and retrieved at several magnitudes faster than any mechanical hard disk -- especially when the drive itself has to spin up to speed before disk access can take place.
The benefits extend from faster start up, shutdown, standby and resume times to enhanced application performance and, for notebooks, extended battery life.
Robson is part of the checklist for Santa Rosa, the codename for Intel's next iteration of the Centrino platform, and it's been extensively demonstrated at every IDF expo over the past 12 months (you can read Intel's backgrounder and performance claims here).
Intel will sell Robson to OEMs as a mini-card module or a kit of components which can be mounted directly onto the motherboard. Santa Rosa's Crestline chipset will act as traffic cop, coordinating Robson's flow of bits over the PCI Express bus.
 Intel Robson: coming soon to MacBooks? |
Modules are expected to be offered starting at 256MB for around US$20 to OEM manufacturers, according to information presented at the this year's Computex techfest in Taiwan, with other packages at 512MB, 1GB and 2GB.
The cards have a 40 Mb/s read time and 12-15 Mb/s write time -- typical for NAND, in which write times exceed read times (and the opposite of NOR, where reading is the quicker of the two operations).
However, Robson won't be a must-have item in the Santa Rosa recipe. "You'll see many systems with Robson, because it enables us to accelerate performance and save battery life, but it will not be mandatory" Mooly Eden, General Manager for Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, told APC in a recent interview. Manufacturers will be free to choose if they adopt Robson and, if so, how much flash memory they use.
So where does Apple fit into this? Late last month, on a visit to Samsung in Korea, APC met with the Chuck Kang, an engineer from the Flash Memory Planning Group in Samsung's sprawling semiconductor business.
Kang was briefing us on Samsung's flash-enhanced hybrid hard drive, which takes the same approach as Robson but integrates the flash memory into the hard disk assembly rather than mount it on the motherboard.
Microsoft has long promoted Samsung's technology, which will be branded as FlashON drives, as a poster child for the ReadyDrive capability in Windows Vista. (ReadyDrive is the inbuilt OS support for disk caching to NAND flash devices -- not to be confused with ReadyBoost, which uses USB memory keys to expand the pool of available system memory). We'll have more on hybrid hard drives next week.
During our chat with Kang, we asked if Samsung had offered the technology to other OS vendors besides Microsoft?
"We did propose the HDD (hybrid disk drive) concept to Apple" he said, "but Apple's opinion is that they're not going to use [the] HDD for their systems... they won't support it".
Kang said that with the appropriate software, Samsung's FlashON "can support other operating systems" besides Vista, so all is not lost.
However, it's certain that Apple won't be first in line at the hybrid hard disk party when these drives start to hit the market through the first quarter of 2007.
Which made us wonder if Apple is set to add another piece of the Centrino technology tinker-set to its own checklist, especially for notebooks.
It's not that hybrid hard drives can't be used on desktops. However their most significant benefits are most appropriate to laptops. Extending battery life by reducing hard disk access and hopefully the number of times the disk needs to spin up at all is a no-brainer for notebooks.
Faster times for startup, shutdown, sleep and resume times -- all due to slabs of the necessary system startup data being read from and written to a slab of flash RAM rather than hard disc platters -- are far less crucial to Apple than in the Windows world. Take 10 seconds off the resume time for most Windows notebooks and you've more than halved the finger-drumming wait. Take ten seconds off the resume time for a Mac and you're back to a point in time before you actually lifted the laptop's lid.
Of course, no-one would object to eking out any extra degrees of speed from their Mac desktop, and this is where the overall enhanced performance of a flash-assisted hard disk access comes into play.
Provided the OS or the associated drive software is smart enough, the most-used code can be loaded into flash memory for faster recall, with associated files deliberately shovelled into the flash segment for 'pre-fetching' so they're ready for when you need them.
Intel's Robson rollout calls for a specific driver which builds a bridge between Robson, the OS and Intel's Matrix Storage Manager for managing the NAND flash.
There's also BIOS and EFI-level code which breathes life into the Robson module before the OS and its drivers load, which is necessary if most (or all) of the OS itself is to be called directly from flash memory.