Rocking Team » Intel

Intel Announces Third-Generation SSD : Intel SSD 320 Series

Alex Jose — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:14:38 +0000

Intel announced its third generation Solid State Drives the Intel® Solid-State Drive 320 Series (Intel® SSD 320 Series).

Highlights of Intel’s Third Generation SSD

Third-generation Intel® SSD 320 Series on 25-nm NAND flash memory offers 40-, 80-, 120-, 160-GB plus higher capacity 300- and 600GB options.
Advanced architecture enables robust, reliable SSDs with enhanced security features for desktop/notebook PCs or server data center storage.
Performance, reliability upgrades enhance solid line of high-performing SSDs with up to $100 price drop over current Intel® X25-M SSD model.

From the Press Release: “Intel designed new quality and reliability features into our SSDs to take advantage of the latest 25nm silicon, so we could deliver cost advantages to our customers,” said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. “Intel’s third generation of SSDs adds enhanced data security features, power-loss management and innovative data redundancy features to once again advance SSD technology. Whether it’s a consumer or corporate IT looking to upgrade from a hard disk drive, or an enterprise seeking to deploy SSDs in their data centers, the new Intel SSD 320 Series will continue to build on our reputation of high quality and dependability over the life of the SSD.”

The Intel SSD 320 is for the use on desktop and notebook PCs. An SSD is more rugged, uses less power and reduces the HDD bottleneck to speed PC processes such as boot up and the opening of files and favorite applications. The Intel SSD 320 Series comes in 40 gigabyte (GB), 80GB, 120GB, 160GB and new higher capacity 300GB and 600GB versions.

Intel SSD 320 prices, are as follows: 40GB at $89; 80GB at $159; 120GB at $209; 160GB at $289; 300GB at $529 and 600GB at $1,069.

Intel® X25-V SSD Priced at $125

Alex Jose — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:14:03 +0000

The Intel® X25-V Value SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD) is targeted for value netbooks, dual-drive desktop PCs as a “boot drive” and advanced RAID 0 configurations to boost system and gaming performance. The 40GB SSD retails for $125.

Highlights

Intel introduces X25-V Value SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD) at $125 entry price point.
Perfect for value netbooks or as boot drive for dual-drive SSD/HDD desktops, X25-V delivers SSD performance at an affordable price.
Desktop PCs can now combine an SSD with HDD to boost overall system performance and speed system boot up and opening of applications

The Intel X25-V features 40GB of 34nm NAND flash memory. This non-volatile memory retains data, even when the power is turned off, and is used in applications such as smartphones, personal music players, memory cards or SSDs for fast and reliable storage of data. SSD benefits over a traditional HDD include higher performance, battery saving and ruggedness. “Adding the Intel X25-V to our existing family of high-performance SSDs gives our resellers a full range of high-performing, quality SSDs for notebook upgrades, dual-drive desktop set ups or embedded applications,” said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group. “SSD adoption continues to be one of the more exciting trends in personal computing, and this entry-level product enables users to enjoy the productivity and performance benefits of Intel SSDs at a new price point.”

Intel’s forthcoming many core processor codenamed ‘Larrabee’

Alex Jose — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:03:26 +0000

Intel Corporation is presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12 that describes features and capabilities of its first-ever forthcoming “many-core” blueprint or architecture codenamed “Larrabee.”

Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications.

Larrabee

The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based on an array of many processors. The individual processors are similar to the Intel processors that power the Internet and the laptops, PCs and servers that access and network to it.

Larrabee is expected to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers. Intel has a number of internal teams, projects and software-related efforts underway to speed the transition, but the tera-scale research program has been the single largest investment in Intel’s technology research and has partnered with more than 400 universities, DARPA and companies such as Microsoft and HP to move the industry in this direction.

Over time, the consistency of Intel architecture and thus developer freedom afforded by the Larrabee architecture will bring about massive innovation in many areas and market segments. For example, while current games keep getting more and more realistic, they do so within a rigid and limited framework. Working directly with some of the world’s top 3-D graphics experts, Larrabee will give developers of games and APIs (Application Programming Interface) a blank canvas onto which they can innovate like never before.

