Intel Developer Forum - Fall 2001: Day 2

Intel's Application Accelerator

During Computex we got word that Intel was working on some new drivers that enable higher disk performance on any i8xx series chipsets. We actually ended up getting our hands on a beta version of Intel's Application Accelerator shortly thereafter and ran it through a few tests only to be disappointed with the lack of performance improvement.

Part of the reason for our disappointment ended up being that Intel's performance measurements were in comparison to Microsoft's IDE drivers built into Windows 2000 and not Intel's currently available storage drivers.

We hypothesized that Intel's Application Accelerator was nothing more than a glorified version of their storage drivers. The Intel representatives doing the the IAA presentation for us at the show floor indicated that the performance difference between IAA and the regular storage drivers wasn't as great but they weren't the same exact thing. IAA actually enables some software level prefetching that looks at data access patterns and prefetches data from the hard disk to main memory. This speeds up functions such as compressing files and even loading levels in a game (they gave Quake III Arena as an example). These speed benefits are offered only for IDE drives running off of the chipset's I/O Controller Hub.

Boot time is also decreased but currently the majority of the performance boost comes under Windows 2000. Intel did inform us that upon the final release of Windows XP we should see a more tuned version to work with XP's inherent prefetching mechanisms to offer a performance improvement there as well.

In terms of compatibility, the IAA enables support for 48-bit LBA enabling support for ATA drives larger than 137GB. The final feature of IAA is that it will be the driver used to support Serial ATA devices.

The driver will be available as a free download on September 10, 2001 - the official release date of Intel's 845 chipset.