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."
Excellent deal on the price point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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How much human effort is involved in the manufacturing process compared to a hard drive? To me that's where the real costs lie. Mechanization should be driving the price even lower.
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The thing is, it's made up of individual dies. If you tried to make a single slab of silicon that's 38 square cm, you'll find it impossible because of flaws. The smaller the die, the less chance it will be made on imperfect silicon, so smaller processes lead to more dies per wafer (less cost per die) an
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I'm in total agreement on the ongoing R&D costs. Ultimately I expect the price to really plummet, if the patent licensing isn't abused. I sure wish more laptop makers included an SSD option, but maybe they still need to offload their warehouse full of hard drives. It should really be only a couple more years.
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Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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And why hasn't Intel shipped better faster cheaper products? Do they even want to compete anymore? Are these even questions? Or perhaps some form of statements in the form of questions? Isn't it about time we get some answers? Who knows anymore? Does Intel know?
Intel Flash (Score:2)
This is ridiculous! Intel previously had a flash memory division, which made their famous StrataFlash, which they later spun off into a separate company called Numonyx (which was a merger of their and STM's flash memory division) which even later got acquired by Micron. In other words, Intel exited the flash market b'cos they were dragging down their margins.
In that context, I'm just not getting why Intel is making any flash - be it NAND flash or NOR flash. First of all, memory fabs are somewhat differ
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.
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But flash cells are very different from standard logic & SRAM cells that are used in CPUs. While some bugs may be common to both flash & SRAM based circuits, the basic cells that are used in flash memory - in case of Intel, typically stacked gate cells - are completely different from flip flops, muxes, demuxes and other basic circuits that form any typical chip.
What you are describing here may have been true about StrataFlash, where Intel had plenty of internal logic to regulate the inner working
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The last in house controller was on the 320's,, and in overall use i still continue to buy the Intel 320 series drives for enterprise use. They are absolutely rock solid.
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Rock solid by whose definition? Yours, or the rest of the actual world?
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html [techspot.com]
http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_ssd_320_firmware_fix_for_8mb_bug.html [guru3d.com]
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4625/intel-testing-firmware-fix-for-ssd-320-8mb-power-bug [anandtech.com]
P.S. -- This comment comes from someone who owns 5 of these SSDs and none of them have experienced the aforementioned problem, and that's probably because I upgraded the F/W almost i
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Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's pretty much all of the above. On the Intel side of things, making their own controllers just wasn't panning out. There are rumors that they had some problems with what was supposed to follow their existing in-house controller, but there's also a lot of evidence that the benefits of building their own controller wasn't worth the cost. The controller itself is very low margin, and Intel is looking for high-margin areas.
Meanwhile SandForce has some extremely desirable technology. Data de-dupe and compression not only improve drive performance right now, but they're going to be critical in future drives as NAND cells shrink in size and the number of P/E cycles drops accordingly. Intel likely could have developed this in-house, but why do so? They can just buy the controller from SandForce at a sweet price, roll their own firmware (that's where all the real work happens anyhow), and sell the resulting SSD as they please.
Custom Firmware.. (Score:3)
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SSD reliability has been so bad [insert contrary anecdotes here] and Sandforce such a bright-spot of "not broken" that at this point I just specify Sandforce controllers and worry aout other things. Newegg will even let me search by it now. Perhaps Intel gets this sentiment and stands to benefit. Intel has a historical relationship of OEM'ing from LSI and their memory is good, so sign me up if these things don't get hanged in the first couple months.
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually asked a person who worked in Intel's storage research about this.
It boiled down to this: Intel Research made the X25, and pushed it over to Intel's product teams who basically just put them in boxes and shipped it. And people loved it.
Then Intel's product design teams tried to design a follow on controller and sucked entirely at it. So they got the research group to rev the x25 a few times, while they contracted with Marvell for controllers since they needed a SATA 6G controller for their own firmware.
At that time, they hadn't switched to Sandforce, but judging by the fact that Sandforce has been quite dominant even back then, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel did almost no firmware customization now.
I wouldn't have believed that Intel had sucked in SSD controller design had I not heard it from a Intel researcher (although they might have been biased given that the story make their peers look good) but looking back again, we're talking about the company that brought us Netburst and FBDIMMs.
Who can't do math? (Score:1)
20 is 20% smaller than 25.
25nm - ( 20% * 25nm) = 20nm
Re:Who can't do math? (Score:4, Informative)
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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 ;)
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Well, I did figure it was a typo of sorts. It's not exactly ground breaking maths to derive a percentage decrease :D
help me understand! (Score:3)
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.
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In fairness, it is true that raw NAND flash has some obnoxious behavior around read/write and erasure, which may have been what the grandparent poster was referring to. On the PC side, though(and, often, on the embedded side. I don't know exactly how the economics shake down; but a lot of devices use eMMC rather than dealing with a flash filesystem, whether for software convenience or to keep pin and trace counts low) that's all behind a controller chip that handles the messy details and tells a bunch of co
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Yes, and the crossover point will vary depending on how much data you want to store and how much you want at once. Hybrid solutions like using an SSD as the cache drive in ZFS change that point as well. A pile of recent drives of any kind will saturate gigabit if you have enough of them.
