Intel 335 Series SSD Equipped With 20-nm NAND 135
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."
Re:Excellent deal on the price point (Score:5, Informative)
According to TFA, each of these new 8GB 20nm dice are 118 mm. There are 32 of them in the 335 series. 37.8 square centimeters of processed silicon is serious business. Honestly, I'm amazed that it's so cheap.
Re:Who can't do math? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A tiny example of trickle down economics in act (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Re:help me understand! (Score:5, Informative)
Laptops are one obvious win, since only the largest ones can even contain a RAID of any flavor, and certainly not a properly cooled 15k SAS type arrangement.
When you aren't dealing with form-factor constraints, though, the big deal is random access. SSDs are only moderately superior(and some are actually worse) than HDDs for big, well-behaved, linear reads and writes. If you are faced with lots and lots of requests for little chunks from all over the disk, though, mechanical HDDs fall off a cliff and SSDs don't.
Re:Intel Flash (Score:5, Informative)
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.