Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers

No one really paid much attention to Intel getting into the SSD (Solid State Disk) business. We all heard the announcements, we heard the claims of amazing performance, but I didn't really believe it. After all, it was just a matter of hooking up a bunch of flash chips to a controller and putting them in a

drive enclosure, right?

The closer we got to release and the more time I spent with competing products, the more I realized that Intel's biggest launch of 2008 wasn't going to be Nehalem - it was going to be its SSDs. If Intel could price them right, and if Intel could deliver on the performance, the biggest upgrade you could do for your PC - whether desktop or notebook, wouldn't be to toss in a faster CPU, it would be to migrate to one of these SSDs. Combine Nehalem and one of these mythical SSDs and you were in for a treat. But that was a big if...Intel still had to deliver. We already talked about the drives back at IDF. The Intel X25-M and the X18-M, available in 80GB capacities, 2.5" and 1.8" form factors (respectively) with 160GB versions on the way. Today we are allowed to share performance data and pricing information, one of which is more impressive than the other. Intel will be selling the X25-M at $595 MSRP through OEMs and channel vendors, although I

hear the street price may be lower.

Both of the -M models are based on Intel's MLC flash, while a X25-E using SLC flash will be due out by the end of this year. I'll detail the differences in a bit. The pricing is rough, that puts Intel's X25-M at cheaper than SLC drives on the market but more expensive than MLC drives. Your options are effectively to get a 128GB MLC drive, an 80GB Intel X25-M or a 64GB SLC drive. But as you can expect, I wouldn't be quite this excited if the decision were that easy. Over the next several pages we're going to walk through the architecture of a NAND flash based SSD, investigate the problems with current MLC drives (and show how the Intel drive isn't affected) and finally compare the performance of the Intel drive to MLC, SLC and standard hard drives (both 2.5" and 3.5") in a slew of real world applications.

If you want to know the ending first I won't make you wait. Intel absolutely delivered with its first SSDs. After I completed my initial testing of the drive I sent AnandTech Senior Editor, Gary Key a message:

"I think Intel just Conroe’d the HDD market."

Honestly, within 6 months I'd expect it to be just as important to have one of these drives in your system, as your boot/application drive, as it was to have Conroe in your system back in 2006. The only issue here, the only problem I have is the price. I was hoping for something much lower from Intel and although the pricing is justified based on the performance, it ensures that the X25-M like most high performance SSDs, remains a luxury item. While the X25-M isn't the world's fastest storage device across the board, it is among the fastest. And in the areas that it does dominate, it does so unbelievably well. The other great thing? You’ve got one of the world’s fastest hard drives, and it can fit in your notebook.

Intel's X25-M Solid State Drive

Looking back at recent developments in the flash solid state drive (SSD) market, we could tell that it was only a matter of time until Intel jumped in feet-first. Flash-based hard drives are about to assail the hard drive market from the very high end, where conventional hard drives are being outperformed by flash products, and from the low end, where cost and low power consumption count most. However, the mainstream has remained largely ignored, due to insufficient capacity, the intolerable cost of flash SSDs, and shortcomings, such as the absence of the power savings promised by many flash SSD makers. Being a true flash memory vendor—as opposed to so many others out there—Intel has the advantage of being able to design and refine its own product. And that’s what it has done. The X25-M is a multi-level cell (MLC) flash based drive that is capable of competing with the best single-level cell (SLC) drives on the market.

Flash SSD Facts and Overview

A solid-state drive means that the unit doesn’t include any moving parts as conventional hard drives do. As a result, flash SSDs are robust and potentially much more efficient. They’re also capable of providing almost instant access to data, while hard drives have to spend time moving arms and spinning disks to access individual blocks. We looked at the first flash-based SSD by Samsung exactly two years ago. It reached the 50 MB/s transfer speed that was offered by comparable 2.5” drives at that time, but it required half the power to operate.

The first retail products appeared a year later from Sandisk, Samsung and Ridata, and others followed a few months later, offering nice performance and attractive efficiency. But they still did not truly beat the magnetic hard drive.