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How exactly are latency and IOPS not measures of speed?
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Hard drives arrays can be fast at sequential transfers but they suck at random access as tends to happen when doing things like loading software or running most types of server.
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SSDs typically have read write sustained bandwidth around 500MB/s. You would need about 4 HDD to catch up with that speed. Moreover RAID is not going to do much about latency which is one of the most important point with SSDs. The power consumption of SSDs is much lower than that of a single HDD. The only good thing about HDDs is their price per GB.
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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 :-)
You'd need several dozen hard drives to even approach the IOPS of a single consumer level SSD. The SSD wins so many times over it's not funny.
Now, if you're talking about sequential read/write speeds, that's a whole different matter. You'd need roughly 3-4 hard drives (in RAID 0 (no redundancy)... double that figure for RAID 10) to match the typical sequential read/write speeds of an SSD. At that point, the raw cost of the hard drives far exceeds that of the SSD, and that's ignoring the need for the extra S
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Not all systems can take 100-200 hard drives, which is what it would take to get the same average latency between a 10ms mechanical hard drive and a 0.1ms SSD. My laptop, for example, the 1U servers I run, etc... Plus, many applications can't take advantage of the lower average latency. Sure, a web and database server with thousands of simultaneous users can, but my laptop where I take advantage of it when I start openoffice or another large application for the first time in a few days cannot.
I think per
so this fixes smaller cell = less reliability? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [google.com]
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce#Issues [wikipedia.org]
and more...
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Rock solid? Yeah right... (Score:2, Interesting)
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*.
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What do you mean by 'freezing'? Depending on your OS, the issue may actually be with the SATA controller/driver. There is a Windows hotfix for Win7/2k8R2 addresssing the inbox driver.
Sorry, I'm too lazy to sign in.
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Last I heard, failure rate was directly tied to process size. Does any of this fix that?
I haven't heard anything about failure rate, but smaller process size generally means it will wear out earlier. Anandtech's review [anandtech.com] says it is still rated at 3000 P/E (program/erase cycles) like the 25nm NAND that preceded it, but they found some very disturbing results of less than 1000 P/E so I'd definitively wait to see how that checks out. Personally I'm sitting on a 5K-rated drive that according to the life meter should die after three years, so yeah... these new SSDs may be "cheap", but they're also co
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Write Endurance (Score:1)
Awesome, so now we're down to what, nine erasures before it's cooked?
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allowing it to offer the same performance and reliability characteristics of the 25-nm stuff.
There is no "down to" it is "the same as"
77c/GB? I can live with that (Score:2)
As long as the hardware can provably outlast a spinning HDD, I'd be more than happy.
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Not at 77c/GB it won't.
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Time will tell, I still have spinning disks from the late 1980's that work like a champ in my retro computer corner
No emergency power = not for serious users (Score:3)
Serious users should insist on SSD with a battery or super capacitor [wikipedia.org]. If not, then you might lose data in internal caches [2ndquadrant.com] 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.
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I don't think this issue is specific to SSDs. A regular hard drive also corrupts the sector if it loses power during a write. Especially if the data is in the cache and hasn't been written to the disk. And both types of drives often lie about their fsync capabilities.
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I don't think this issue is specific to SSDs. A regular hard drive also corrupts the sector if it loses power during a write. Especially if the data is in the cache and hasn't been written to the disk. And both types of drives often lie about their fsync capabilities.
If I'm reading the wiki link provided in the grandparent post correctly, in a MLC (but not SLC) drive, not only can the current write be corrupted, but previously performed (and assumed safe) writes can be corrupted as well.
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I noticed that too, so I think I was not clear on my original post. My point is this: serious users should insist on a drive with a battery or super capacitor. This statement is true regardless of the type of drive used. The original post implies that this problem is specific to SSDs, which it is not. Given the context of the link, the Wiki article then implies that it is specific to MLC drives, which is it not.
On a note of this, the Wiki article calls this "lower page corruption" and a Google search fo
What's the point? (Score:2)
Is this a breakthrough? No. 29% is nice, but it's not like they found a whole new revolutionary way of doing it.
Is there some controversy, like someone claimed in the past that they could never get more than 10% better and Intel broke through the barrier? No (or if it is, Slashdot doesn't seem to have heard of it).
Does having them get this much better make them useful for applications they weren't useful before, or make them affordable to a whole new range of customers? Not really.
Is it at least a nice
Please tell me... (Score:1)
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I like George Reisman's quote on this
Of course, many people will characterize the line of argument I have just given as the 'trickle-down' theory. There is nothing trickle-down about it. There is only the fact that capital accumulation and economic progress depend on saving and innovation and that these in turn depend on the freedom to make high profits and accumulate great wealth. The only alternative to improvement for all, through economic progress, achieved in this way, is the futile attempt of some men to gain at the expense of others by means of looting and plundering. This, the loot-and-plunder theory, is the alternative advocated by the critics of the misnamed trickle-down theory.
