Leaked Intel roadmap reveals PCIe flash kit

Tom's Hardware has reported a leaked Intel storage roadmap that confirms a PCIe flash product is coming, as well as confirming updates across Chipzilla's three flash product families. According to the slide: The 700-series high-end products have a Ramsdale PRQ coming by the end of the year. It is a 200GB or 400GB PCIe card …

[Anonymous Coward]

A "flash product" is.... what?

What a strangely-worded article. "Product" is a very generic term to use when you could have been more precise. Is there some reason not to have mentioned that the "products" in question are all SSDs?

[TaabuTheCat]

Chris does it again...

OK, after reading yet another interesting storage piece from Chris, I have to say it: The man covers storage like no one else. I've leaned more about storage companies and products I didn't know about in the last three or four months than I have in quite a while, courtesy of Chris's great reporting.

Keep up the good work, and don't do an Ashley and leave just when it gets really interesting!

(Reg, increase the man's pay immediately!)

[Baskitcaise]

You sir are Chris Mellor and I claim my £5.00p

[Jim O'Reilly]

Is performance the right metric?

There's a spectrum of prices to consider together with the raw performance. Measured in IOPs per dollar, we likely will see these new Intel products favorably compared with the top end of the market.

But that isn't the whole story. First, the purpose of the SSD is to make apps run faster, and generally (emphasize that!) gains with even the top products are less than 3x, and, moreover, the same gains are achievable with slower SSD or PCIe. The reason: Applications/operating systems are not optimized for the very short latencies of flash.

Second, the need for performance is often addressed by adding spindle and/or servers. In any situation, SSD is cheaper than this for a given improvement.

All in all, Intel may be taking aim at the market size bullseye.