14 DAY TRIAL // DigiTimes has published a report in which they share information from their sources, about Apple's new Robson technology using laptop.
The Robson technology, which relies on NAND flash memory instead of traditional hard drives for booting a computer, was only recently demonstrated, in the fourth quarter of last year, during the Intel Developer Forum Taipei in October 2005. The technology allows for almost instant booting of the computer, and, in the case of laptops, improves battery life as there is no need to mechanically spin up the hard drive. Apparently, DigiTimes sources say that Apple will release the new laptop in the middle of this month.
There are no details on which line of laptops, iBooks or Powerbooks, will be using the technology, and how it will be implemented. Robson technology can be used in one of three ways: the fist would be a NAND flash disk on module that would plug into the ATA slot; the second would be a combined memory solution, offered by hard drive manufacturers, in which they would provide an addition density area that would be assigned to NAND flash; last - the direct approach, to embed the Robson-flash into a chipset or create an additional slot on the motherboard for such memory, which is very unlikely because it implies motherboard and chipset manufacturers to get involved.