CES is sort of like a Where’s Waldo book. There are thousands of places to look, with new technology spread around all over the place. Some of that unreleased tech shows up right in front of you and you don’t even realize what you were looking at until later on. It’s how we caught a look at prototype Light Peak (now Thunderbolt) two years ago, and this year we saw some more goodies not previously seen in the wild. I tend to be a bit of a shutterbug, and I take seemingly random pics of things as the PCPer gang runs around the various vendor booths and hotel suites. While going through the pics from my phone, I ran across this shot of what I thought was an Intel 320 Series SSD:

Definitely not a 320, that’s an Intel 520 Series (Cherryville) SSD. While Intel had their 520 Series locked up tight at their Storage Visions booth, this one was powering another motherboard makers product elsewhere in Vegas. Unfortunately this system was only to demo the motherboard itself, without a connected display, so it would not have been possible to run our own benches.

At storage visions, we also saw this display at the Micron booth. It’s interesting to see how 16GB of flash memory has shrunk over the past few years. We’ve certainly come a long way from the good old X25-M:

Some of you may know that I’m a sucker for a good die shot, so I snuck back out to Micron’s suite later on to get my own macro shot of the 20nm IMFT flash die:

Micron is, like many other vendors, working on their own SSD solution specifically for SSD caching applications. It’s currently unreleased, so more to follow on this.

CES Storage Roundup Part 3 - Intel Cherryville and IMFT 20nm flash die spotted! - Shows and Expos 2

PC Perspective’s CES 2012 coverage is sponsored by MSI Computer.

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