IDF: Full Speed Ahead for Intel SSDs

[Guest]

Intel says its SSD drives offer unparalleled performance, although we're still skeptical about actual real world performance.

IDF: Full Speed Ahead for Intel SSDs : Read more

 

[navvara]

So the mainstream drives use 0.15 watts when active and 0.6 when idle. Care to explain how?

 

[scooterlibby]

How the heck would a drive double the frame rates from a VR? I know you can get some FPS boosts from new drives (from personal experience going from 8mb SATA to 16mb), but I thought the benefit was in load times. A doubling of frame rates I would think usually attributable to the CPU, RAM, and GPU.

 

[Area51]

I have had the fortune of having one of the drives for testing for about 30 days now. So far I am hitting the 250MB/s read and close to 70MB/s write. Its also exceeding 3500 IOPS. I haven’t been able to measure the power because it’s so little that it is with the margin of error.

 

[one-shot]

Wait a minute...wouldn't it go up to .6 from .15? I thought that's how numbers worked. Maybe Intel changed that though...

 

[cushgod]

How the heck would a drive double the frame rates from a VR? I know you can get some FPS boosts from new drives (from personal experience going from 8mb SATA to 16mb), but I thought the benefit was in load times. A doubling of frame rates I would think usually attributable to the CPU, RAM, and GPU.

Yes please if someone could explain this that would rock! Thanks!

And Prices?? How much are we talking .. so as to compare to other SSD's

 

[wicko]

It could be for games that stream textures. But the article says they got the numbers mixed up, so who knows.. I doubt its anything close to double performance.

 

[rockyjohn]

Well now I am really confused. The recent article on SSD;s said that highend products used SLC memory and maintstream MLC. Intel does it the other way - their extreme is said to be MLC. Now I am confused about characteristics of both.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000.html

Can anyone "unconfuse" this?

 

[Guest]

A little error in the document: the Extreme series are based on SLC technology and the Mainstream on MLC not the way around.

 

[TheFace]

I thought that SLC drives were the faster, more reliable, SSDs. Whereas MLC drives were slower, cheaper and less reliable. Does this article have it backwards?

 

[GlItCh017]

[citation][nom]navvara[/nom]So the mainstream drives use 0.15 watts when active and 0.6 when idle. Care to explain how?[/citation]

I'm curious as well. I was going to say something but you beat everyone to it.

 

[darkbob87]

Devin here,

It was a typo on my part about the wattage. The Mainstream drives uses .06W when idle, .15W when active.

As far the frame rates go, Falcon NW said that certain aspacts of the game (textures, etc.) are pulled off the emo disc every time it is run, and that info goes through the HDD. Faster drives = better fps.

 

[Guest]

"and with the manufacturing capacity Intel brings to any market"

Ummm.. these parts are not manufactured in the Intel fabs that do CPU's and chipsets - these are done (I believe) in the joint venture fab between Intel and Micron. While they should be able to mass produce them, please don't (incorrectly) confuse Intel's CPU/chipset manufacturing capacity with their overall capacity/capability.

 

[jaragon13]

[citation][nom]darkbob87[/nom]Devin here,It was a typo on my part about the wattage. The Mainstream drives uses .06W when idle, .15W when active.As far the frame rates go, Falcon NW said that certain aspacts of the game (textures, etc.) are pulled off the emo disc every time it is run, and that info goes through the HDD. Faster drives = better fps.[/citation]
Basically,shitty programming where the game doesn't prefetch it in the memory,and the game will freeze until it's loaded,or worse,slow the whole thread down until you load it up.
Their point is biased bullcrap.

 

[Guest]

Here's the deal, Intel is posturing they've arrived at SSD Mecca. The reality is, the best is obviously yet to come. It is my opinion that these drives make the largest impact on mobile applications that desire a reduction in heat and power consumption. SSD technology should boost performance, even in games.
The comment made about poor programming... where the game doesn't prefetch it in the memory... Programmers made that exception in games for the slow performance of non-SSD drives - so, of course! They made that exception for the countless people in the world that don't build a true performance rig with each new emerging technology. SSD changes that to a degree - It's glorified memory by nature.

 

[ALANMAN]

"Also, the Extreme series are based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLC ) technology, whereas the larger Mainstream drives are Single-Level Cell (SLC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLC ) based."

Yeah that IS backwards.

 

[GullLars]

This article should be re-written to remove the typos that have been mentioned here. Summary:
Idle power 0.06 and active 0.15 for mainstream drives.
Extreme SSDs use SLC, mainstream use MLC (therefore the reduced write speed)
Also, the FPS gain in the (UNNAMED!!!) game comes from texture streaming, and judging by the FPS it was on a bad computer.
The (UNNAMED) SSDs intel compare theirs to and give numbers like 5-19 times more sequential read means the other drives have is 250/19=13.5 to 250/5=50 MB/s. This means these "competing" SSDs are first generation trancend and crucial i think. wich is NOT competition at all.
More comparable competition for the "mainstream" drives are OCZ Core v2, wich are 170/96 read/write. And these actually BEAT intel at write, and are 30% slower on sequential reads. This press release is pure propaganda.
I would also love to see the access times on these, and random read IOPS graphs, pluss pcmark vantage results. THEN i would have some actually usefull information.

 

[hixbot]

The code of the game demo completely relies on drive speed. It buffers little to nothing in RAM.
A conventional hard drive wouldnt stand a chance running game code like this. Ofcourse, there's no reason why anyone would code a real game like this.
In a sense, these are not real world gaming numbers. A real game would benefit with better load times, not frame rates.

 

[Guest]

Intel is certainly developing an interesting portfolio of products lately... Between SSDs, Trusted Platform Module, and Wimax integrated into laptop's motherboard, big brother now has everything he needs to go through your files when the computer isn't even powered on.

 

[Guest]

Its 0.06 not 0.6