Why Intel can’t quit x86

Here’s a nice perspective on Intel’s non-x86 efforts, and why they failed and x86 marched on, despite its weak points, and why Intel can’t quit x86.

Kudos for remembering that Intel made ARM chips.

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Remember Plextor? Now they’re making SSDs.

Those of you who’ve been around as long as I have–which is probably most of you–will remember Plextor as the maker of the very best SCSI CD-ROM drives back when there was a market for SCSI CD-ROM drives. I had one, and I haven’t used it in years, but I relied on it, especially when I was doing A/V work. And it never, ever let me down. Read more

The mainstream places a bet on SSDs

I just saw that LSI Corporation bought Sandforce, maker of high-performance SSD controllers, earlier this week for $400 million.

LSI makes a lot of things. I’ve owned a couple of SCSI controllers over the years with their chips on them. I’ve administered servers with their RAID controllers in them. They also make system-on-a-chip solutions.

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Apple-Intel ARM partnership makes sense

Rumor is that Apple is shopping around for a new manufacturer for the SoCs that power its mobile devices. And that Intel is interested in the business. I think it makes a ton of sense.
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Intel and the SSD, 2011

I saw and heard a couple of interesting bits about Intel and SSDs today.
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State of the SSD, 1Q 2011

It’s no secret that I loves me some SSDs. And 2011 looks to be a good year for SSDs. Anandtech has a preview of what promises to be the fastest available drive on the market, once it’s released. It may not be at the very top of the heap for really long, but it represents the state of the art for now.

I’d rather not spoil the whole article, but there are two key takeaways from it.
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4 more questions about RAID

Longtime reader Jim ` asked me a few more worthwhile questions while I was procrastinating working on yesterday’s post about RAID. Let’s go to Q&A format. Read more