It was recently revealed by research firms Georgia Tech and NEC Corp. that the speed of flash memory plays a greater roll in modern device slowdown than factors such as network speed, as whilst performance in the processing department has gone up, compact flash options have failed to increase in bandwidth.
It's no surprise, then, that a product such as Sandisk's I-NAND is being utilised as the reference in designs from Intel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, with specific note the the firms' upcoming Windows 8 reference designs.
I-NAND Extreme products are packaged as embedded media multimedia cards and feature a read performance of 50MB/s and a write performance of 80MB/s, far surpassing the standard eMMC offering typically found in a modern Android tablet.
There's a lot of movement in the Windows 8 tablet camp, with x86 offerings likely to show up from AMD and Intel, announcements of ARM processors such as the Snapdragon S4 Pro which look to focus on Windows 8 support, at the very least, as with graphics cards and DirectX, the presence of Windows in this new market appears to be spurring on development and raising the bar for device capability.