M-Tron was the first company to ship a flash SSD that is actually capable of outperforming a hard drive very clearly. MemoRight followed up with increased performance, clearly positioning high-end flash SSDs to replace enterprise hard drives, but we found that most of the flash-based SSDs, despite being faster than hard drives, still could not provide improved energy efficiency (with a few exceptions). For us this is a huge issue, as everyone speaks about power savings, which, in fact often weren’t there. Our last article, which compared 14 flash SSD products, only recommends the latest offering by Samsung (also sold by OCZ), which combines impressive performance with excellent efficiency. The cost issue, however, has remained: good flash SSDs are expensive, to the point of being unaffordable to mainstream buyers.

The Intel Promise: 175x Better Disk Performance

Back at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco last August, Intel provided an insight into its flash SSD family, and spelled out the main performance points. One of the claims was a 175x performance boost over hard drives, which have only shown incremental performance increases over the last 10 years. This reflects our findings in the article Capacities Outran Performance, which we released almost two years ago. Some of you may already know the key data from various news and announcements: Intel intends to reach 250 MB/s read speed at 0.085 ms access time and revolutionary lower power consumption. This clearly is a challenge to the big guys in the flash market, namely Samsung, Toshiba and Hynix. Intel, which takes the fifth position behind its joint-venture partner Micron, obviously wants to change the balance of power by entering the storage business. Others, such as Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital, are certainly watching closely. Let’s look at Intel’s first shake up of this competitive market.

Intel SSD X25-M 80GB Review. SSDs are Cool

SSDs were all the hype last year, then the "bubble" popped when tests performed on the Macbook Air showed that the SSD drive did little more than add $1,500 to the computer's final price. No performance increase, no battery life increase - two of the promises (among others) that SSD buyers were expecting from this technology.
When they were announced, the Intel Solid State Drive (SSD) seemed fast enough to justify a field test, so we installed a 80GB Intel X25-M SSD into a 2 years old Sony Vaio SZ laptop to see what would happen. Why such an old laptop? Because we think that the perceived unresponsiveness observed by many users is caused by the lack of disk performance. Disk accesses are the main reason why many simple computer tasks (boot, shutdown, applications loading, thumbnails generation...) feel so slow. We hoped that adding this drive alone with give a "boost" to the aging laptop.
So what are the results? It worked! Thanks to the SSD awesome performance, the laptop responds quickly. The Intel X25 80GB makes SSDs cool again and proves that hard drive performance can be more important than processing power.
Our old laptop is now almost as responsive as a nearby new desktop PC equipped with a Western Digital Velociraptor 10k rpm drive (300GB). The Vaio SZ's PCMark 05 HDD score went from 2996 to 18817! As a reference, the desktop PC and its Raptor 10k rpm drive gets a score of 8298... Unfortunately, a benchmark is a benchmark and real-life performance is sometimes different from synthetic measurements, so we'll try to tell you how the user experience is affected by this Intel X25-M SSD.
Admittedly, the original 5400rpm drive was a little weak, so we ordered a modern disk that would be considered a worthy upgrade by laptop users: the Western Digital Scorpio 7200rpm 250GB. It is one of the best 2.5" platter-drive you can get.

Test configuration

• Windows XP SP2
• Intel Core Duo 1.83Ghz (T2400)
• 3GB of RAM
• HDD1: Seagate Momentus 5400.2 100GB (original drive)
• HDD2: Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEKT 250GB (7200rpm "upgrade")
• HDD3: Intel X25 80GB (model SSDSA2MH080G1GN)

Performance tests

     

As you can see, the boot times are impressively fast, but there's better: Applications can load up three times faster than the original hard disk. Loading Photoshop CS2 now feels as fast as my desktop machine. As you can see, upgrading to a faster platter drive brings a small performance (and capacity) boost for a reasonable price (around $110), but platter drives are no match for the raw performance of the Intel X25-M SSD.

Power savings?

We won't be testing the potential battery savings of the SSD. The reason is that in a laptop most of the power is going to the display, the CPU and the GPU anyways. Improving the power consumption of the hard drive has little to no practical implications. Expect no miracles on this side.

Conclusion

The Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) is impressive and really demonstrates the potential of SSD drives. It is faster than most desktop hard drives and runs completely quiet and cool. Obviously, you can pair two of these and get twice the throughput. At $600 (bulk price) with a small 80GB capacity, I'll leave it to you to appreciate how much you "need" to get this "Raptor in a laptop" drive. I assume that most people would still go for a conventional drive - I would (but at $300, I'll jump on it).
However, this clearly shows that in the next two years, we might get 120GB SSD drives for $200. This is still expensive, but capacity is not a key factor for everyone, especially for those who use their laptops as a secondary system. Also, Keep in mind that today's disk controllers and drivers are still built around mechanical drives, so expect a lot of progress on that front as well - this will further boost performance. Given the mechanical drive performance evolution over the past few years, it's pretty clear that SSDs will keep the performance lead. At some point, their price and capacity will be compelling enough to take significant market share from mechanical drives, just as they did for multimedia players.

