Other Innovations
Of course Computex just wouldn’t be complete without a bit of everything else mixed into the fray. The first and probably most exciting entry here is the iRAM unit from Gigabyte.
This iRAM is a device from Gigabyte that allows you to utilize standard DDR memory as a solid state storage device on your PC. While at first this doesn’t seem very exciting, you’ll soon find out why the industry was all abuzz during the show about this product.
Here is the device in action: it has four DIMM slots for DDR memory, a PCI bus interface, a SATA interface and a batter on board that will apparently last for 16 hours before losing all the data on the card. (Better plug it back in, quick!) It uses the PCI bus for power, not for communications as the SATA bus is the part that moves data back and forth between the system and iRAM.
Here is a screenshot of a benchmark that Gigabyte was running at their booth. This one shows a standard 7200 RPM SATA drive’s performance. Though you can’t read it from the image I have placed here, the results show a max read of 64 MB/s and a min read of 27 MB/s.
Here is the same test run on the iRAM device. It shows a much more consistent performance graph with a max read speed of 117 MB/s and a min read speed over 106 MB/s. This is obviously a MUCH faster system, though there are some drawbacks to it as well. Interestingly, we found that the memory that was running on the iRAM was in fact only running at 33 MHz! This slow of a clock was required by the SATA bus for some reason though we are already seeing a much higher performance rate than on standard drives. The uses for this device are already spinning in my head….
Here we see the AOpen XC Cube Mini device that is obviously meant to have you think of the Apple Mac Mini machine. It sports a decent list of specs and we are expecting one soon in house to review.
Finally, we have the latest memory from Corsair in the form of DDR2-667 modules in XPert form! Finally users that have wanted the diagnostic and flashiness of the XPert line can get them on the DDR2 platforms as well.
And just for fun, here are those modules running quiet well at the 1 GHz level!
