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Intel 335 Series SSD Equipped With 20-nm NAND
crookedvulture writes "The next generation of NAND has arrived. Intel's latest 335 Series SSD sports 20-nm flash chips that are 29% smaller than the previous, 25-nm generation. The NAND features a new planar cell structure with a floating, high-k/metal gate stack, a first for the flash industry. This cell structure purportedly helps the 20-nm NAND overcome cell-to-cell interference, allowing it to offer the same performance and reliability characteristics of the 25-nm stuff. The performance numbers back up that assertion, with the 335 Series matching other drives based on the same SandForce controller silicon. The 335 Series may end up costing less than the competition, though; Intel has set the suggested retail price at an aggressive $184 for the 240GB drive, which works out to just 77 cents per gigabyte."
Maybe we won't need so much of that rare earth stuff anymore. I still find it amazing that a hard drive with all that monkey motion going on inside is any cheaper than these SSDs.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm a bit surprised that Intel seems to have abandoned doing their controllers in-house(which they did for some of their early entries in the SSD market, back when there was some...um... extremely variable quality available. *cough* JMicron *cough*). Does SandForce have some juicy patents that make it impossible for Intel to economically match/exceed them even with superior process muscle? Has building competent flash controller chips now been commodified enough that Intel doesn't want to waste their time? Did some Intel project go sour and force them to go 3rd party?
This is Slashdot. He's not an ordinary idiot. He's an extraordinary idiot.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Just wondering: Is there a point (or is this close to it) where in using HDDs and certain RAID configurations, you can match or beat speed while maintaining better redundancy with larger capacity, cheaper drives? What is the main application these excel at? I assume power would be one, and cached content on webservers? Help me understand :-)
(1-(167mm^2-118mm^2))=0.2934, or approximately 29%. They were referring to the area of the die.
It is not cheaper than Intel's offers from 1 and 2 years ago?
Actually 3 years ago I bought a couple of X-25Ms, 160GB, they were 639USD each.
This one is 240GB at 180USD.
That is not cheaper? Obviously it is 'trickle down' or normal economics, that's how it works. A company sees profits from its product, works on the product more to sell it to a wider market, more people get the product at lower prices.
I see a company giving me a better offer in a positive light, so why are you so upset? You don't like better cheaper deals?
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This is an example of what is known as 'trickle down economics' in action, which means that the more productive a company becomes (by getting profits from its current sales and re-investing the profits into the business, creating more efficiencies, new technologies) the lower it can set the prices accessing bigger and bigger markets.
Those who are poor (compared to Intel for example, because they do not have their own factories to produces these SSDs) are gaining from the rich (Intel investors) and see their lives improve (if they need and buy this product at the lower prices).
That is what all economics is, not a centrally planned economy, aiming at equal outcomes for different people and thus destroying the society by creating discrimination, which requires destruction of individual freedoms. But this is just normal economics (some call it 'trickle down') in action. A company searching for more profit investing its profits and creating new products that end up improving people's lives, and it's done with only the free market feed back loop, signalling the company that it is on the right track with its products.
Umm.. No, that's not what trickle down economics is. Instead, what you've described is simply capitalism actually working -- in a quest to find more revenue a firm is providing supply to customers at lower prices by improving efficiency via R&D.
Trickle-down economics (effectively -- but not exactly -- a pejorative term for supply-side economics) is the idea that a dollar given to those at the top of the socio-economic food chain will be redistributed down through the economy benefiting rather than being horded. It is used contrast against the "classic" or Keynesian view which is that the same dollar given to someone at the bottom will immediately be spent and will therefore work it's way across and up the socio-economic ladder benefiting all. A simple thought exercise which should make you question the validity of that idea:
Give $10 to a bum on the street (or Rush Limbaugh): ...
You -> Bum (Rush) -> Crack dealer -> Liquor store -> Liquor Distributor + Gun shop -> Liquor Distiller + UPS + Gun factory -> Farmer + Gas Station + Steel Factory ->
Give $10 to Bill Gates:
You -> Bill Gates -> Nothing
That $10 did not impact Bill's participation in the economy one bit. Bill will buy what he was going to buy before he got the $10. Hell, he could have simply used it to light up a palette of Androids and iPhones to heat his chalet.
