14 DAY TRIAL // Intel is already the leading developer and supplier of consumer central processing units, as well as the owner of the only currently available six-core chip. However, it seems that just this high status is no longer enough for the Santa Clara company. After it completed the 25nm NAND, in collaboration with Micron, the chip maker revealed that it had every intention of becoming prominent on the SSD market. Since then, Intel released the 40GB X25-V Value SATA SSD and was even reported to be working on 400GB and 600GB drives. These developments definitely suggest that the company wasn't jesting when it made that statement and the latest report from Fudzilla seems to prove Intel's intention beyond doubt.
According to the report, Intel is already working on making SSDs based on the 25nm manufacturing process technology. Currently, the X25-E enterprise SLC-based drives are the fastest that it has to offer and they reach the impressive read and write speeds of 250MB/s and 170MB/s, respectively, even while being based on the 50nm process.
The next-generation devices that are supposedly in development, codenamed Lyndonville, being based on a smaller process, will naturally exceed this performance, perhaps even by far.
Lyndonville drives will also be created out of multi-level cell NAND Flash memory chips and will most likely also be meant for the enterprise sector. This is because, while offering a boost in performance and a lower chance of errors, SLC adds a significant extra cost compared to multi-level cell chips (MLC), a price premium that, in most cases, doesn't justify the performance enhancement, even in data centers and servers.
That said, the 25nm Lyndonville drives will have capacities of 100GB, 200GB and 400GB and should score some new benchmarking records when they are made public.
It is unclear how much the new products will cost, but there is also no real need to find out, given that they will only be launched in the first quarter of 2011.