Roomier, Faster, Cheaper SSDs Coming Sooner Than We Thought (Plus Gazing Forward To Montevina And Beyond)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
by Charles W. Moore
There is a growing sense of inevitability that Solid State Drive (SSD), AKA NAND flash memory technology is going to give the old electro-mechanical hard drive a run for its money and eventually supplant it, especially in laptop computers. The tipping point isn’t here yet, and it’s hard to draw a bead on just when we might expect it, but a couple of developments this past week indicate that it may be closer than some imagine.
I don’t hate the venerable hard drive. I’ve had excellent service from hard drives over my 16 years on the Mac, with only two hardware failures - both on nearly-new drives which were almost certainly due to manufacturing defects. I also prefer the hard drive as a backup medium as opposed to disk-burning. However, there’s no denying the SSD’s advantages: no moving parts (a big advantage with portable computers with no need for the extra cost and complexity of sudden motion sensor technology), lower power demand, lower heat generation, and complete silence of operation (Ahhhhhh!), so if SSDs can be made cost, capacity, and functionality competitive with hard drives, bring them on.
It didn’t happen with the MacBook Air, whose optional Samsung SSD costs a whopping $1,000 extra and actually has 16 GB less capacity than the standard 80 GB 1.8” hard drive. It also reportedly offers little in the way of performance gains. Obviously not ready to seriously challenge the trusty, fast, and relatively cheap mainstream hard drive.
However, last weekend, Samsung Electronics has announced that it has developed what it claims to be the world’s fastest, 2.5-inch, 256 GB multi-level cell (MLC) based SSD using a SATA II interface, making it the thinnest SSD drive with the largest capacity to be offered with a SATA II interface.
With a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speed of 160MB/s, this new SSD is about 2.4 times faster than a typical HDD. Furthermore, the new 256 GB SSD is only 9.5 millimeters (mm) thick - the standard drive thickness these days for laptops, although too large to fit in the MacBook Air, which uses iPod-type and sized drives, but a 1.8-inch version of the 256GB SSD is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2008, which, if it turns out to be thin enough, sounds like an ideal fix for one of the Air’s limitations - it’s meagre storage capacity.
Samsung says its new 256GB SSD will effectively eliminate data storage density as a barrier to SSD adoption. However, no word on cost competitiveness as yet.
“With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. commented Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage.”
Samsung also says that through “major advancements” in proprietary controller technology, the new MLC 256GB SSD also boasts reliability equal to that of SLC SSDs, with a mean time between failures (MTBF) of one million hours, while costing considerably less. Power consumption is also exceptionally low at 0.9 watts in active mode. In addition, the drive offers a sophisticated data encryption process that prevents data stored on the SSD from being accessed in an unauthorized manner, even after the SSD is removed from the computer.
Overall, the number of computer models in which SSDs are offered is expected to increase dramatically once Samsung’s previously announced 128GB SSD and the new 256GB SSD are launched, but don’t start holding your breath quite yet.
Samsung is expected to begin mass producing the 2.5-inch, 256GB SSD by year end 2008, with samples available to computer makers for testing in September.
According to a Q1 2008 report by the semiconductor market research firm iSuppli, the SSD market will grow at an annualized average of 124 percent during the four-year period from 2008 until 2012. iSuppli now projects SSD sales to increase by an additional 35 percent in 2009 over what it projected last year, 51 percent more in 2010, and 89 percent more in 2011, and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.
The other development on the SSD front I referenced above is a report by The Register’s Tony Smith that Intel plans to use the forthcoming next-generation “Montevina” Core 2 Duo CPU to “push SSDs into the mainstream.”
“Montevina”, whose rollout, according to a TGDaily report yesterday, will miss its originally planned debut date later in June, and “is now scheduled for a July 14 launch with ‘some chipsets’. A ‘couple of weeks later’ the company will be shipping the full line of chipsets, as the company needs ‘a few extra days’ for tasks such as antenna testing.”
When it eventually arrives, Montevina is projected to be available bundled with 80GB and 160GB 2.5” and 1.8” format SSDs in Q2 ‘08, and the 1.8in model also sounds like a logical update for the MacBook Air.
Other good news about Montevina, which will of course be available to OEM customers without bundled SSDs and is expected to power the next refresh (or redesign) of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, is that the mobile versions of the chip are to have a maximum power draw of 25W, or 10W less than the Santa Rosa Core 2 Duo’s 35W, which should help get the temperatures in those ‘Books down, as well as improving battery life. The Montevinas are also expected to incorporate faster front-side buses (1066 MHz), as opposed to the current Core 2 Duos’ 800MHz.
So when will we see Montevina-based Apple ‘Books?
Last weekend Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster reportedly suggested a 60% chance Steve Jobs will announce new Apple laptops at WWDC on June 9 along with a 3G iPhone, and an 80% chance by the end of summer.
I think a WWDC announcement of new laptops is the longest of long shots, being as the current Penryn-based models are still a relatively recent refresh, and Intel has apparently, pushed the Montevina chip release back to mid-July. I can’t imagine a new laptop release without Montevina, especially the much-rumored MacBook major redesign. An 80 percent likelihood by the end of summer (September 21) is more plausible.
The standard size current-generation Penryn Core 2 Duo chip was actually released by INtel last November, so it took about three months for Apple to get Penryn-based machines out the door last February. With a July release to OEMs for Montevina, we can deduce that if Apple wants to stay with the program, they could conceivably have Montevina-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros ready to roll by September, although it won’t greatly surprise me if it ends up being closer to Apple’s traditional notebook update time window a bit later in the fall.
Before that we might see Revision B MacBook Airs with their current Merom-family chips replaced by small form-factor (22 x 22mm) Penryns, probably with clock speeds similar to the first-gen’s Meroms (1.6 GHz; 1.8 GHz) and that could happen soon, possibly as early as the World Wide Developers Conference in June, which would make Gene Munster’s “60%” prognostication technically accurate, but not for Montevina. Eventually, small form factor Montevinas for the Air are projected at 2.26 GHz and 2.40 GHz clock speeds, but look for the bigger ‘Books to get Montevina first.
There doesn’t seem to be any logical home in Apple’s current notebook lineup for the 1.2GHz and 1.4GHz Penryn processors Intel also has on the shelf, whose advantage is that they draw a modest 10 watts, which gets this writer musing wistfully about the days of quiet PowerBooking without the cacophonous intrusion of cooling fan racket.
At the other end of the spectrum, Intel has let it be known that they will be introducing a quad-core Penryn “mobile” chip which will have a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of approximately 45 watts. As noted above, the TDP of the latest Penryn-equipped MacBook Pro is 35 watts. Whether Apple will decide to build a king-of-the-hill MacBook Pro with a quad-core processor, a machine that would thrill video-editors and high-end graphics professionals, is an imponderable at this juncture. I hope that will, but we’ll have to wait and see.
It is of course being widely rumored that Apple will take the transition to Montevina processors, which will reportedly require motherboard re-engineering due to Montevina not being pin-compatible with the Penryn and Merom chips they’ll be replacing, as a cue to go with a major redesign of the MacBook, with an aluminum housing and design motif incorporating styling themes introduced with the MacBook Air -- with a thinner (although not as radically so as the Air) form factor and softer-cornered, more “organic” contours.
And after Montevina, Nehalem cometh, reportedly representing a revolution rather than evolution in CPU design, but that will be a 2009 show.
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