IDF: Intel's astonishing SSD claims

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While Intel was hoping to focus on news about its Atom processor at this spring's developer forum (IDF), it's surprising announcement of its foray into solid-state hard disks drew the attention of many attendees.

While backroom tech sessions on the Atom-based nettop and netbook platforms were sparsely attended, a queue about 100 feet long snaked from the door of one already-full briefing room.

In that room was Knut Grimsrud, an Intel Fellow and director of storage architecture at the company. During the technical briefing he outlined the general performance of the drives, and made some astonishing claims for Intel's upcoming SSD devices in comparison to the competition.

Grimsrud presented Intel's devices against the competition in terms of three areas: endurance, power and performance.

Endurance is a key factor that's been impeding the take-up of solid-state drives since flash memory wears out if it's written too many times.

Grimsrud kicked off half an hour or so of amazing bravado by declaring the endurance of Intel SSDs should be roughly 50 times better than the competition.

That barrier comprehensively destroyed, he moved on to power consumption. Grimsrud claimed that although the Intel SSD uses around twice the power for read and write operations, it does them so much faster than competitors' drives that the actual total energy consumed for a given operation is reduced by about half.

Finally, he presented a graph of performance results which made some of his other statements look positively conservative. If they're to be believed, the read and write performance of the SSDs will be several hundred times faster than the competition.

The bad news is that Intel is flatly refusing to give details on pricing or a release date for actual devices.

But Grimsrud reiterated what was implied yesterday: that Intel will be producing and selling complete SSDs itself, not just providing the technology behind them to traditional hard-disk manufacturers.

"We'll be providing the entire device: it's not just going to be a bag of chips," he said.

Click here for more of IT PRO's coverage of IDF.

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