Intel today announced the Intel Solid-State Drive (SSD) Professional Family, including the Intel Solid-State Drive Pro 1500 Series. The new business-class SSDs are engineered for easy IT deployment and secure manageability.
Seperately today, Intel has started shipping shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power.
Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series
The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series allows IT departments to increase employee uptime and reduce cost with its manageability and security features. The Intel Stable Image Platform Program ensures that key drivers are in place and makes transitioning to the Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series simple and predictable. The ability to remotely manage assets and diagnose issues at the drive level means fewer deskside visits, so PC maintenance and repairs require less time.
The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series also protects data from unauthorized access with enterprise-grade security features, including hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and Opal key management protocols. The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series is designed to work with the 4th generation Intel Core processors with Intel vPro technology. Using the Intel Setup and Configuration Software, IT managers address problems before they arise by remotely managing devices and extracting drive diagnostics to monitor storage health.
The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series come in new small form factors, such as M.2, featuring low-power modes that reduce idle power by more than 90 percent compared to HDDs. Smaller form factors and less power enable slimmer device profiles with long battery life, including Ultrabooks, 2 in 1 devices and traditional PCs.
Intel says that its SSDs offer annualized failure rates (AFR) well below 1 percent.
At the heart of the Pro 1500 is a 6Gbps SATA SandForce SF-2281 controller, the same controller used in Intel's SSD 330, 335, 520 and 530. The controller complemented by Intel's firmware and Intel's 20nm 2bpc MLC NAND. The new SSDs will be available in 80GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB, 360GB and 480GB capacities.
The new Intel Solid-State Drive Pro 1500 Series as well as other Intel solid-state drives and solutions are being showcased in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group booth (#812) at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The event runs from September 10-12 at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.
Power-efficient Haswell processors for tablets
Ahead of tomorrow's IDF, Intel has today started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors.
The dual-core Core i3-4012Y processor is part of the new Haswell processors that could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids. Tablets that run on Core processors offer great performance but poor battery life. Intel claims that Haswell dual-core chips will offer up to 50 percent more battery life compared to previous Ivy Bridge chips.
The Core i3-4012Y draws as little as 4.5 watts in specific tablet or mobile usage scenarios, according to Intel's measurements and what the company calls SDP (Scenario Design Power), which tracks the usage of power when heat is dissipated in mobile usage scenarios. However, the SDP measurement has been panned by critics, who said the measurement is more a marketing trick than a true benchmark.
The new chip, which runs at a clock speed of 1.5GHz, can also be used for laptops, under which it may draw 11.5 watts (TDP) of power.
Intel has also started shipping the 1.5GHz Core i3-4020Y and the 1.3GHz Core i3-4010Y, which are dual-core processors and draw as little as 6 watts of power under the SDP measurement. All the low-power processors have a TDP of 11.5 watts.
All the new chips have 3MB of cache, 4200-series integrated graphics processors and support low-power DDR3 memory.
Intel will also launch new Atom chips code-named Bay Trail for tablets at the Intel Developer Forum starting Tuesday in San Francisco.