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Intel sheds light on Braidwood memory acceleration

by Parm Mann on 3 June 2009, 13:17

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Remember the unusual NVRAM slot we've been seeing on 'Ibex Peak' P55 and H57 boards here at COMPUTEX? Well, we've tracked down Intel and confirmed that the slot is indeed used for Braidwood memory technology - confirming that Braidwood will be made available later this year with the launch of its Core i5 processors, codenamed Lynnfield.

So, what's Braidwood and why does it matter to you? Well, as mentioned previously, it can be thought of as Turbo Memory on steroids and it provides dramatic I/O acceleration to speed up all-round system performance. Think of it as a super-quick cache, acting if you will like a board-mounted SSD to provide rapid access to files and applications.

The Braidwood flash memory module, pictured above, will slot into NVRAM slots found on Intel's Ibex Peak boards - beginning with P55 later this year. Intel isn't yet quoting capacities for its Braidwood modules, but we're led to believe they'll reach up to 16GB in size.

We're looking forward to mainstream Nehalem as much as the next guy, but Braidwood - we reckon - will provide the performance boost most will recognise. SSD-like performance isn't to be sniffed at, and we'd expect Braidwood to make its way into Core i7 boards somewhere down the line, too.


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HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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So essentially an off chip L4 cache?
borandi
So essentially an off chip L4 cache?

No - that would imply it's between CPU and RAM. This is between hard disk and RAM.
So my 1TB SATA hard drive can now come with a 16GB cache. Wonder how prohibitively expensive this will be, considering that it needs to be *much* faster than a SATA drive to make it worthwhile…
sounds interesting but yeah price is gunna be an issue. Id be interested to know how it actually caches files, like do you select which ones it caches or does it figure it out automatically.
Biscuit
sounds interesting but yeah price is gunna be an issue. Id be interested to know how it actually caches files, like do you select which ones it caches or does it figure it out automatically.
It'll just use the existing ReadyBoost and SuperFetch features of Vista and Win7 I'd imagine, using a driver to trick the OS.

Price will be an issue for most, but then, I doubt this is aimed at most, it's aimed at the enthusiasts, those who otherwise might have 8gb+ of RAM to take advantage of the SuperFetch goodness. If i5 and i7 were being launched at the same time, I doubt the ‘budget’ i5 boards would even have seen it, it being filtered down for the next generation instead.