TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Intel is making good on another one of the things talked about during the IDF, that being a substantial decrease in the time Centrino-branded laptops take to power up. The new changes, called “Robson Cache Technology”, are essentially a way of storing the most commonly used / bootable data on a flash chip as opposed to the hard drive. The biggest strain on laptop speeds is the oft-times slow spinning hard drive, and providing a small, but usable, chunk of space for extremely fast access is the goal. It apparently works, too, with boot times measured in seconds and programs opening in under a second after boot. On top of this it also gives power savings from not having to spin up from the disk or read from it as often. This technology isn't exactly a new idea and has been spoken about before, but Intel is making it happen. With “Robson” capacities upwards of 4GB you may have a laptop that has your entire operating system along with all your programs on a single flash chip, with tons of space left over for data. Very nice.