Intel X25-M SSD

The new 80GB X25-M is the blazing fast SSD just released from Intel that has knocked our socks off in testing. Our first chance to take a look at this drive is inside the HP EliteBook 8530w where it screamed through every single test we threw at it. Not only did this drive increase performance substantially across the board, but we also saw a significant jump in battery life. In this review of the HP EliteBook 8530w we cover the changes before and after the SSD upgrade, and show you just what you’d be missing if you couldn’t scrap together the funds for this drive.

HP EliteBook 8530w Specifications:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 Processor (2.53GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• Microsoft Genuine Windows Vista Business
• 15.4-inch WUXGA+ anti-glare (1920 x 1200)
• 512MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M Workstation GPU
• 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (2 x 2GB Configuration)
• 80GB Intel X25-M SSD (Up to 250MB/s Read, 70MB/s Write)
• Blu-Ray and DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
• WiFi, Ethernet, Modem, and Bluetooth Connectivity
• 8-Cell 73WHr Battery
• 3-Year on-site Warranty
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 14.0" x 10.4"
• Weight: 6.5lbs without power adapter, 8lbs with power adapter

Cost to upgrade
Everyone knows that you have to pay to play and with any upgrade to an SSD you need to pay quite a bit. At the time of this review the going street price of the 80GB Intel X25-M SSD is $660 online. On the HP website it will cost $524 to upgrade from a 160GB 7200RPM drive to the 80GB Intel SSD. You can also add a second hard drive or SSD in the EliteBook 8530w's Upgrade Bay (replaces the optical drive) for additional storage. The Intel SSD will be available for sale on the HP wibsite with the 8530w on October 20th. While the price is steep by itself, it is only about thirty percent of the overall price of the above notebook configuration, and less still when compared to drives currently on the market. This upgrade isn’t for everyone, but I can say if you take a chance on this drive you won’t be disappointed.
Performance boost
Out of all the notebooks I have reviewed, and countless system components, no single item has ever given the overall speed bump that we witnessed from the Intel X25-M SSD. With just a swap of hard drive our HP EliteBook saw a huge bump in system speed from the first boot with a fast initial system load and Vista configuration, as well as a super snappy user interface. Little things such as clearing off system bloatware, which normally takes a bit of time as the system deletes files off the hard drive, happened almost instantly. As soon as we would select an application to uninstall and give the final confirmation the notebook would blip progress window and close it in a fraction of a second. Something was noticeably different with this system configuration, and from the first benchmark we ran we started to see why.
HDTune reported speeds as high as 192MB/s in some benchmark runs, with the average settling in at 182MB/s. Compared to most SSD’s in the 90MB/s range, or even our last SSD review with the 64GB Samsung model with 130MB/s average, this was a huge bump in speed. When you compare it to the fastest notebook drives that barely peak 80MB/s, or even the 10,000RPM Velociraptor desktop drive that peaks at 123MB/s you start to see just how fast this drive is. It should also be mentioned that while smoking other drives, it also runs perfectly silent and consumes less power than most notebook hard drives. Under full load being benchmarked the Intel X25-M SSD puts off barely a hint of heat, feeling cool to the touch at 83 degrees Fahrenheit recorded by our temperature gun.

HDTune for 7200.2 notebook hard drive:

HDTune for WD Velociraptor high performance desktop hard drive:

HDTune for Intel X25-M SSD:

