Could Intel's Braidwood Technology Mark the End of Solid State Drives?

PRLog (Press Release) - Sep 03, 2009 -
Report Buyer, the online destination for business intelligence for major industry sectors, has added a market report explaining Braidwood technology, it provides strategies for participating in the market.

According to the report “Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?” available at http://www.reportbuyer.com/go/OBJ00008 Intel is adding solid state drive (SSD) storage to PC and server motherboards with Braidwood, its second generation Robson technology. This caches data stored in hard disk drives inside a NAND flash module installed on a PC's motherboard.

The idea is to shorten boot times, launch applications faster, and generally get a PC running faster overall by cutting down on time spent waiting for disk I/O (input / output).

The report explains the ways in which flash memory can provide good disk cache. This is mainly due to its much faster access times: microseconds, not milliseconds. Flash can actually take much longer to write than a hard disk. But for reads, it's extremely quick. Users who put the right hard-disk data into the cache, choosing the right time to carry out write operations, can save huge amounts of time on future disk reads.

"NAND has a role in the PC platform and Braidwood promises to be the right implementation at the right time," says report author Jim Handy. "Although this isn't the first time that Intel has tried to bring NAND into the PC, the earlier Turbo Memory product failed for a number of reasons." The report goes on to elaborates on how Braidwood improves upon Robson's flaws.

Braidwood could have around 16GB of capacity and will work with Intel's 5-series chipsets, which are due out soon, and the Clarkdale line of processors, due out in 2010. Clarkdale is a 2- or 4-thread, 2-core desktop processor built on a 32nm process and using the Nehalem micro-architecture.The 5-series chipsets put memory gates directly on the processor and don't have a normal memory bus arrangement.

The analysis is that the combination of flash and standard hard disks will deliver almost all the advantages of pure solid-state disks, but at a lower overall price.

The report “Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?” is available from Report Buyer at:
http://www.reportbuyer.com/computing_electronics/hardware...

Report Buyer product ID: OBJ00008

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