Intel plans to put flash memory into notebooks next year
Intel plans to put NAND flash memory chips into notebook PCs beginning next year, the company revealed at the Intel Developer Forum this week.
According to a report published on TheStreet.com, the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker said Tuesday that the NAND flash feature in its forthcoming notebook platform, dubbed Santa Rosa, would offer the main benefit of almost instantaneous PC boot times.
NAND flash is a type of computer memory that retains data even without a power supply -- a technology that has proven especially popular for the new generation of consumer electronics devices, such as digital media players and cameras.
"We need to have devices that boot up very rapidly," Sean Maloney, the head of Intel's mobility group, told developers. "The same way you come off a plane and get a cell phone signal immediately."
In his presentation, Maloney demonstrated the advantages of flash technology in PCs, by booting up two PCs on stage, one with 256MB of flash memory, and the other without, TheStreet reports. The PC with flash reportedly booted in about half the time and also consumed slightly less power than the non-flash PC.
According to Maloney, the technology can scale way beyond a 256MB flash buffer, potentially running a PC's entire operating system from flash instead of from the hard drive. "It just comes down to what's the cost curve on NAND," he said.
Still, Maloney noted that it is still unclear how much flash would be incorporated into the forthcoming Santa Rosa platform, an updated version of the company's popular Centrino brand scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2007.
Word of Intel's intentions to extend NAND flash technology to PCs comes roughly three months after Apple gave the chip maker and its flash memory manufacturing partner Micron a cool $500 million in prepayments to secure a supply of the memory chips through 2010, presumably for iPods.
According to a report published on TheStreet.com, the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker said Tuesday that the NAND flash feature in its forthcoming notebook platform, dubbed Santa Rosa, would offer the main benefit of almost instantaneous PC boot times.
NAND flash is a type of computer memory that retains data even without a power supply -- a technology that has proven especially popular for the new generation of consumer electronics devices, such as digital media players and cameras.
"We need to have devices that boot up very rapidly," Sean Maloney, the head of Intel's mobility group, told developers. "The same way you come off a plane and get a cell phone signal immediately."
In his presentation, Maloney demonstrated the advantages of flash technology in PCs, by booting up two PCs on stage, one with 256MB of flash memory, and the other without, TheStreet reports. The PC with flash reportedly booted in about half the time and also consumed slightly less power than the non-flash PC.
According to Maloney, the technology can scale way beyond a 256MB flash buffer, potentially running a PC's entire operating system from flash instead of from the hard drive. "It just comes down to what's the cost curve on NAND," he said.
Still, Maloney noted that it is still unclear how much flash would be incorporated into the forthcoming Santa Rosa platform, an updated version of the company's popular Centrino brand scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2007.
Word of Intel's intentions to extend NAND flash technology to PCs comes roughly three months after Apple gave the chip maker and its flash memory manufacturing partner Micron a cool $500 million in prepayments to secure a supply of the memory chips through 2010, presumably for iPods.
Comments
Originally posted by Robin Hood
Interesting, although my MacBook Pro already "boots up" from sleep in under a second!
How long does the battery last when sleeping?
I think this is pretty nice, especially when using peripherals that don't allow a computer to sleep well when connected.
Very cool. I hope Apple adopts this. Would there be any benefit for desktops with this? How about launching programs user-specified quicker with this technology? I know Apple Music uses would like Logic to boot up in about half the time!
Ever run a Pismo from Flash? Ever run Linux from RAM? Ever played an iPod nano and been impressed with the lack of seek times, vibration and BULK?
The future is in flash. Platter hard drives are great for huge data stores that you want to be fast, re-writable and of course cheap. But the age of tugging one around with you all the time and fearing the worst when you drop your computer or left it stored in the cold is coming to an end.
Apple first!
While this could be loaded without having to spin up the disk, the kernel still has to initialize and go through its boot process. Will parallelizing the hard drive spin up really make a difference?
putting OS libraries and files on a separate physical disk (whether its flash or platter-based, especially one that rarely needs writes), is bound to speed up any application, is this a potentially cheap and efficient way of doing just that?
Originally posted by fuyutsuki
I love this technology - getting rid of platter drives is the holy grail of laptop and TABLET computing!
I realized that this was basically what they touted as Robson several months ago. It isn't dedicated flash drive but a hybrid caching system using as little as 128MB of flash to store some often used files with low latency. Running Tiger and any current software on a flash drive is still very unrealistic unless you have a lot of money.
Originally posted by JeffDM
I realized that this was basically what they touted as Robson several months ago.
Actually, it's still touted as Robson.
I might be holding off my MBP purchase until Santa Rosa.
The consumer is going to get stuck with this feature at a price point that will no doubt raise the prices of MacBooks.
Hell we can't get a $40 add-on BTO video card option yet these memory chips will be almost that much for a laptop. Of course this will be billed as a "feature."
Originally posted by mdriftmeyer
Whose paying for this "feature?"
The consumer is going to get stuck with this feature at a price point that will no doubt raise the prices of MacBooks.
Hell we can't get a $40 add-on BTO video card option yet these memory chips will be almost that much for a laptop. Of course this will be billed as a "feature."
I doubt the cost of a 256MB flash chip is anywhere near $40.
Don't get too excited!
It will take time before Flash can replace HD's. Its write lifetime is way too short, and the price is way too high.
What really matters to me is being able to quickly suspend and resume login/application sessions. Normal sleep is still the best option for that since none of my systems support safe-sleep. I'd like to use safe-sleep for longer durations of system inactivity and if NAND flash made that faster I'd might use it even more often.
I keep a Windows laptop hibernated for months at a time, power it back on, and resume everything right where I left it (well, until the inevitable updates download and I end up rebooting anyway after they're installed). And my Solaris box now lives in sys-suspend most of the time, but still ready to be resumed in the state I left it.
I'd rather see more sophisticated session management features than faster system boot times.