MSI to bundle Intel Robson cards with motherboards

IN A BID to offer more value with their products, several motherboard manufacturers decided to start bundling variations of Turbo Memory - formerly known as Robson Technology - using the available technologies.

For starters, MSI is going to bundle a PCIe x1 card with around 1GB of flash memory, and we expect that Asus and Gigabyte will follow suit. The engineers we talked to told us that putting this memory onto a PCIe slot makes real sense, because it will not be sensitive to load of USB bus, and this is the tech Chipzilla intended it to be used. Notebook designs feature a mini-PCIe slot.

The cost of the boards should be offset with the increased performance we have already seen, but desktop drives offer higher performance than 5400 rpm drives Intel was using to demonstrate Robson at last years' IDF Fall in San Francisco.

PCIe x1 slot is slowly finding its reason to live, only three years after introduction...

If the truth be told, nothing replaces more memory, but every technology that will speed up the swap is welcomed. Now, we have grown tired of numerous showings of SSD drives that aren't being sampled, yet alone manufactured - so yours truly will refrain from promoting the tech before reps of SSD manufacturers finally step up and provide samples of SSD drives to interested press.

So Intel Robson sounds like a good stop gap until real SSDs arrive on market. µ