Intel to enter SSD market

Intelflash2smallThe news that Intel is getting ready to start producing solid state disks (SSDs) hasn’t generated a lot of excitement but I think it should.  Intel already makes a lot of chip-level memory products like the relatively new Turbo Memory Boost so they have the know-how and more importantly the ability to produce SSDs in numbers significant enough to help drive costs down.  According to C/NET Intel will begin producing 80 – 160 GB SSDs as early as the second quarter of this year and will go head to head with the big SSD makers such as Samsung.  Intel realizes that SSDs are the future of mobile computing and will produce both 2.5 and 1.8 inch units to address the entire mobile market.  The fastest SSD currently has a 100 MB/s read rate but Intel says theirs is "much better than that".

"We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering,"said Troy Windslow of Intel. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performancehard disk drives. Intel’s products will be based on the SATA IIspecification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.

"When Intel launches its…products, you’ll see that not all SSDsare created equal," Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected,the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference,"he said, referring to the chip (controller) that manages the SSD andsoftware (firmware) that the controller uses.

This news couldn’t be better in my view and I can’t wait to see what Intel can do to this market.

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