Intel slashed prices of its solid state drives today by up to 60 percent, just a year after it first introduced such drives.
Inventory glut? Hardly. Intel’s price cut is an example of Moore’s Law at work, and Moore’s Law is as much about the economics of manufacturing as it is about technological advances. Because Intel is using a new manufacturing process technology — 34 nanometers — to manufacture these drives, it’s putting just as much storage onto a smaller die, cutting materials costs for making a storage device that can hold the same amount of data as last year’s 50-nm device.
Intel, which started out as a memory company, not a processor company, was built on the economics of Moore’s Law. And that’s why you can expect to keep seeing price cuts for memory and processors — at least until Moore’s Law runs out of steam. Several experts, including Gordon Moore himself, have said that will happen in about six years.