21 October 2010

Soft Core Porn [UPDATED]

You are the Apple of my eye, although I'm no fan of Stevie Wonderful.  There's been miles of type devoted to Steve's recent announcement that the next version of Mac portables will run only flash storage (which may or may not be packaged as a SSD).  Here's the Journal version.

Not that I'm much of a fan of the Journal, of course, but the story carries this wonderful quote:
"The market is moving from hard drives to flash much faster than it was expected six months ago," he says.
He, in this case, is Philippe Spruch, chief executive of LaCie.

Follow that Yellow Brick Road.


[UPDATE]:

Here's a Forbe's article.  The answer is as I expected:

Not surprising, however, is the fact the SSD isn't really an SSD per se--it is simply NAND Flash on the primary circuit board paired with a "SSD controller." This is one of the points I made last year in a post addressing Stec Inc. (STEC). Due to the fact that it is much more economical and takes less space to "roll your own" SSD (put Flash chips on a board with a controller), there will eventually be a very limited market for SSDs that duplicate the form factor of a HDD - PC companies and even enterprise storage companies will simply buy SSD controllers and NAND Flash chips. The point here is the controller will be the differentiating chip and that takes us to Marvell Technology (MRVL).

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