IDF San Francisco 2008: Intel wants to halve loading times in games

With the X18-M and the X25-M Intel introduced two solid-state drives for the mass market. Now the company showed which benefits can be gained by the faster access time and transfer rate.

Those benefits were on display in a presentation. According to Intel loading times of computer games increased over the past few years. While the performance of processors grew by 175 times since 1996, the improvements of hard drives have been only minor: current mechanical hard drives are, according to Intel, only 1.3 times faster than in 1996.

This bottleneck is supposed to be resolved by solid-state drives. They actually are intended for notebooks, but desktop PCs will be equipped with this technology sooner or later, too. Intel is not going to do things by halves with the performance they are heading for: 240 Megabyte per second will be the maximal reading throughput and thus the response behavior is said to improve by the factor nine compared to the fastest 2.5 inch HDDs with 7,200 rpm, battery life is said to be increased by 30 minutes.

Result of the efforts: Intel's transparencies specify a shortening of the loading time in, for example, Crysis of the factor 1.9 - nearly the bisection they wanted to achieve.