Tech Talk: Here Come The Built-In Flash Drives!!

Get ready for really fast computers. I mean fast.

Intel has introduced a solid-state storage device - the size is 80GB; 160GB will be available in a future release.

Story here.
[hat tip: LGF reader links]

The hard drive on your computer is a huge bottleneck. Well, I guess tiny would more describe it. Hard drives have moving parts - steel spinning at very fast speeds with an arm and magnetic head that has to bounce around to read and write bits on this spinning disk. This whole mechanical process is much slower than the ability of the chips in your computer, which can move data at much faster speeds, since only electronic bits are read and written without the need of moving parts.

The interesting point in this article is that future Intel chips - a new CPU architecture - will be so fast, these solid-state drives will be necessary to not slow down the system.

Apple already ships the MacBook Air with a 64GB solid-state drive.