Intel Corp. has unveiled a new ruler-shaped flash drive aimed at the data center market that it hails as the densest in the world.

The SSD DC P4500 (pictured), introduced late Wednesday, packs a hefty 32 terabytes of capacity. It uses 3D NAND technology, a type of flash in which the constituent memory cells are stacked atop one another in layers to provide more capacity. The flash in the P4500 is based on a 64-layer architecture.

According to Intel, the P4500 requires “half the airflow” of a traditional solid-state drive to maintain optimal temperatures, which a major advantage given that cooling is one of the biggest expenses in data centers. The unit unsurprisingly compares even more favorably against spinning disk, with Intel saying it needs just a 10th the power and a 20th the space.

The entire drive is about the size of an old-fashioned 12-inch ruler. According to Intel, that means 32 P4500s can be arranged side-by-side in a single server slot to provide a massive 1 petabyte of memory.

The chipmaker didn’t share any information about the P4500’s performance. Fortunately, however, there are specifications available about the other models in the series that offer a general idea. Details uncovered by TechSpot show the sequential read and write speeds of a similar 8-terabyte drive are 3.3 gigabytes per second and 1.9Gbps, respectively.

Intel unveiled the P4500 against the backdrop of its annual Data-Centric Innovation Summit in Santa Clara, California. At the event, the chipmaker reaffirmed previous commitments to deliver a 10-nanometer server processor in 2020 and shared plans to release a new central processing unit series optimized for artificial intelligence. It said that the upcoming Cascade Lake family will provide twice as much performance for AI workloads than current offerings.

Image: Intel