Anandtech is taking a look at Intel’s Turbo Memory, a feature that was added with Intel’s recent introduction of the Santa Rosa platform.
This article follows HP’s comments about not offering Intel’s Turbo Memory as an option in their Santa Rosa based laptops, including the HP 2710p and HP 2510p, HP’s latest 12.1-inch ultraportables.
The one unique feature that Santa Rosa offered that no other competing mobile platform, Intel or not, could bring to the table was a technology called Turbo Memory. An on-motherboard flash card, Intel’s Turbo Memory is designed to act as another layer in the memory hierarchy, caching data where possible and improving performance/battery life in notebooks.
In our Santa Rosa preview we found that Turbo Memory did very little in fact. Performance didn’t improve (in some cases it got worse), we couldn’t find any measurable reduction in power consumption and in the end we found absolutely no use for the technology. Notebook makers echoed our sentiments, with both HP and Sony declining to use Intel’s Turbo Memory in their Santa Rosa lineups, but Intel insisted that there was an upside to the technology.
We met with Intel engineers to understand a bit more about Turbo Memory and why we weren’t able to see any positive results out of it. Intel’s explanation and the resultant lightbulb that lit in our heads, led to the production of this article.