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AS OF 12/4/2008 12:46AM EST

New Processors and SSDs From Intel
By Alex Handy

August 20, 2008 — Intel is entering the storage market. With a deafening clap of media thunder at its Intel Developer Forum today, the company announced it would begin shipping consumer-level solid state drives before the end of September. That same month will see the release of a new six-core Xeon processor, one of the last revisions of that chipset before the i7 series, codenamed Nehalem, arrives.

For enterprise users, the Nehalem-EP is the chip of the future. Arriving before the end of the year, Nehalem-EP is a power-efficient server processor with a significantly faster path to memory and 3D calculations. Intel is also bringing back a blast from the past in the form of Turbo Mode. Long ago a resident button on the front of PCs, Intel's processors will handle this toggle themselves, kicking up the power and speed when resources get tight.

Nehalem-EP's older brother, the Nehalem-EX, will arrive in the second quarter of 2009. EX is the expandable server version of the i7 series chips, aimed at working in those spaces currently dominated by Xeon chips. The first round of the i7 series will offer four cores with two threads each, and 8MB of cache onboard.

The i7 series will be able to regulate its power usage as well as its need for turbo speeds. The chips will feature power gates that can lock down unused cores, or run them up at speeds variable to those of other cores. The overall effect allows the i7 series of chips to dynamically save power and processing performance as workloads vary.

As for the SSDs…
Intel's bountiful chip business was not the company's only interest at its annual developer event in San Francisco. The company made the rather significant announcement that it would be moving into the solid state drive market in 30 days. With 80GB 1.8-inch and a 2.5-inch drives available in mid-September, the company is pushing hard for consumer adoption of these devices, particularly in laptops. For the server crowd, however, the Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD will surface sometime before the end of the year. This enterprise-class storage medium will clock in at 32GB, and offer a read latency 75 microseconds.

A 64GB version will begin production in the first quarter of 2009, bringing with it further revisions of the consumer level products to sizes of 160GB.

Intel is attempting to differentiate itself in the crowded SSD market by claiming that its drives are more reliable than others. Naturally, with Intel only just now offering the devices, it remains to be seen how they stack up against an already highly competitive range of server and consumer flash media.

The consumer market was widely targeted by Intel, as it unveiled partnerships and new chips that will be embedded in televisions, mobile phones and mobile Internet enabled devices. The company put a new emphasis on its embedded and video products at the show, showing its hand in almost all major consumer electronics markets there. Intel, in a break with its tactics in previous years, showed off robotics, home security systems, LoJack for laptops, and other broadly applicable markets for its chips.

Related Search Term(s): mulitcore, solid state drives, storage hardware, Intel

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