14 DAY TRIAL // Having read about the likelihood of a new Amazon Kindle Fire being on the way, we now get to look at a report that deals with a different company and an equally different product type.
In this instance, Intel is the corporation that Digitimes' report talks about, although not for its central processing unit line.
Granted, the matter still revolves around chips, but they are of a different kind, used for storage to be exact.
Essentially, Intel is said to be preparing some new NAND Flash-based devices, commonly dubbed solid state drives.
The Maple Crest 300 Series should come out first, in May, and it will be followed, at some point, by the Ramsdale. There are also 500 series King Crest SSDs in the pipeline.
Maple Crest should be the same old type of SATA III units. The number 300 is smaller than 520 though, which means that the company may not stick to the latter's SandForce controllers.
Speaking of which, the 520 line was released last month, so you can go read more about it here.
The Ramsdale will be different, equipped with the PCI Express interface and, thus, higher read and write speeds, probably of over 1 GB/s. The storage capacities will be of 400 GB and 800 GB. In other words, these things will only be good for enterprise applications.
As for the later parts of 2012, Digitimes says the Santa Clara company will bring forth the 20nm-based 700 series Taylorsville and the 300 series Jay Crest and Oak Crest.
Taylorsville will be 100 GB, 200 GB, 400 GB and 800 GB drives, but the capacities of the other two collections are still under wraps.
The report's sources say that 2012 will be a key year for the cementing of the trend where solid state drives begin to replace hard drives, but we aren't so sure things will truly go this way, knowing how much more expensive the former continue to be compared to the latter.