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Watkins moves to flash specialist
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 5th May 2009
Bill Watkins has announced his first position since leaving Seagate, with a flash memory specialist - despite his doubts on the technology.
Despite Watkins' very public denunciation of flash storage technology in laptops during his employment at hard drive specialist Seagate – which saw him state that he “just [doesn't] see the flash notebook selling” - Watkins clearly things that there are advantages to the solid state storage system after all: size.
According to CNet, Watkins' latest employment is as a board member with start-up Vertical Circuits, which specialises in making ultra-thin flash storage for notebooks via a 3D stacking technique which sees chips stacked one on top of the other rather than side by side. Watkins believes that this manufacturing method – despite only removing around 1.6mm of space between memory chips – will pay off big: speaking to the Times, he said he was surprised to learn “how much a Dell or Apple will pay for thinness [...] there's a big difference for them between 2 millimetres and 1 millimetre on some of this stuff.”
Despite Watkins' predictions of greatness, Vertical Circuits hasn't yet turned a profit – however, the company hopes to change that over the “next few quarters.”
Are you surprised at Watkins' U-turn on the feasibility of flash-based notebooks, or did his comments make perfect sense from the perspective of a major player in the mechanical hard drive arena? Hoping that the Vertical Circuits chip-stacking tech will shave millimetres off your next notebook purchase? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Case in point, NVIDIA talking down unified shaders back when ATI was there and they weren't - then they released 8800GTX. And now, they're talking down programmable cGPUs like Larrabee - until they bring out their own of course.