Article: AMD's Mobile Strategy
By: EduardoS (no.delete@this.spam.com), December 20, 2011 6:50 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Seni (seniike@hotmail.com) on 12/20/11 wrote:
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>Actually, the economics of small NAND caches are even worse than for small SSDs,
>since you end up paying $40 for a minimal hard drive, then another $40 for a minimal
>SSD, and then the SSD part turns out be slow because it doesn't have enough chips,
>and NAND performance scales with chip count.
If a flash cache is included in the HD it will increase it's price by $10, maybe $20, there is no need for many chips, just one or two, streamming accesses bypass the cache and goes to rotating media, random accesses goes to the flash, wich is way faster than rotating media for this access pattern, also, by skiping streaming accesses it saves spaces on the flash memory...
Well, but you are right that it doesn't make the drive cheaper, but it solves the performance problem and may reduce significantly the enry cost of flash storage wich is about $100 today for anything usefull.
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>Actually, the economics of small NAND caches are even worse than for small SSDs,
>since you end up paying $40 for a minimal hard drive, then another $40 for a minimal
>SSD, and then the SSD part turns out be slow because it doesn't have enough chips,
>and NAND performance scales with chip count.
If a flash cache is included in the HD it will increase it's price by $10, maybe $20, there is no need for many chips, just one or two, streamming accesses bypass the cache and goes to rotating media, random accesses goes to the flash, wich is way faster than rotating media for this access pattern, also, by skiping streaming accesses it saves spaces on the flash memory...
Well, but you are right that it doesn't make the drive cheaper, but it solves the performance problem and may reduce significantly the enry cost of flash storage wich is about $100 today for anything usefull.