Initial product implementations of the Larrabee architecture will target discrete graphics applications, support DirectX and OpenGL, and run existing games and programs. Additionally, a broad potential range of highly parallel applications including scientific and engineering software will benefit from the Larrabee native C/C++ programming model.

Additional details of the Larrabee architecture discussed in this paper include:

The Larrabee architecture has a pipeline derived from the dual-issue Intel Pentium® processor, which uses a short execution pipeline with a fully coherent cache structure. The Larrabee architecture provides significant modern enhancements such as a wide vector processing unit (VPU), multi-threading, 64-bit extensions and sophisticated pre-fetching. This will enable a massive increase in available computational power combined with the familiarity and ease of programming of the Intel architecture.
Larrabee also includes a select few fixed function logic blocks to support graphics and other applications. These units are carefully chosen to balance strong performance per watt, yet contribute to the flexibility and programmability of the architecture.
A coherent on-die 2nd level cache allows efficient inter-processor communication and high-bandwidth local data to be access by CPU cores, making the writing of software programs simpler.
The Larrabee native programming model supports a variety of highly parallel applications, including those that use irregular data structures. This enables development of graphics APIs, rapid innovation of new graphics algorithms, and true general purpose computation on the graphics processor with established PC software development tools.
Larrabee features task scheduling which is performed entirely with software, rather than in fixed function logic. Therefore rendering pipelines and other complex software systems can adjust their resource scheduling based each workload’s unique computing demand.
The Larrabee architecture supports four execution threads per core with separate register sets per thread. This allows the use of a simple efficient in-order pipeline, but retains many of the latency-hiding benefits of more complex out-of-order pipelines when running highly parallel applications.
The Larrabee architecture uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network (i.e., 512 bits in each direction) to allow agents to communicate with each other in low latency manner resulting in super fast communication between cores.
The Larrabee architecture fully supports IEEE standards for single and double precision floating-point arithmetic. Support for these standards is a pre-requisite for many types of tasks including financial applications.

Intel’s Solid State Drives – High Performance, Rugged, Reliable and Low-Power Storage Solution

Alex Jose — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:03:16 +0000

Intel Released Intel® X18-M and X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives (SSDs) based on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash technology for laptop and desktop computers. The X18-M is a 1.8-inch drive and the X25-M a 2.5-inch drive. SSD increases overall system performance and faster booting. Since SSDs are like flash drive it has got no moving parts or motors like in Hard Disks, SSD run cooler and less noise. And also Hard Disk limit the input/output data speed because of it mechanical limitations, but in SSDs there is no mechanical parts so speeds of data transmission has got no boundary, to maximaize the efficency of your processor. Lab tests show that the Intel X18-M and X25M increase storage system performance nine times over traditional hard disk drive performance.

The Intel X18-M and X25-M Mainstream SATA SSDs are available in 80 gigabyte (GB) capacities, with 160GB versions sampling in the fourth quarter of this year. The 80GB drive achieves up to 250MB per second read speeds, up to 70MB per second write speeds and 85-microsecond read latency for fast performance.

There is no idea about the cost of this product in India. Anyhow it won’t be cheaper at the crawling age. Lets wait for the arrival of SSD.

Review : Intel Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition

Alex Jose — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:46:25 +0000

Product information

3.20 GHz core speed
8 processing threads with Intel® HT technology
8 MB of Intel® Smart Cache
3 Channels of DDR3 1066 MHz memory

The good: Fastest high-end desktop CPU; supporting motherboard supports both graphics card vendors’ multicard technologies.

The bad: Requires an expensive new motherboard; chipset needs three memory sticks for maximum efficiency.

The bottom line: Thanks to an expensive new motherboard requirement, Intel’s new Core i7 desktop processors will remain enthusiast and professional-level parts until more affordable complementary hardware comes out later next year. Speed never comes cheap, however, and if you’re willing to spend for it now, you’ll find yourself in possession of the fastest CPU on the market.

The Core i7 965 Extreme Edition runs at 3.20GHz and features a QPI (QuickPath Interface) throughput of 6.4GT/s, which is the key difference here. The mainstream versions of the processor include the Core i7 920 and 940, clocked at 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz, respectively. These more affordable processors feature a QPI throughput of just 4.8GT/s, so it will be interesting to discover what kind of impact this has on performance.