Intel launches a line of solid-state drives designed to better reduce latency

Intel CEO SSD
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich

Intel will launch a line of solid-state drives (SSDs) designed to improve performance over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), the company said June 3. The Intel Solid-State Drive Data Center Family for PCIe includes the Intel SSD DC P3700 Series for write-intensive applications, the Intel SSD DC P3600 Series for mixed workloads and the Intel SSD DC P3500 Series for read-heavy uses.

The new line of Intel SSDs uses PCIe 3.0 specification and a PCIe interface controller architected with NVMe. The PCIe with NVMe is built to moves data and storage closer to the processor, in order to eliminate latency. The line is expected to deliver up to 2.8GB per second read speeds, up to 1.9GB per second write speeds, and up to 460,000 input and outputs per second.

The NVMe 1.0 Industry Standard, which the new SSDs will utilize, feature a new storage interface protocol developed by the NVMHCI Work Group that is meant to boost performance and reduce latency. The reduced interface latency is designed to exceed 6 Gbps SATA SSDs.

Specs

The line of SSDs works on Windows and Linux. The drives are backed by Intel’s 5-year limited warranty and have an average time between failures of 2 million hours. The P3700 Series offers 10 full-drive writes per day over the life of the drive, which totals 36 petabytes, or 459 years of high-definition video. The P3600 Series delivers three drive writes per day, and the P3500 Series offers 0.3 drive writes per day.

The Intel SSD Data Center Family for PCIe will be offered at a starting price of $560.

On June 3, Intel also introduced its new processor family, the K-series, an Intel Pentium processor Anniversary Edition to celebrate the 20 years of the brand, and a slim 2-in-1 tablet and laptop that feature’s Intel’s new Core M processor.