Intel Turbo Memory

~ the obituary ~

Intel Turbo Memory became available on 9 may 2007, alongside the Santa Rosa laptop platform, after two years of being talked about under the codename Robson. The idea was reasonable on paper. Hard disks were the slow part of every laptop and flash was getting cheap, so Intel put a small amount of NAND on a mini PCIe card inside the machine and let Windows Vista use it as a cache. Vista had two features waiting for exactly this: ReadyDrive for non-volatile disk caching and ReadyBoost for supplementing memory.

The pitch was a faster boot and a hard disk that spun down more often, which meant battery. The sticker went on the laptop next to the processor sticker. This was the peak of the sticker era, when the palm rest of a notebook carried five or six little foil rectangles and at least one of them was for something the buyer could not explain.

I was in the middle of that window, finishing an engineering degree on Turkish broadband and reading hardware forums where people argued about specifications with the seriousness of people spending a month's money. Turbo Memory was one of the lines you had to have an opinion about for roughly a year. Then the reviews landed and the opinion resolved into nothing, which is the honest description of what the feature did.

~ the case file ~

~ what the benchmarks said ~

AnandTech tested it and concluded that it basically does nothing for the user experience. Other testing found the benefit disappearing once a machine had more than a gigabyte of system RAM, and by 2007 a gigabyte was the floor rather than the ceiling. Vista itself was a memory-hungry operating system, and the money spent on the Turbo Memory option bought less improvement than the same money spent on another RAM module, which is a hard thing for a feature to survive.

The manufacturers noticed before the customers did. HP would not adopt it. Sony looked at it and said there was no customer benefit right now, and left it out of a whole summer laptop line. On ThinkPads the card occupied a mini PCIe slot that could otherwise have carried a mobile broadband module, so choosing Turbo Memory meant giving up a radio for a cache that did not measurably help. Owners worked this out and pulled the cards.

~ what came after ~

Intel tried again. Turbo Memory 2.0 arrived in 2008 with more capacity and a utility that let you pin specific files into the cache by hand, which is an odd thing to ask of a laptop owner. A successor called Braidwood was announced for the 5-series chipsets in 2009, motherboards were built with a connector position for it, and no production board ever came with the connector fitted. The Register checked in 2011 and wrote that Braidwood had sunk without trace.

What actually solved the problem was the solid state drive, which did not cache the slow disk so much as remove it. Intel kept working the same seam for another decade with Optane, first as a small cache module in front of a hard disk and then as a memory tier, and closed that down too in 2022. Turbo Memory was the first version of a bet Intel would keep making: that there is a profitable layer between memory and storage. There keeps not being one.

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