Friday 30th May 2008

Intel shows off low cost 4GB SSD chip

Posted at: 3:41am 30th May 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Thumbnail-sized multi-level cell chip features 4GB of NAND memory, and can be stacked up to make a cheap 256GB SSD

Intel and Micron 32Gb (4GB) 34nm NAND chip

While a 64GB Samsung solid state disk (SSD) may set you back over half a grand at the moment, Intel and Micron reckon they have the answer to accelerating the SSD revolution with a new 32Gb (4GB) TSOP NAND chip that’s made on a miniscule 34nm process.

The tiny new chip measures just 172mm², making it smaller than the average thumbnail, and Intel claims that you can easily stack the chips to make packages with larger capacities. Intel gives the example of using two eight-die stacked packages in an SSD, giving you a 64GB SSD, and also said that the technology could soon result in ‘capacities beyond 256GB in today's standard, smaller 1.8in form factor.’

According to Intel, the chip offers ‘the smallest NAND process geometry on the market,’ which isn’t surprising given that its transistors have a width of just 34nm. Intel says that the chip was designed with SSDs in mind, and it could certainly make a big impact on the emerging SSD market, which is currently in its infancy with very expensive drives with small capacities. However, Intel says that its new NAND chip will ‘enable more cost-effective SSDs, instantly doubling the current storage volume of these devices.’

Intel originally announced its plans to enter the SSD market at IDF this year, and it hasn’t taken the company long to come up with the goods. Intel claims that the new chips will be sampling as soon as June this year, with mass production scheduled for the second half of 2008. Depending on the pricing of these chips, we could be seeing affordable SSDs with larger capacities by the end of this year.

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Comments

@ l3v1ck

Time to dispel the "SSDs have a short lifetime" myth: to quote http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html "To get that very high speed the process will have to write big blocks (which also simplifies the calculation). We assume perfect wear levelling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit. 2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds. That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give... The end result is 51 years! But you can see how just a handful of years ago - when write endurance was 20x less than it is today - and disk capacities were smaller."

Comment by Ratkid132 at 4:00am 4th June 2008

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@l3v1ck

Ahhh... Good point, i didn't really think about it like that... and @Cogwulf I think you exaggerated your comment a bit too much...

Comment by NikoBellic at 7:17am 1st June 2008

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@ NikoBellic

In this case Intel isn't getting involved in other aspects of the hardware industry. They've always been involved in silicone chips. Technically it's the others (tradition HDD manufacturers) that are entering Intels market (silicone chips). I guess this misconception is because of what these particular chips will be used for (ie storage), but you can't blame Intel for making money from new uses of computer chips. It's not as if they've started making traditional hard drives.

Comment by l3v1ck at 10:35pm 31st May 2008

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Intel are good at everything silicon

they have the money and technology to develop things like SSDs in ways other companies cant, like using 34nm transistors. Microsoft aren't good at anything.

Comment by Cogwulf at 5:33pm 31st May 2008

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Tutt...

I Hate when Isee Intel getting involved in other sides of the harware industry because now I have recently started to see Intel as the Hardware Version of Micro$oft, and I would jjust preferre if they concentrated on improving their CPUs, While M$ should concentrate on improving their OS!!...Message to intel: Leave everyoe else to do their work, and you guys make sure you give us a noticable difference with your Next Gen CPUs!!.

Comment by NikoBellic at 7:36am 31st May 2008

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How long will they last?

It'll be interesting to know how many read/write cycles these things can handle before they conk out. So far early SSD's have suffered with this problem. Also will Intel go for the same con that HHD manufacturers use and advertise their drives in decimal gigabytes (1000 MB) or will they go for binary gigabytes (1024 MB)? In PC's that the moment RAM chips are in binary GB's but HDD's aren't. As these chips are halfway between the two, which system will Intel go for?

Comment by l3v1ck at 3:24am 31st May 2008

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Bits and bytes

Gb is Giga-bits. GB is Giga-byte. So 32Gb works out at 4GB I believe. (8 bits = 1 byte)

Comment by paulgreyhead at 9:38pm 30th May 2008

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Call me a n00b..

but surely 32Gb is 32Gb not 4Gb? Where do they get that from? :P Cheap SSD is always going to be a winner and hopefully this is the next step towards retiring theh hard disk drive, one day we may even get the holographic drive :D

Comment by gavin_maw at 7:12pm 30th May 2008

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I'm interested in

the read/write specs. I don't expect it to be close to the top hardware but it would be good for reference. I suspect Intel are holding back the info so people don't slag it off.

Comment by TWeaKoR at 5:24pm 30th May 2008

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