The next benchmark in our list is PCMark05, which saw an astonishing jump in score from 6,287 in our original review to 9,452 with the Intel SSD. This is over a 3,000 point jump from a drive upgrade and nothing else. Both 3DMark06 and PCMark Vantage saw boosts in performance, but not as big of a jump as PCMark05. 3DMark06 went from 5,230 in the original review to 5,847 with the SSD. PCMark Vantage jumped from 3,944 to 5,516, over a 25% bump.
Battery life boost
To get almost three times speed from a drive, you would expect that system power usage would increase at least a little bit. In the Bizarro world with the Intel X25-M we saw the exact opposite, with power consumption levels dropping by more than 20%. In terms of real life performance under the same testing procedure using the balanced power profile, brightness set to 60%, and wireless enable battery life increased by 1 hour. In the original review we found battery life to top out at 3 hours and 38 minutes, and after the SSD upgrade the system managed 4 hours and 38 minutes before it went into sleep mode at 5% battery life remaining.
Conclusion
Intel really made a winning product with the X25-M 80GB SSD, blowing previous performance SSD models out of the water, while still being light on power consumption and heat output. While still pricy at $660 compared to standard hard drives, it isn’t nearly as bad as what SSDs used to cost even six months ago. For those looking to add this option to your notebook during customization, you are looking at $524 from HP at this time. In my eyes this is the best single upgrade for a notebook on the market, outside of going from an Intel Celeron to Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Intel Core i5 750 Review

Introduction
Yes, I am aware of the fact that the NDA on the new Intel products has ended almost a week ago and, yes, I was actually planning on releasing this article on launch day, but due to several other launches, projects and articles I didn't have the time to finish all the necessary tests on all the different platforms I wanted to include in this article. So, instead of doing it half-half, I decided to postpone the release of the article so it would more than just a work-in-progress.

So, what is all the fuss about? Basically: Core i5, LGA1156 and the Intel P55 chipset. I can assume that, since this article is a couple of days too late, you already know what this new release is all about. In short I would describe the LGA1156 platform as "affordable 1366", although you will notice that the high-end 1156 hardware configurations will come close to the less-expensive 1366 configurations price-wise. Nevertheless, the main purpose of the new LGA1156 platform is to make Core i7 cheaper. To do so, Intel has removed the third memory channel and has integrated the IOH, containing the PCI-e lanes and the connection between CPU and peripherals, onto the CPU die. Next to that, the new processors will have either less cores or no Hyper-Treading. Removing the IOH and disabling cores/hyper threading is not only more cost-effective, but should also reduce the motherboard production costs and the total power consumption.

To NDA or not to NDA?

The fact that I'm apologizing for not posting the article when NDA ends may come across as laughable, but I shouldn't be the one apologizing in the first place. As most of the technology enthusiasts know, the NDA on any of the three product launches has been broken so many times that I actually see Intel's NDA strategy as meaningless. An NDA, or: non-disclosure agreement, is to prevent information regarding a certain product launch to be leaked to the big public; for instance performance figures, pricing rates or even in-depth technology features. Now, even in the past, we knew that Asian sources often 'broke' NDA by sharing bits of information a couple of weeks before the actual launch, but this time breaking NDA was taking a step further.

This time around however, weeks, even months before the media was allowed to talk one word about the upcoming Intel products, motherboards and processors were available in retail stores all across Asia and even Europe, and that’s without counting including the ES samples in the wild! This created a totally ridiculous situation where media was not allowed to talk about performance, but anybody could just go out and find the products themselves. Reason for this seems to be an error somewhere in the Intel HQ, which stated to distributors that they could sell the products, but not advertise that they had them. In the video of TweakTown underneath this paragraph, you can clearly see local stores selling Core i5 products, but none of them actually put links on their website. In any case, for those who wonder, it can be completely different: just think about the secrecy with which AMD developed its new HD58xx series: so close to the launch and publicly no one has a real clue about its performance.

Core i5 750 - Core i7 860 and 870 processor review

Goodness gracious great processors of fire... can you believe it has been nearly a year ago since Intel released the dazzling Core i7 series processor? What an instant hit directly from the start they were. The problem with Core i7 however is that it is a slightly expensive platform, especially in combination with X58 chipset based motherboards... also your average X58 motherboard will set you back a good 250 USD alone, add to that the cheapest 289 USD'ish Core i7 920 processor and then well, you'd still need to build the rest of the PC.
So while Core i7 started to dominate and glorify the top enthusiast segment of the market, in the past year the mainstream to high-end segment was left alone. The current Core 2 Duo and Quad processors are plenty competitive and as such Intel simply did not introduce new processors and motherboard chipsets. For me as a technology journalist that was a weird thing to see. Was Intel in a comfort zone? Did they want to sit out the economic crisis or just maximize the Core 2 series revenue stream? We'll never really know but it certainly took a very long time before we noticed some new products.

