Gentlemen, start your solid-state engines: Intel takes overclocking to SSDs

If cash is tight, upgrading to a solid-state drive is easily one of the biggest PC bangs you can get for your bottom dollar. Seriously, these puppies are face-melting fast, and the cheapest SSD you can buy blows the spinning platters off the fastest traditional hard drives you can buy.

But what if that's still not fast enough? What if you've got a need—a need for truly blistering storage speed?

Intel just might have you covered, oh impatient one. At the company's annual Intel Developer Forum this September, Intel plans to demonstrate a way to overclock its self-branded SSDs, as part of a larger overclocking session that mostly looks devoted to Haswell and upcoming Ivy Bridge-E Extreme Edition processors.

While overclocking processors, graphics cards, and even RAM is all relatively commonplace, overclocking SSDs is virtually unheard of—but that doesn't mean it isn't theoretically possible. Solid-state drives rely on NAND flash memory, and like those other frequently tweaked PC components, NAND is regulated by clock speeds and other technical fineries, all of which are regulated by the firmware in your drive's SSD controller.

When the upcoming SATA Express spec rolls out with 2GBps speeds, though, overclocking SSDs should be a much more practical performance option for PC enthusiasts.

Myce.com claims to have found hints about SSD overclocking abilities while digging around in preliminary code for Intel's XTreme Tuning Utility, a tool used to overclock and monitor your system hardware. Myce's sleuthing revealed options to control both the clock speed and the NAND bus speed of SSDs. The site also discovered "limited," "typical," and "unrestrained" power-mode options.

The scarcity of solid-state overclocking tools isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Any time you overclock a component, you run the risk of stability issues—and an unstable storage drive is no storage drive at all. You also have to wonder how overclocking will affect the longevity of solid-state drives, especially as the industry adopts SSDs using NAND flash with triple-level cell technology, which (theoretically) sport shorter life spans than SSDs that use one or two cells.

In other words, drive reliability could be a big concern when overclocking SSDs.

Assuming the overclocking abilities come via the Xtreme Tuning Utility, Intel presumably won't let you push hard enough to fry your drive. Even still, there's probably no real reason to overclock SSDs—yet.

X-bit Labs, which first noticed the IDF session details, points out that the storage speed bottleneck in enthusiast PCs isn't so much the speed of the SSD itself as much as the 0.6 gigabyte per second (GBps) cap on the SATA 3.0 interface. Overclocking an SSD that already saturates the SATA interface is pretty much pointless.

When the upcoming SATA Express spec rolls out with 2GBps speeds, though, overclocking SSDs should be a much more practical performance option for PC enthusiasts with a need for ludicrous speed. Stay tuned for all the details out of IDF, which will be held September 10 - 12 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils.
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Don't start selling until you see the whites of their eyes: Google patents "pay-per-gaze" ads

Although we are constantly surrounded by advertisements both online and offline, companies have no way to know whether we’ve actually seen what they’re selling. That could change in the future, with the help of Google Glass.

A newly-discovered Google patent for “pay-per-gaze” ads would use eye tracking to determine what the user is looking at. Google’s patent says it would then be able to charge companies when users look at advertisements, including online banner ads and offline billboards.

These pay-per-gaze ads could go even further, the patent says, by determining how long users have looked directly on an ad, and even measure emotional response.

“For example, if the advertiser desires to generate a shocking advertisement to get noticed or a thought provoking advertisement, then the inferred emotional state information and/or the gazing duration may be valuable metrics to determine the success of the campaign with real-world consumers,” the patent says.

Google’s patent also mentions the ability to provide automatic, augmented reality search results based on eye-tracking. Dubbed “latent pre-searching,” the system would begin its search queries for objects in the user’s peripheral vision, so they’re ready to display by the time they come into focus.

Eye tracking is not a feature that Google Glass currently offers, but the code in Glass’ companion app has hinted at support for “eye gestures” such as winks. Another Google patent has called for even more precise eye tracking, including a way to unlock Glass by tracing a lock pattern with your eyes.

Because these are just patents, there’s no guarantee Google will implement them in Glass or other products. And even if Google did offer eye tracking, it would have to convince people that the benefits outweigh the creepiness of letting the company see what you see. “Latent pre-searching” doesn’t seem like enough of a hook.

Technical hurdles come to mind as well. The current version of Google Glass already suffers from poor battery life, and the power it would take to constantly scan and interpret visual data would likely be immense. It doesn’t seem practical without major breakthroughs in battery efficiency.

Still, recent reports have claimed that the final version of Google Glass may not cost a lot, and the idea of an inexpensive product supplemented by ads definitely fits with Google’s business model. Even if pay-per-gaze isn’t coming soon, it seems like something Google will inevitably try to pull off.

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