An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
Most of the worlds market is looking onwards towards thenewly-released platforms like Intel’s Atom, Nvidia’s Tegra and Via’s Nano –details on supporting hardware have been scarce.
Scarce, that is, until Intelannounced its Z-P230 PATA drives, for the UMPCand MID market (although theoretically it could also target CE). PATA as it maybe, the Z-P230 comes in 4GB and 8GB flavours (with 16GB to follow by the end ofthe year) and pricing will be an amazingly low $25 ($6.25 per Gig) and $45($5.625 per Gig), respectively. Adding as little as 10g to the device that willsupport it (basically anything with a PATA interface and 1.8-inch connector),the Z-P230 draws just 1.65mW at idle (if there is such a thing in SSD) and 314mWwhilst active.
Performance may be nothing special, or just enough to run some whacky OS andhelp get you through a work day, with a 35MB/s sustained sequential read and7MB/s sustained sequential write speed. That would be enough, though, to readthrough hi-def 1920x1080 60fps video...
Oh. MTBF is 1 million hours – with an average three-year life expectancy.
This really does show just how much faith (and how many Benjamins) Intel iswilling to throw at the UMPC market and just how far they are willingto go. Intel could be making a killing by charging a premium for any sort of SSDthey put out the door, but right now they’ve gone into “enabler” mode wherebymoney is knowingly lost and chalked up to making a platform (Atom) viable.
We wouldn’t be shocked if these things eventually made Via Nanobooks,Tegra-based MIDs viable too. That kind of investment has a nasty habit of bitingyou in the butt-ocks, you know?