Meanwhile, facing the same economic crisis and haunted by a processor bug, AMD had to readapt, refocus, redesign and reintroduce their Phenom series processors. Boy what rough water they had to sail, as right after the TLB bug was fixed, the economy crashed. But hats off to them, ever since the beginning of 2009 AMD started to sell Phenom II processors that were finally able to compete with chipzilla's processors, and with good success. And that is important as the market could never function properly without some kind of competition.
Today the turn goes back to Intel. They are introducing the P55 motherboard chipset and no less than three new Nehalem based Lynnfield processors, with many more to follow in the upcoming months. Today's product releases are targeted at the higher segment of the mainstream market, what you read about today can hardly be called cheap or 'very' affordable, with one exception.

Two out of the three Lynnfield processors introduced today are actually positioned and classified in the Core i7 range of processors, and just one processor is an actual Core i5 series processor. They all have several key features in common. They come with a lovely 95 Watt TDP, are Nehalem (Core i7 family architecture) based and yes... they come with that new much discussed package on Socket LGA 1156. Yeah chaps, we have a lot to talk about and to show you, of course. We'll separate the P55 motherboard chipset and the three new processors into two articles, this article will cover Core i7 870, Core i7 860 and Core i5 750. Another article will cover the P55 chipset and overclocking experience with an MSI motherboard and then later this week more reviews on P55 motherboards from names like ASUS, Gigabyte and ECS. So with that said, let us quickly head on over to the next page where we'll start off with this processor review article. Hihooo Lynnfield, here we come...

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Intel’s Roadmaps Reveal Conroe Clock Speeds & Information

Intel is convinced that by the end of this year it will have turned the tables on AMD; with Conroe, Merom, and Woodcrest, Intel fully expects to regain the performance crown while offering much lower power consumption than their present-day CPUs. While I’m expecting Intel to do well, it’s hard to say for sure whether it’ll achieve its ultimate goal. Of course, if you ask Intel, it has had the world’s fastest processors for the past five years straight. Regardless, it’s about time for a processor roadmap update, and luckily I have one right here.

As you can guess, Intel is phasing out the Pentium brand and replacing it with its new Core brand. We first saw this on the mobile side with the Core Duo and Core Solo CPUs, and we’ll see it again this fall with some derivative of the Core name on the desktop. What we’ve all known as Conroe for a while now will eventually be called the Core something E6000 or E4000. The E6000 and E4000 break down as follows:

Processor Number	Clock Speed	FSB	L2 Cache
E6700	2.66GHz	1,066MHz	4MB
E6600	2.40GHz	1,066MHz	4MB
E6400	2.13GHz	1,066MHz	2MB
E6300	1.86GHz	1,066MHz	2MB
E4200	1.60GHz	800MHz	2MB

With the latest roadmaps, we finally have an indication of clock speeds for Intel’s new architecture. Remember that Conroe has a deeper pipe than Yonah, thus allowing it to reach higher clock speeds, but the decrease in efficiency is most likely more than made up for by architecture changes (such as the four-issue core).

The increase in L2 cache on the higher-end parts will also prove to be beneficial to performance, especially considering that these parts still lack an on-die memory controller. I’ve already seen that Yonah can perform, clock for clock, very similarly to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2, so I’d expect Conroe to do no less. The larger L2 cache on Conroe also explains why Yonah’s L2 access latency went up from 10 cycles in Dothan to 14 cycles; it seems as though Yonah’s L2 cache is a 2MB version of the 4MB cache we’ll see later this year in Conroe (and in Merom on the mobile side).

The other key aspect of Conroe is its higher FSB frequency, from 667MHz in Yonah up to 800/1,066MHz. More FSB bandwidth will help keep those larger caches full and help in multitasking scenarios where both cores are active.

Note that all of the Conroe E6000 and E4000 CPUs are still LGA-775, meaning they should work in current 975X-based motherboards. Of course the 975X chipset is still a high-end solution; Intel will release the G965 and P965 chipsets for the mainstream market alongside the new processors. The G965/P965 solutions will both support DDR2-800 and a 1,066MHz FSB, so they will be able to run the full gamut of Conroe E6000/E4000 CPUs.

Interestingly enough, there will be a Xeon based on Woodcrest (the server version of Conroe) clocked at 3.0GHz with a 1,333MHz FSB released sometime in the third quarter of this year, as well. Given Intel’s prior history of turning Xeons into Extreme Edition processors, we may very well see a 3.0GHz Core Extreme Edition processor on the desktop later this year.

