Intel has announced that it has managed to produce, along with Micron, a 32 gigabit NAND device, that could pave the way for a larger presence of solid-state drives (SSDs) on the market. The chip has been made using a 34 nanometer process, making it the world’s densest chip.

While both Toshiba and Samsung have announced that they will produce NAND chips that will be able to be used for 256 GB SSDs, their devices have a larger form factor compared to the one Intel produces.

The company’s officials have stated that the solid-state drives that will incorporate Intel’s newest device could be cheaper than the competition’s because the technology that Intel now owns allows the company to produce the devices at a fraction of the cost of its competition. However, the final price of the devices is also influenced by other factors than how much it would cost to produce it.

Solid-state drives are superior to their counterparts, the hard disk drives, but have one big problem: price. SSDs are ideal for notebooks because of the fact that they are very robust, very fast and consume less energy compared to HDDs, which translates into longer battery life. Servers could also use the speed at which they exchange data and the low energy consumption since it is known that this is an important issue for companies that run a large number of servers.

Intel will aim to come on the market with a 80GB solid-state drive at first, but then hopes to move quickly to a 256 GB SSD, which Intel officials say that will fit in a 1.8 form factor, the same as the one used by MacBook Air.