Intel SSD is Awesome

I wrote this article for the latest issue of CPU Magazine, it's about the recent announement that Intel is jumping in to the solid state hard drive business.

I have been writing quite a bit about Intel lately, often about the company’s quest to increase its platform real estate from within a personal computer. Last month I touched a bit on Intel’s much-anticipated Larrabee graphics platform; this month I’m writing about the chipmaker’s solid-state drives. Unless you’re living in a Unabomber shack somewhere in the deep woods, you probably heard that Intel announced its new SSDs at IDF this year.

Let me start by saying that I have a pair of these babies running in my Blackbird PC in RAID 0. Based on my experience, Intel has completely changed the game with these drives. Not only has the company made SSD relevant in high-performance scenarios, but through some complex algorithm management, Intel has managed to wipe the floor with any other storage technology on the planet.

Of course performance is important, but what about battery life and drive efficiency for notebook applications? Months ago, Tom’s Hardware wrote about the SSD battery life issue. They missed a few points, one of the most notable being that there is a direct correlation between the efficiency and performance of the drive and the overall battery life on the device. In other words, the slower the SSD, the longer it takes to run a task, thus the more battery life it eats. This is not the case with Intel drives; they are fast, efficient, and they actually extend the battery life of the machine compared to other SSDs. After installing a pair of them drives in RAID, my system literally boots Windows Vista Ultimate in seconds. Overall, I would say these new SSD drives rock, both in notebook applications and in desktops.

You might wonder what this means for Intel, and you wouldn’t be alone. My guess is the company is working to increase its aforementioned platform real estate through technologies like NAND, SSD, chipsets, CPUs, wireless, and soon through graphics. Imagine if Intel can pull off the seemingly impossible by making its next-generation graphics much better the previous Intel Extreme graphics. I’m not speaking from insider information here; I’m simply guessing that Intel has some incredible things in the back room at the moment, based in part on rumors that the company is apparently hiring some of the best graphics engineers in the industry. I can only imagine what the new Centrino will be like; after all, if the company can suddenly jump into the storage business with an industry-leading product, then anything is possible.

The industry is changing. The days where customers would spend thousands of dollars on a huge, 2-kilowatt, multi-GPU desktop PC just to play one game well are almost gone. People are generally very well-informed in making buying decisions, and they’re looking for “greener,” more efficient PCs. They want a system that works and supports all of their applications.

So, what’s the point?

If Intel can pull off creating the ultimate integrated graphics part, it will likely make third-party discrete graphics irrelevant in notebooks. Why would anyone want to integrate a third-party discrete chipset when all you need is an Intel processor combined with whatever Centrino-branded devices you need to create a hardware simple platform? Now throw in the Intel SSD and you have a bigger, even uglier Intel than you do today.

As a builder of systems, I’ve learned that the success in this industry isn’t as simple as taking the best components and tossing them into a box. The secret is to look at what companies like Intel are doing, listen to what your customers are looking for, and work backward into cool, innovative new products. As such, we spend a lot of time imagining ways to create thinner, lighter, less expensive, and more powerful devices. Yeah, it’s a continuing process, and Intel seems to be leading the way, again.