Hard disc caching technology developed by Intel could speed
up the operation of PCs, a new report has concluded.
The report -
Intel's Braidwood: death to the SSD - by Objective
Analysis has found that Intel's Braidwood technology offers
comparable performance and power consumption improvements to
solid state drives (SSDs), but at considerably lower costs.
Both SSD and Braidwood rely on a type of memory chip, known as
Nand. While SSDs use large arrays of Nand chips to create
large-capacity SSDs, Braidwood uses smaller capacities - up to
16Gbytes of Nand - to create an intelligent disc cache.
From a cost per gigabyte perspective, the report predicted SSDs
would likely remain about 20 times as expensive as a hard disc
drive (HDD), making it an expensive option for providing large
volumes of storage on desktop PCs.
The report states, "The
benefits that SSDs bring to the PC environment (faster boot-up
and application launch times and a nominal increase in battery
life) are not generally found to warrant a significant price
increase."
Since Braidwood requires less Nand memory, Jim Handy, the
report's author, said, "Braidwood would add $10 to the cost of a
PC, compared with $200 for SSDs."
The report also notes that since the Nand is not hidden behind a
disc interface, the data communication between Braidwood and the
processor will be significantly faster than that between an SSD and
the processor. This should give the small Braidwood memory an
opportunity to outperform SSDs in some instances, even though an
SSD's larger capacity is likely to make it faster than Braidwood in
other cases, according to Objective Analysis.