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...