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."

Comments

Not so sure

[mseeger]

When given similar performance but a slightly higher price, i would prefer the SSD. I can't take the flash to the next PC as i can do with the SSD. Hard disks have a highe life expectancy than mainboards (i usually find some good use for old HDs, i never did for old mainboards). Unless the SSD will cost 2-3 times as much as the flash on the mainboard, i believe SSDs will still be used. But maybe this will lead to lower SSD prices.

Re:Not so sure

[jackharrer]

"(...)if it becomes commonplace, most PCs will eventually have it (...)"

Which opens an interesting hole. That flash on motherboard will hold some data to speed up system startup. That means first n opened files. With that flash big enough it will also hold quite a lot of user documents. Unless documents can be marked as "not to be cached" it will add extra headache when getting rid of old systems. We have it already with 419ers buying old PCs and smartphones, gangs dumpsterdiving, etc.

Also try to explain to customers that they will need to erase flash they cannot see in system (and will most probably not even know about it!) or destroy the chip before throwing away old system. With HDDs it's quite hard and those are big, visible and has been around for ages.

Re:Not so sure

[jackharrer]

Actually not. It is going to store quite permanently only some files used to speed up system processing. There is not going to be any journals, and the filesystem will be highly optimised for this kind of usage. That is from press release I read somewhere. So even MLC will last long time as writes will be very limited. Only issue is that to drive costs down controller is also going to be scaled down so no great magic as with SSDs. So if somebody hacks that flash to use as HDD it will wear quite badly and quickly.

Re:Not so sure

[Garridan]

Seems to me that this article is a thinly-veiled marketing trick. Somebody publishes a paper, "Will Intel product A beat Intel product B?", and presto, we've got buzz about product A which doesn't even come close to competing with product B (which is a market leader, dontchaknow), and increased buzz about product B. Then, people chime in with their arguments and counterarguments about which product is better... and Intel wins no matter what. Both product lines are probably going to succeed independently of one another.

That said, Braidwood sounds awesome to me, especially because my servers talk to a storage box over NFS, and fast onboard cache sounds great to me. But, I want fast local storage too, and 16GB is nothing, so I want large-capacity SSD drives. I really don't see these as competing products. This is just a slashvertizement. Move along, folks.

Re:Not so sure

[Spoke]

Which brings up an interesting design thought:

Battery backed up (BBU) RAID controllers with volatile RAM cache are very common in the server market because of the huge performance increase of small random writes.

The RAM cache lets the controller cache writes and then send them to the disk in batches while performing write combining so multiple small writes get turned into larger writes reducing the number of disk seeks required to store the data. Also think of the case where your controller has a 512MB cache and you write 200MB to disk. The controller can say OK as soon as it's written to RAM (fraction of a second) where your typical fast disk these days will take 2 seconds.

Without having a battery to back up the volatile RAM cache, you could lose a lot of data if the server lost power, but with it, you go go at least a couple days without losing data.

So now, let's replace that 512MB BBU RAM cache with a 16GB SLC SSD. You won't quite get the burst speed of the BBU RAM controller, but in sustained server loads performance should be a lot better. The SSD will also be able to store a lot more data for reads. If the controller is smart and only uses the SSD for caching random read patterns, you could get close to SSD performance for a lot of workloads but still have 1TB of disk storage.

Ohh - maybe they could take it to the next step...

[IcephishCR]

Now only if they could start following the server side folks and place an internal USB connector inside and then MS and others could give us the OS on its own usb drive (read only) and we could use the hard drive for updates and programs we could enhance the security as well...

On-Drive NAND also quite likely

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.

Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?

Anyway, three competitors will emerge:

- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.

- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.

- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.

In a single drive system, the cost will be about the same. Doing it on the drive will create an instant performance boost on any machine, and well worth the estimated $10 added cost.

Re:Ohh - maybe they could take it to the next step

[zrq]

Why a USB connector ? That causes the same problem as making SSD cards use the SATA interface - the serial interface becomes slower than the things it is connected to.

What I would like to see is a set of sockets on the motherboard, mapped into the main memory address space (not PCI), a physical switch on the board to make them read only and software in the BIOS to make them look like a bootable disk.

Four sockets with 16 or 32G in each would give you enough space to store the entire OS. I don't know how Windows would handle it, but in a Unix or Linux based system it would be fairly easy to mount the devices as read only partitions and map them into the filesystem. This would be ideal for a server system, mapping the entire OS into the main memory address space and making it read only.

In fact all the BIOS would need to do is make the first 100M visible as a boot partition, and leave the OS to handle the rest.

The flash buffer should be on the HDD

[thue]

The buffer should obviously be on the hard disk. That way the data on the disk will always be in sync, even if there are writes buffered in the flash cache when the computer loses power. I can't see a good reason to put it on the motherboard instead. Especially as most consumer systems have exactly one HDD.

The article says that the flash buffer could work for "all system io". I can only think of optical disks and flash drives possibilities other than hard disks. But optical disks are interchangeable, so they have to be reread on each use anyway, and could just as well be cached in RAM. And it makes no sense to cache flash drives in flash cache...

Re:The writing's on the wall.

[dissy]

Capacity is still an issue though.

Not really for most people.

The last few systems I have worked on for 'standard consumers' were all quite upset at being forced into purchasing a 'way too big' 300gb hard drive, simply because any drive under 100gb is both very hard to find, and likely expensive in comparison. 500gb was a waste to them, when they only sync their camera once a month and have office and a couple games installed.

Outside of work where I would be classed as a standard consumer, it would cost me far, far too much to buy enough SSDs to transfer my 4TB of data from my HDDs.

You are not allowed to use "standard consumer" and "4TB of data" in the same sentence :P
Careful, they might swoop in and hole punch a warning into your geek card!

Anything >= 2tb is far far above the standard consumer. Even 1tb is far above the average consumer, although 1tb is still falling well within the power user and average gamer groups.

Re:HW buffer for drives

[gabebear]

The main thing this would do that battery backed up DRAM wouldn't do is allow for quick boot and hibernate, which is something the enterprise people generally don't care about. The flash looks like it will be replaceable via a dimm-like slot. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10258748-64.html and http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/news/ymiclpqWwpyaaJY/Computex09_Intel_P55_motherboard_gallery/

The other thing this does is bypass the "slow" SATA interface. We have laptop SSD drives that saturate SATA 3.0 and newer drives should be able to saturate the upcoming SATA 6.0. I don't know what kind of bandwidth is going to be available on this new flash slot, but I hope it's a LOT.