Slashdot has lined to an article about Intel’s upcoming flash memory add-on that calls its self Braidwood.  The analyst who wrote the article speculates that it will be between 4 to 16GB of NAND memory will appear on motherboards in 2010, only raising the price of those boards by $20.  Seeing as how Braidwood will be a new feature on motherboards that will speed up boot and load times, assuming it works properly of course, Intel is not likely to add it onto high end motherboards at such an incredibly low cost.  It also seems very trusting to store important pieces of your OS on a storage medium that small, MLC flash may start to fail after 10,000 writes and with only a handful of gigabytes of storage you will not see much ability to load level.


The author then goes on to speculate that Braidwood also represents a death knell for SSDs, as apparently they only good thing about SSDs is the ability to boot into the OS quickly.   Nobody tell Allyn about that, OK?

“Intel is planning to launch its native flash memory module, code named Braidwood, in the first or second quarter of 2010. The inexpensive NAND flash will reside directly on a computer’s motherboard as cache for all I/O and it will offer performance increases and other benefits similar to that of adding a solid-state disk drive to the system. A new report states that by achieving SSD performance without the high cost, Braidwood will essentially erode the SSD market, which, ironically, includes Intel’s two popular SSD models. ‘Intel has got a very good [SSD] product. But, they view additional layers of NAND technology in PCs as inevitable. They don’t think SSDs are likely to take over 100% of the PC market, but they do think Braidwood could find itself in 100% of PCs,’ the report’s author said.”

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