Intel Flashes Forward

According to Maloney, the demonstration PC had 256 megabytes of NAND flash "under the hood." But he said it was still unclear how much flash would be incorporated into the Santa Rosa platform.

"The technology scales way up," said Maloney. "It just comes down to what's the cost curve on NAND."

At some point, he said, there is the potential of running a PC's entire operating system from NAND instead of from the hard drive, where it currently resides.

"Again, it's something that comes down to price," said Maloney.