With Core Duo still taking its sweet time to get out into the mainstream market, it’s no surprise that Merom (Yonah’s successor) won’t be out until the fourth quarter of this year. It’s quite possible that Merom gets pushed off into early 2007 to give Core Duo a reasonable lifespan. The details on Merom are as follows:

Processor Number	Clock Speed	FSB	L2 Cache
T7600	2.33GHz	667MHz	4MB
T7400	2.16GHz	667MHz	4MB
T7200	2.0GHz	667MHz	4MB
T5600	1.83GHz	667MHz	2MB

Architecturally, Merom should be very similar to Conroe, and Intel is talking about including a new set of SIMD instructions with the new chips (currently called Enhanced Processor SSE, maybe SSE4 in the future). Merom is slated to debut on Core Duo’s Napa platform but will receive its own brand-new chipset and wireless solution (the Santa Rosa platform) in early 2007.

Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002

The Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 is a with a 20-inch display and a dual-core Intel Atom processor that sells for about $600. It’s part of Asus’ popular Eee line which original featured just the company’s netbooks, but has grown to include a number of different products that make it “easy to learn, easy to work, and easy to play”. Previously most nettop models, including Asus’ EeeBox, were just netbooks brought to the desktop–this was effective for the price but underwhelming on the performance front. After all, the limitations we accept when on battery power are much different from what we will accept when sitting at home. To deal with this scenario the ET2002 not only moves to a dual-core Atom processor (the Atom 330), but it uses Nvidia’s Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002. ION brings a significant graphics boost to the

, making it ready for tasks that you would ask of a desktop, including HD video playback and mainstream gaming. It also offers GPU acceleration of certain tasks, like video encoding through Nvidia’s Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002. These things are important when you have a 20-inch 1600×900 display sitting in front of you as well as a built-in DVD drive. The ET2002 has 2GB of RAM, wireless b/g/n, and a 320GB hard drive.

The Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 is about 20-inches wide and 16-inches tall. It requires about 10-inches of depth to stand properly. This makes it a good size for most desks, and smaller than the combination of a 20-inch LCD and a tower. The system ships with an undersized, numberpad-less keyboard, and a travel-sized mouse which also save room (though you’ll probably want to upgrade both). The computer isn’t quite as good looking as some of the other all-in-ones that we’ve see on the market, but given it’s emphasis on value, it doesn’t give us much to complain about. A nice 20-inch LCD panel is framed with a rather wide bezel and at bottom of the entire cabinet is a speaker. The base is composed of two pieces–an adjustable metal stand which controls the tilt of the LCD and a clear plastic component with a soft rubber foot on the bottom. Overall the design is a bit clunky but it’s something that people won’t have a problem putting on a desk on even in their kitchen. If there are any features to complain about it would be the seven blue LEDs below the display. These are constantly shining and can be distracting, especially during media playback. The worst part is that some of the LEDs are for volume up/down, a Home button, and the LCD OSD, which don’t certainly require LED indicators.

One of the best parts of the Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 is its versatility. Many people might be expecting a simple system that works for checking your email and little else, but it can do much more than that. The 20-inch system works great for watching video and the speakers get surprisingly loud, so they are great for listening to music. The computer also has an optical drive, a card reader, and an HDMI input for watching video from another device Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 (or playing video games through your console). Another major perk–it runs with only one cable connected. It obviously needs power, but the mouse, keyboard, and internet connection are all handled wirelessly.

Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 got at least one part of the EeeTop perfectly right: the setup. After taking it out of the box, plugging it in, and turning it on the EeeTop instantly recognized its keyboard and mouse. After that I was connected to my wireless network in seconds and on the internet doing what I wanted to do before I knew it. The point of an all-in-one is convenience and ease of use, and Asus nailed both of them.

When it comes to usability, the EeeTop was also strong. The full-sized display could use more height for productivity purposes, but it worked for most (especially media). The dual-core Atom was the most significant hurdle to the Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 success (at least in my estimation), but it wasn’t ever a serious issue, even running Vista. The system certainly doesn’t have a lot of CPU power to spare, but the inclusion of ION means that 3D and video will be able to run, leaving the CPU to handle the rest. It sometimes choked when too much was thrown at it, but it’s not particularly bad. In fact the Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 was just slow when multitasking if an application or two was demanding. ION isn’t perfect, but it’s an impressive solution and it tends to be the star of the show if you know what to look for–most people will just see that their $599 all-in-one plays HD video (even while installing a program) and be happy with that, not thinking about what’s making it possible.

