InsaneTek

Ultrabook sales are expected to grow 92% by 2017, which has OEMs all over the place scrambling for ways to make theirs better, and has the hardware manufacturers finding more and more ways to make ultrabooks better. One of the newest ways that ultrabook hardware has been improved comes from a recent announcement from LSI, who recently purchased SandForce. Announced by LSI was a new SSD controller designed specifically for ultrabooks. It lowers the power requirements for the SSD, making the battery of any ultrabook the controller is in even longer. It also makes boot and wake times faster, which is a main selling point of ultrabooks.

Thad Omura, who is the Vice President of Marketing for LSI's Flash Components Division, said,

LSI has shipped well over 10 million3 SandForce FSPs and we anticipate our shipment volumes will continue to increase, driven by the exploding demand and lowering price points for NAND flash technology. LSI SandForce FSPs deliver impactful enhancements to the everyday computing user experience and design benefits that are especially valuable to Ultrabook manufacturers.

Read the full announcement here. The controllers announced are the SF-2141, SF-2241 and SF-2281, and their benefits to ultrabooks are below:

• Consume less power, providing as much as one hour longer battery life2
• Enable faster system boot and wake times
• Meet the low Z-height product requirement of Ultrabooks
• Support SATA 6Gb/s host connectivity
• Address 24GBs to 512GBs of NAND flash memory
• Provide support for virtually all MLC flash product families