Intel Prepares Flash Attack

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel(INTC Quote) is getting more serious about flash.

The company outlined plans at its developer conference this week to sell flash memory as a replacement for magnetic hard drives in laptops and corporate servers.

The move represents a sharpening of Intel's flash memory efforts, and comes almost two years after the company formed a joint venture to manufacture NAND flash memory with Micron(MU Quote).

It also raises the pressure on SanDisk(SNDK Quote), which is trying to parlay its business selling flash memory for cell phones and digital cameras into the PC world. In April, SanDisk announced a deal to provide PC maker Dell(DELL Quote) with 32GB flash-based hard drives for its corporate notebooks.

Flash memory is a type of memory that stores data even when a device's power is switched off. The technology is faster, more power-efficient and more resistant to physical shocks than the traditional magnetic hard drives found in PCs today.

In a special panel at the company's conference Wednesday, Intel storage technology and manufacturing director Knut Grimsrud discussed plans to offer an 80GB flash-based drive, or solid state drive, designed for notebook PCs.

In a live demonstration, Intel showed a notebook featuring the flash drive running through a battery of operations three times faster than another notebook sporting a traditional hard drive.

Grimsrud said the notebook flash drive will be based on MLC (multilevel cell) technology, a less expensive form of NAND flash memory than the SLC (singlelevel cell) technology currently used by most companies for solid-state hard drives. That could help Intel price its solid state drives at a more affordable level than some of the products currently on the market, increasing the appeal of its drives to a broader set of customers.