Intel to make solid state drives

[wolverinero79]

Article

Intel is jumping into another aspect of the memory world - solid state drives. Unfortunately the article doesn't mention availability, timeline, or even if it will be an Intel branded harddrive, or if someone else will product the actual drives. If someone could find a better article with more information, I would greatly appreciate it.

Guess the pricewar isn't affecting Intel's ability to spend money on fun projects.

 

[shinigamiX]

Article

Intel is jumping into another aspect of the memory world - solid state drives. Unfortunately the article doesn't mention availability, timeline, or even if it will be an Intel branded harddrive, or if someone else will product the actual drives. If someone could find a better article with more information, I would greatly appreciate it.

Guess the pricewar isn't affecting Intel's ability to spend money on fun projects.

That'd be brilliant. AFAIK the only company producing SSDs right now is Samsung, and they got busted for fixing NAND prices last year. When you consider how big SSDs will be in the future, it would be nice to have some competition in the sector.

 

[YO_KID37]

Intel lately has enough extra cash coming in that they can experiment with technologies they had(Hyper-Threading for Penryn), have(Out-Of Order Execution built-in) and can get to work(CSI/ HyperTransport); Hyper-Transport, which I know and believe Intel has tried and worked so that they could work into their Personal CSI and call their own, but HyperTransport 3 will undeniably beat CSI to a Pulp.

 

[The_Abyss]

Given that this is posted in the incorrect but coincidentally busiest (CPU) forum, then it looks like nothing more than pepetuating fan boy crap, interesting though it may be.

 

[The_Abyss]

Given that this is posted in the incorrect but coincidentally busiest (CPU) forum, then it looks like nothing more than pepetuating fan boy crap, interesting though it may be.

To write that crap you just wrote, you have to be an AMD fanboy yourself.

Absolutely. I wince everytime my E6600 boots up.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Perhaps Intel has some excess capacity that they need to put to good use? Intel has a lot of fab facilities and it would not shock me that they had some sitting more or less idle due to the discontinuation of the old NetBurst stuff and 130nm chipsets. It's not like CPU makers have never made memory before. They make SRAM cache memory all the time. AMD had Spansion, which they spun off. Heck, Intel used to make RAM until 1985, when they got booted out of the market by the Asians. I have heard an old ex-Intel employee say that the Asian firms were selling RAM for less than Intel paid for the *boxes* that their RAM shipped in.

It seems like a pretty good utilization of extra fab space, employees, and facilities to be making something useful like these Flash HDDs. Much better than laying off 10,000 workers, if you ask me. Also, it will allow them to diversify better. That is very obviously a good thing if you've been watching the bottom fall out of CPU prices as the AMD-Intel price war rages on. AMD saw that writing on the wall and purchased ATi. Now Intel would be smart to diversify more as well.

 

[wolverinero79]

Unless I'm confused (which happens constantly), the old stuff is being produced on 200mm wafers in Intel owned fabs. The solid state stuff should be NAND based, making it fall into the Intel-Micron partnership fabs, rather than Intel owned fabs. I don't think they shuffle resources and people to the partnership that often. I could see moving people between the NOR flash fabs, the chipset fabs, and the CPU fabs, but not the NAND ones.

Intel has always diversified and they've been criticized for it unless they throw a large bulk behind it (Integrated Graphics, Networking, Mobos, Chipsets, etc. vs things like a web tablet PC). I don't know if this is a serious venture for them that they are going to throw their weight behind, or if it's merely another experiment that they'll sell to some company at a loss down the road.