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Since the rich have gotten such preferential treatment, life for the poor has gotten worse, not better. If you believe in trickle-down
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more subsidies for the rich and more taxes for the poor will benefit the poor
- that's a loaded statement. The rich pay more taxes than ever and poor get more subsidies than ever, beyond that, the poor get cheaper products than ever. The capitalists are the actual friends of the poor, though the poor may not recognize it, even when they go shopping and get all the products and services at ridiculously low prices. The actual enemy of the poor is the government, which works hard, every day, to raise prices for the poor by creating fake money, by propping up silly credit bubbles, by
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This is Slashdot. He's not an ordinary idiot. He's an extraordinary idiot.
Re:A tiny example of trickle down economics in act (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Capitalism simply working" has been turned into pejorative 'trickle-down' economics in the West. Probably you should take your own advice and do research on this topic, start with wiki [wikipedia.org], why not.
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Now that is a troll.
As opposed to all the other times, when /. moderators mode something as a troll, they clearly do not understand the concept of what a troll is, which is clear now, since this one is not moderated accordingly.
Why is it a troll? Because it is contrary to the most obvious fact that there were and there are and there will be plenty of people who use their own savings (capital and private property) to start a business by arranging scarce resources (by managing capital, land an labor) in orde
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True indeed.
So, tax the people at the top and give this to the people at the bottom or give them jobs which will benefit society (building new roads, picking up litter etc.) and the rest should be encouraged to use their savings to promote new business.
The people at the top get hammered with extra tax but stimulating the economy should increase should trickle-up to their high value business ventures.
This economics thing is a breeze!
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Well, if your conclusion is that the productive people need to be taxed more to give unproductive people more money to spend, then clearly "this economic thing" is not a breeze.
By definition, only the rich can be "productive" so taxing the rich and giving it to the poor makes for more people that can be "productive" increasing the overall productivity.
Note, that I am not advocating for any income taxes at all, AFAIC there is no more destructive tax than income tax.
So you think a "wealth tax" would be more fair and less destructive?
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You can't take money from a company that produces wealth (yes, products are wealth) and then use that money to pay for various campaign contributions, road building and WTF governments do, that is not productive use of resources, otherwise the free market would be doing it.
So if a private company builds a prison, and charges the government $10,000,000 a year to run it, that's "wealth", but if the government does it and runs it for $5,000,000 per year, that's waste and draining wealth? I just don't get how a road is "wealth" if paid for with private funds (my driveway, a store parking lot) and not "wealth" if built by the government (the road from my drive to the store).
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Drug war. These two words should make you stop this line of thinking, because that's something that you cannot defend, it's indefensible.
Yes, the War on Drugs, declared by the big-government party, the Republicans, is a horrible thing. I've never said anything that could be construed as supportive of it. I think you are trying to change the subject because you realize I caught you in an inconsistency when the government and private industry can own the same thing, and you declare the one you like "wealth" and the other "wealth-less theft" or whatever.
I understand that you do not. Here [slashdot.org], I talked about it long ago.
Nevermind. You don't answer questions. You are a chat bot. You take questions and comme
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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-econo
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The problem with giving money to Bill Gates is that the people immediately downstream of him take large cuts of the cash for basically moving paper around. At least if you give it to the bum more of that cash ends up in a larger number of people's pockets, instead of just being creamed off by a few and spent on big luxury items that only generate employment for small numbers of people.
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Rich people don't just let their money sit there.
Yes they do.
The New York Times estimates [www.cbc.ca] 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 u
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EXACTLY. Deserves upmodding.
The average Joe can't afford to stash his money. He needs it to pay the bills.
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Actually your example is incorrect, here is how it really goes:
1. Savings are generated by underconsumption.
2. Savings are used to invest and start (or expand) a business.
3. Expansion of business through investment leads to more productivity (SSDs for example, after all this is the story about SSDs and I can relate to it rather than to Bill Gates, I don't buy MS stuff).
4. Expensive SSDs hit the market.
5. Early adopters and businesses buy (maybe, or they do not, then the business loses the investment).
6. If
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Give Bill G an extra $10 and sure he'll probably invest it but that will not significantly flow back into the economy
What do you think investing is, if not flowing back into the economy? "Significantly" is a meaningless qualification, unless you'd care to define it further.
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You've fallen for the fallacy that when rich people have money, they invest it, and all investment leads to more economic activity. Unfortunately, it's not true. Real investment that creates wealth only happens when there's enough demand for the wealth created.
When there is not enough demand for the wealth, the cost of that wealth is reduced until there is demand for it.
A bank is not going to just sit on a pile of money, they will re-loan that money even if they only get a small return on it because a small return is better than no return. That would be called 'lowering interest rates'.
(not counting the roughly 10% that the feds require banks to keep on-hand)
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Whatever your feelings are about Intel's products, this product is cheaper than a similar product 1 year or 2 years ago, it's better, it's faster, it's less power hungry, it has more capacity.
Clearly the investment into the original batch of SSDs paid off and Intel was able to use the profits it made on them to invest into better technology. That is economics (as I said, some call it 'trickle down' economics), but really all real economics is 'trickle down' economics. The more profitable a company becomes,
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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 bette
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while they might have just got the price & performance to the same point as everyone else, they have far exceeded everyone in quality for a long time.