Jonathan's Hardware Thread 2H 2006

[Jonathan]

http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1168

I am seriously considering building a new computer, but two things are stopping me. First, I bought a $300 AGP graphics card for my last computer not very long ago, and would have to spend at least $200 to get a similar level of performance in a PCIe card. So that busts the idea of a low-cost upgrade for the CPU/motherboard/RAM (subsidized by Intel, of course).

Second, I really want this Robson (actually Snowgrass, in its desktop incarnation) feature, which won't come out until 2007. Robson/Snowgrass is NAND flash inserted between the disk and RAM, distinct from NAND on a disk (hybrid drives) or NAND on USB. As currently implemented Snowgrass isn't particularly different from hybrid drives, except you can replace the flash and the hard disk independently with Snowgrass but not with hybrid drives. One could certainly imagine drivers that were intelligent about which data was put on flash and which was bypassed, though, which would require a separate interface to the flash (i.e. Snowgrass). USB isn't fast enough to act as a disk cache, so anybody you see bemoaning the current availability of this does not know what he is talking about. Snowgrass really helps game load times; I'm thinking it would do wonders for my Eve warp lag. A C2D wouldn't hurt, either.