Intel Ups the Ante

Intel has been taking plenty of heat lately, including from us.  However, at the Computex trade show in Taipei they managed to sneak out a couple of cool new products.
Silicon Valley Sleuth noticed a low power CPU announcement.Running at 0.75 Watt, it looks like a sure winner for laptop users craving for long battery life.

And the folks at DigiTimes were excited by the upcoming Robson chip.

Robson utilizes NAND flash memory in conjunction with a standard hard disk drive (HDD) to create a Hybrid Hard Disk (HHD), which can improve software performance, reduce boot times and prolong battery life for a notebook PC by using features from Microsoft’s upcoming Vista operating system.

Robson will take advantage of two key features in Windows Vista – ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost. ReadyDrive enables the system to boot up faster by reading some files from NAND flash rather than from the hard drive. Patterson stated that the boot up time can be reduced from one minute to 30 seconds.

Although it may save the average user perhaps a minute per day, that minute staring at a booting screen is one of the most excruciating. So every second will count.

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