Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 19, 2007 3:39 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
A Measurable Increase in Battery Life?
With a better understanding of how Turbo Memory is supposed to work, we went out and tried to make it work. We used the same test platform from our Santa Rosa article, except with only 1GB of memory instead of 2GB.
Our first test involved a loop of SYSMark 2007 running while the system was on battery power. We used a stopwatch to measure battery life between the start of the test and when the system eventually shut down at 0% battery power remaining.
Much to our disappointment, there was absolutely no increase in battery life with Turbo Memory enabled. Even with the drive set to spin down after 1 minute of inactivity, Turbo Memory could not even buy us an extra minute of time on the battery.
We suspected that SYSMark had a bit too much going on in the background for Turbo Memory to have any impact, so we turned to simpler tests.
PC WorldBench 6 measures performance in individual applications running independently of one another; a lack of multitasking means that there's a greater chance of finding a scenario where data can be properly prefetched into the ReadyDrive cache. The only issue with WorldBench is that each test has a reboot before and after it runs, which makes the benchmark less real world since you don't normally reboot your notebook every 6 minutes; that being said, it's still worth a look.
The first WorldBench test is the Mozilla benchmark; the user basically browses the web for around 4.5 minutes and the test is run as fast as possible on the system.
Here we see a dramatic increase in battery life, a total of 20 minutes, with Turbo Memory enabled. The 16% increase in battery life is most likely due to the small dataset that we're working with here since all the test is doing is loading webpages over and over again.
We looked for another common notebook usage model with WorldBench and ran its Microsoft Office benchmark:
Once again we were met with impressive results; Turbo Memory increased battery life just over 12%, or 17 minutes.
For our final battery life test we wanted to see the impact of Turbo Memory on watching a DivX movie off of the hard drive. We loaded up a DivX rip of Casino (we've been on a mob film kick around here lately) and looped it until the battery ran down.
Our DivX playback test only resulted in a 4% increase in battery life, translating into an extra 8 minutes of movie playback. It's not huge, but when on battery power we'll take just about any increase we can get.
What's most interesting here is the wide range of improvements we've seen from Turbo Memory. From absolutely no gain in battery life under SYSMark, to more than a 16% increase under WorldBench. We expect the real world impact to be somewhere in between, and unfortunately it looks like the gains will be much less the more multitasking you do on your system.
That being said, when you're trying to squeeze out every last minute of battery life from your notebook you're usually not multitasking heavily, meaning there's a chance for Turbo Memory to make a difference.
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casket - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
"If you add more memory to laptop, you use more power, emit more heat, etc"-- Using this logic... adding ReadyBoost (which is memory) would also use more power, emit more heat, etc...
The key here is that either readyboost or memory uses less power than a spinning hard drive. I would suspect you get the same power savings with more memory as well.
yyrkoon - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
I dont know about anyone else, but I am starting to resent Intel using town names of the area I grew up in as a kid. You would think they could be a little more original.PrinceGaz - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
I'd say that if it reboots every 6 minutes or so to re-run the test, it isn't worth a look and is totally useless as a notebook baterry-life benchmark as it in now ay reflects real-world usage, and all results using it should be discarded. Surely a better benchmark could be found than that. Unfortunately, removing the WorldBench results make Turbo Memory seem next to useless, which is understandable as it is likely to have been mainly the reduced HD activity when rebooting that the Turbo Memory was helping with.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
And yet, the mocked up WorldBench 6 test shows a rather impressive 12% increase in battery life. It seems that the startup/shutdown process at the very least gets a decent benefit (in terms of battery life) from Turbo Memory. That indicates that the power savings from putting the hard drive to sleep are definitely tangible.redly1 - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
I would like to buy this and test it out with my tablet PC. Anyone know where I can buy one of these mini-PCIe cards?skaaman - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Here is the part# NVCPEMWR001G110You can pick them up for under $35
BD2003 - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
The problem I have with the article is that in general, they are still running benchmarks that do not reflect how an actual user interacts with their laptop, and do not really reflect the benefits that turbo memory/readydrive/readyboost would have.PCMark is supposed to give a number as to how fast your computer can run a barrage of application tests - but looping it over and over does not even come close to reflecting an actual usage pattern.
Now granted, they need a *repeatable* test to have numbers that are comparable, but that does not necessarily speak of the validity of the numbers.
For the average office laptop, you'll be running outlook, word, excel etc - the amount of data actually being loaded and saved is VERY small vs. large amounts from a benchmark, and in that very common scenario, the drive would rarely have to spin up, and the battery savings would probably be much closer to the ideal of 30 mins than what their benches showed.
I do agree with them on their final conclusion - 1gb is just not enough for more than basic office tasks. In order for this to really take off, to be able to cache an entire movie, they're going to need cache on the order of 4gb. Then I think it'll really make a difference battery/performance wise.
And they really, really need to fix the driver issues.
BikeDude - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
If the movie is 4GB, a 1GB cache means (ideally) you will spin up the hard drive four times to load the next GB. I doubt you'll see much benefit from a 4GB cache in such a scenario.That said, the test didn't do any read ahead tests. All the descriptions so far seem to say the technology caches stuff already read. I.e. if streaming a movie from the hard disk there's nothing that will suck it all into a cache... (grrrr, this reminds me that my Hauppague TV tuner streams everything to a 7MB file which it then plays back -- works fine as long as I don't hit the same drive with heavy IO)
sorr - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
i'd just use another Gigabyte of memory i.e, 2 GB in total and hybrid drive for now, then after 2~3 years just use the SSD when it comes down in price and goes up in capacitySilthDraeth - Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - link
Page 4 mentions Windows XP. I thought I read the article, but maybe I am missing something. I thought it was purely for Vista, but XP is mentioned several times.Please explain, because I am confused. Thanks.