Samsung gets 'stupid fast' in gaming grab
Directly engages gamers with 256GB SSD
Samsung is pitching its fast 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at desktops and notebook gamers and cites a YouTube blogger saying it will make their systems "stupid fast."
The drive uses 2-bit multi-level cell technology to produce its 256GB capacity and this is twinned with a Samsung-developed controller using an ARM processor core. The SSD reads data at 220MB/sec and writes it at 200MB/sec and does so across a 3Gbit/s SATA interface.
It comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, with 64GB and 128GB versions in 1.8-inch form factor packaging.
A Samsung marketeer, VP Jim Elliot, talks of blistering speeds and dazzling photorealism. Samsung quotes Jon Peddie Research as saying the PC gaming market will reach a size of $30.7Bn by the end of 2012, meaning it could sell a lot drives.
It and says it will "directly engage the gaming community by offering SSD-enabled game stations at the World Cyber Games (WCG) in the United States." It can do this because Samsung is a worldwide partner of the WCG, which, it says, is known as the Olympics of video gaming.
Last year's World-Wide Cyber Games had around 1.6 million participants from 78 countries. Samsung will encourage visitors to use its SSD game stations at this year's U.S. National Finals, September 25 to 27, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City.
No prices or availability have been mentioned by Samsung but our guess is that gamers will need a serious speed obsession and a bulging wallet. You can pick up a data sheet here (pdf). ®
COMMENTS
RE: Goat Jam
I haven't bought a PC game at a retail store in over a year now. The ease and convenience of Steam and other online purchasing methods is far superior, so shelf space at a local store isn't really a great indicator any more.
PC Gaming growing?
Not according to my extremely unscientific EB shelf percentage survey. It seems to me that as the wii, xbox and ps shelf real estate grows, the PC games section shrinks.
It's a shame actually because I hate consoles but I'm getting old now and don't have much time to play games anymore.
RTS games on a console? No thanks. World building games? No way. FPS, um no again.
The only console game I *really* loved and still play to this day is Toe Jam and Earl on the Sega Megadrive which I guess hints at my age, but I digress.
@Andy
I believe it was 640Kb, which still applies to all PCs. Everything else you have is cache memory, extended memory and of course, hard drives etc or whatever kind which is nothing to do with what he was talking about. I don't believe I just backed up Bill Gates there, but there you go.
Multicores of course, kind of expand on it but it's still basically the same architecture per core.
only 2x?
Not sure why everyone gets so worked up about MB/s - this is only 2x or maybe 2.5x a fast HDD... what are the IOPs numbers, then we can see if these really make a difference.
Samsung 24 SSD Awesomeness
This one was a law of diminishing returns.. the reason they only saw half the performance they should have relates to the PCIe bus speed and the RAID controllers they chose. Basically this is the next bottleneck in the equation. 2.5GB/s is impressive, but they should have been able to get that with about 12 of those P256 SSDs.
A lot of the RAID controllers max out around 1GB/s, which is a pain in the backside. I've had a reasonable run with the HP P410, but seems to max out around 1GB/s also. The Adaptec 5xxx / 3xxx had similar problems. The HPT 3520 was the only one (so far) I've used (I am sure there are more) that has performed consistently well above 1GB/s... providing the motherboard allows it to!
