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

[Dogtanian]

I can't take the flash to the next PC as i can do with the SSD.

Not really a big deal; if it becomes commonplace, most PCs will eventually have it (or something like it) as standard anyway and you won't be bothered about it.

Re:Not so sure

[Z00L00K]

Whoever defined parent as troll must be weird.

That said - I'm more worrying about the consideration about exhausted flash on the motherboard. Have all avenues actually been considered here, or is that a built-in best before date that new motherboards will have?

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.

The writing's on the wall.

[jcr]

Sooner or later, no moving parts beats moving parts. The magnetic disk makers have done an amazing job so far, but eventually they're going to lose out to solid-state.

-jcr

Re:The writing's on the wall.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just goes to show how warped a professional's perspective really is. Standard consumer with 4TB of data? Really?

Re:why flash?

[Diabolus Advocatus]

RTFA. It's cheaper than DRAM.

Is Braidwood already canceled?

[bboy_doodles]

There have also been rumors, however, that Braidwood has been canceled, at least in the near term:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article37368.html

Re:Is Braidwood already canceled?

[Colonel Korn]

There have also been rumors, however, that Braidwood has been canceled, at least in the near term:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article37368.html

I read another report (maybe at Anandtech) of the same thing earlier this week. It was a sidenote in a motherboard preview claiming that Intel removed it after it showed no meaningful performance advantage in real use, unlike an SSD.

Re:Bullshit

[John_Booty]

Random I/O is essentially uncacheable.

I'm sure that would come as a great surprise to anyone who ever implemented a virtual memory system.

-jcr

You're both right.

The problem here is that "random I/O" can have at least two subtly different meanings. In the very old days they talked about random I/O as opposed to sequential (ie, tape) I/O. In that sense, yes, random I/O is often extremely cacheable, as you say. That's why virtual memory works, as system files, drivers, commonly-used applications, and so forth are accessed much more often than other daa.

"Random I/O" can also refer to I/O that does not follow any real pattern - ie, a 50GB database in which all records are accessed about equally as often. This kind of I/O is not really cacheable, practically speaking. Unless you can cache the entire thing.

What's the correct terminology for the second kind of random I/O? Random I/O with very low locality?

Re:How about the reliability ?

[John_Booty]

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...

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.

Re:why flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop using a typewriter to post on Slashdot.

Signed, everyone.

What nonsense

[PopeRatzo]

Is this the latest FUD? That if a company brings out a successful product that's priced cheaply it'll "erode the market"?

How did the :"market" become so sacred that it must be preserved at all costs by keeping prices high? It's really funny the crap that'll come out of an MBA's mouth. He'll be all for "free markets" until someone comes along with a better product and then he'll start to squeal that the "market" is under siege.

Good for Intel.