Intel Turbo Memory - Overview

Overview

The technology was publicly introduced on October 24, 2005, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Taiwan when a laptop that booted up almost immediately was demonstrated. The technology attempts to decrease hard drive usage by moving frequently accessed data over to the flash memory. Flash memory can be accessed faster than hard drives and requires less power to operate, thereby allowing laptops to operate faster while also being more power efficient.

The Turbo memory cache connects to a motherboard via a mini-PCIe interface. It supports features available in Microsoft Windows Vista, namely ReadyBoost (a hard-drive caching solution via USB flash drives) and ReadyDrive (a hard-drive caching solution via hybrid drives). These features allow both read caching and write caching of data. Often this is implemented with a Disk Filtering Option ROM (DFOROM).