Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?

In 2010 Intel will introduce Braidwood technology, placing NAND on the mother board and threatening SSDs in the PC, assuming that this is not a repeat of the Vista Turbo Memory debacle, that is.

Braidwood is likely to ramp quickly into the PC market, displacing SSDs, and eventually threatening DRAM bit growth.

This report examines the Braidwood, its potential market, competing technologies, and how the NAND, PC, HDD and DRAM markets will be impacted.

Unit shipment and revenue forecasts detail the rise of the technology and its impact on NAND and DRAM.

Readers will gain an understanding of this important technology, and will learn strategies to participate in the market.

Key Findings:

• It seems that everyone knows that NAND belongs in the PC, but there are iffering views as to how and where it belongs.
• Software support is key to the acceptance of a NAND layer in the computing hierarchy.
• Prior approaches, including the Hybrid HDD and Intel’s Turbo Memory or Robson failed due to faulty software support, an issue that is being addressed by Intel with the company’s new Braidwood technology.
• Once a NAND memory layer is proven to be beneficial it will find rapid acceptance. Objective Analysis expects to see Braidwood adoption sweep themarket in only four years. 
• No matter how high the acceptance of this technology, its contribution to NAND revenues will remain low peaking at about 7% of total market revenues.
• Since a NAND layer will offer near-SSD performance for less than 10% of the price of an SSD, fewer PC buyers will purchase SSDs than do today, even though today’s SSD penetration is only about 1%.
• SSDs will not be the only casualty of this technology. Over time OEMs and endusers will find that they get a bigger performance boost for their dollar by adding NAND than by adding DRAM, and the DRAM market’s megabyte growth will decline further, causing revenues to shrink over the long term.