Of course, this is grossly oversimplifying the debate, but it highlights why the majority of real economists are not supply-siders. Do yourself a favor and research this on your own before you buy into whatever nonsense you've been hearing (including mine, I suppose) and please try to stop spreading it yourself.
Last I heard, failure rate was directly tied to process size. Does any of this fix that?
Also: Sandforce controller? Way to go, Intel - Sandforce is a bucket of fail:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sandforce+freeze
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce#Issues
and more...
Please help metamoderate.
Are there any examples of these obvious Intel patents?
My experience with Sandforce based Intel SSD's was rubbish. Bought a SSD 330 120GB, constant freezing. Sent it back, got a replacement - still freezing. The seller gave me a free 'upgrade' to a SSD 520 120GB as an apology for the trouble. Guess what? Still freezing all the time. Got a refund, went and bought a Samsung SSD 830 128GB (based on Samsung's own controller), and is as solid as a rock - might not be as speedy, but it was £20 less and actually *works*.
If I remember correctly, Intel is using their own firmware on the SandForce controller. So an Intel SSD will still be different then those from their competitors.
No, that equation reduces to 1 - 49.I am pretty sure you meant 1 - (118/167), which is ~0.2934.
I realise your name is bored_engineer, but that's no excuse for sloppy maths ;)
I know you said your example was grossly simplified, but it's also simplified to the point of misrepresentation. Rich people don't just let their money sit there. If they did, they'd become less rich through inflation. The hypothetical Bill Gates sequence runs more like this:
You -> Bill Gates -> Investment Manager -> Expanding Business -> Employee -> Supermarket + Landlord + Gas Station -> Farmer + Logistics Company + Oil Company -> ...
Now, whether that actually benefits low socio-economic groups is another question, but the rich don't generally just sit on their cash.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Serious users should insist on SSD with a battery or super capacitor. If not, then you might lose data in internal caches in an unclean shutdown.
Unlike the Intel 320 series, I can't find anywhere whether the 335 series has backup power, so I strongly assume that it doesn't.
My guess would be that, although the fabs are different, the underlying processes are similar and that's where a huge amount of Intel R&D money goes. Intel's big advantage over the last couple of decades has been outspending everyone else on process technology, so they're always at least half a generation ahead. If they can use this investment in another product line, then that reduces the amount of the price of every CPU that has to go towards R&D.
The other part of the problem, I would suspect, comes from some simulator results that Intel published about a decade ago. When they make a new CPU, they first run it in a complete simulation environment, where every aspect can be adjusted. They tried making the CPU infinitely fast in one experiment (i.e. every CPU cycle takes 0 simulation time) and found that this increased the overall performance by a factor of two. All it did was move the bottlenecks to memory and disks. Ensuring that fast disks are available helps stimulate the market for faster CPUs. We've seen recently in the FreeBSD kernel that the mantra for the last 20 years in a lot of places in the storage stack has been 'don't worry about optimising that - it's on a code path that does I/O, so the extra CPU time will be lost in the noise'. Then you replace a 150IO/s, 50MB/s spinning disk with a 10,000IO/s, 300MB/s SSD and suddenly it becomes a lot less true: operations you used to be able to hide in the 5-10ms of seek time are now quite noticeable and can cause real slowdowns when that seek time becomes a single microsecond.
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Rich people don't just let their money sit there.
Yes they do.
The New York Times estimates that there is between 20 to 30 trillion dollars stashed in the Cayman Islands.
Apple's 80 billion dollar warchest isn't doing anything. Bill and Melinda Gates are using a bit of their money, but most of it is sitting around hedging against fear of want, same as the money of most super-wealthy. They don't feel safe unless they have a big pile of money/gold/property/ locked up somewhere.
"Trickle Down" is a lie. And it is clearly a lie. The economy isn't as screwed up as it is for no reason, and it's certainly not because of the behavior of people with nothing.