The system has enough storage for most people as well as enough USB ports for expansion (six) but does not have eSATA or Firewire. The keyboard isn’t particularly good, nor is the mouse, but they are included and can be swapped out if you think it’s worth it. If you are only spending an hour or two a day on the computer they will be adequate. Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 All-in-One ended up being a really attractive product. For $600 you are getting a 20-inch display, a wireless keyboard/mouse, and a computer that can play HD video. Plus clean desktop lovers will have a system that runs with only one wire connected to it. It’s also a computer that can be setup by someone of any skill level in under ten minutes. There are cheaper options out there, but with the Intel Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 you are getting that dual-core Atom processor and Nvidia’s ION, both of which are important when it comes to performance and the system’s ultimate capabilities. The extra $100 or so dollars will be well worth it when you want to do some casual gaming or fire up a 720p video.

Intel Silicon Photonics

It's been almost two years since Intel Silicon Photonics any "breakthroughs" in silicon photonics. Well, we can't let that stand, can we?

The APD is new ground, not just because it's a different part, but because its performance outdoes "any equivalent device in a III-V-based or exotic material," says Mario Paniccia, an Intel Silicon Photonics fellow and director of the company's Photonics Technology Lab. (III-V, or "three-five," refers to a class of compounds such as indium phosphide (InP) or gallium arsenide.)

That's a first. Intel Silicon Photonics have always been a tradeoff. The devices would be easier to integrate and cheaper to manufacture, since they can be built using complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) techniques that are commonplace in the chip world -- but the performance suffers. Intel Silicon Photonics has been aiming for CMOS devices with 90 percent of the performance of InP ones.

The APDs aren't anywhere close to being a marketable product, by the way. "This is a research result. It's actually a very new result, Paniccia says. Like any big company, Intel has started and ended its share of projects. But Intel Silicon Photonics has stuck, a testament to how vital Intel believes this technology is to the future of computing.

There have been changes, though. All the photonics work is now being done at created early this year out of the Intel and flash memory businesses. Why? It so happens, Intel Silicon Photonics work was being done at what is now Numonyx's fab. Intel found it easiest to just keep the operation in place, Paniccia says. So, the engineers technically work at Numonyx and build their devices on the same Numonyx production lines that are churning out high-volume memory chips.

Going the distance

Intel's silicon photonics efforts are aimed mostly at short-reach connections, but the APD could easily be applied to a telecom network. The devices usually get mentioned in the context of long-haul spans, partly because they're too expensive to use elsewhere -- $200 to $300 apiece, Paniccia says.

The advantage of an APD is that a weaker light source can generate a sufficient current. That means you can take some liberties on the transmission side -- moving the source a farther distance away, for instance. Among the possible applications Paniccia cited was the fiber-to-the-home network, where APDs could conceivably be used to extend the reach of fiber links. Performance for APDs can be measured in the gain-bandwidth product -- that is, the device's gain multiplied by the speed of the connection, which comes out to a fixed number measured in Hertz. For an indium phosphide APD, that gain-bandwidth product is around 120 GHz, Intel says. Intel's silicon APD is showing 340 GHz, implying that it would have better gain than InP devices.

Intel didn't specify the speed it's aiming for with APD, but the company is shooting high with its marketing, saying a silicon APD could be an aid in 40-Gbit/s networks. That would be quite a leap, as APDs are only available in speeds up to 2.5 Gbit/s today."A 40-Gbit/s APD might be really pushing it, but as something they're talking about for the future, it might be reasonable," says Ali Abouzari, vice president of sales forIntel Silicon Photonics.

To describe which part of the APD is made of silicon, it's helpful to look at how an APD works. A normal photodiode receives a photon of light and produces an electron pair (you can think of a "hole" as the opposite of an electron), creating electrical current. An APD adds a multiplication region where that reaction gets amplified, creating many more electron/hole pairs and a stronger current. Intel used silicon for the multiplication region. But to absorb the photon and get the process started, Intel needed germanium, because silicon is transparent to the infrared wavelengths used in communications. Silicon can't "catch" the light. Plenty of challenges exist with this approach. One is that the silicon and germanium atoms form lattices that don't quite match up, and that can cause some current to leak out even when there's no light present. Intel is still working on getting that "dark current" down, Paniccia says.