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Intel's Braidwood Could Crush SSD Market
Lucas123 writes "Intel is planning to launch its native flash memory module, code named Braidwood, in the first or second quarter of 2010. The inexpensive NAND flash will reside directly on a computer's motherboard as cache for all I/O and it will offer performance increases and other benefits similar to that of adding a solid-state disk drive to the system. A new report states that by achieving SSD performance without the high cost, Braidwood will essentially erode the SSD market, which, ironically, includes Intel's two popular SSD models. 'Intel has got a very good [SSD] product. But, they view additional layers of NAND technology in PCs as inevitable. They don't think SSDs are likely to take over 100% of the PC market, but they do think Braidwood could find itself in 100% of PCs,' the report's author said."
RTFA. It's cheaper than DRAM.
There have also been rumors, however, that Braidwood has been canceled, at least in the near term:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article37368.html
First of all, DDR RAM is not cheap (at least, not compared to NAND RAM). It costs significantly more per gigabyte than even the most expensive of Intel's offerings for SSD's. While it should provide more theoretical throughput than any SSD, benchmarks at various places (http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1) haven't shown that to be significant yet, at least from the end user perspective (some synthetic benchmarks show that the RAM based disks can be faster than SSD's, but translating that to real world usage scenarios by consumers doesn't quite show any tangible benefits).
DDR RAM uses up a very large amount of power per stick compared to SSD's do. I remember seeing the power consumption of one of the DDR2 based "volatile hard drives", and it was higher than spinning drives (at least at idle), and wasn't particularly faster than the best of intel's SSD's.
So sounds like DDR RAM on board is expensive, power hungry, and doesn't provide that much of a tangible benefit to consumers. Tell me again why it's a good idea?
SLC flash memory, which the article claims Braidwood will use, is an order of magnitude or two more durable (in terms of write cycles) than MLC flash memory, which is what is used in most consumer-level devices like Intel's X-25M SSDs.
Wear-leveling and overprovisioning should ensure a long life for the memory used in a scheme like Braidwood. Intel, generally speaking, knows what they're doing in this area. Now if only I could afford one of their drives...
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It's *cache*. It's not meant to be moved, and it doesn't prevent you from moving the hard drive. Nor does it prevent you from using an SSD, it just means the performance reasons for using an SSD may get significantly reduced.