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Samsung Demos Future Memory Chips
Fletcher points to this story in CNET Asia, excerpting "The Korean electronics giant unveiled an 8-gigabit flash memory chip Monday based on the 60-nanometer process, as well as a 2-gigabit DDR DRAM chip based on the 80-nanometer process. Flash chips, which retain data after a host computer is turned off, are used in flash cards and cell phones, while DDR DRAM is used inside PCs."
Generally ram/storage sizes on-die are given as bit sizes, and have been for a very long time. No, it doesn't indicate a data rate.
#include "disclaimer.h"
That 16GBs of memory translates into storage of up to 16 hours of DVD-quality video or 4,000 MP3 audio files (at 5 minutes per song).
Can someone explain to me how 1GB/hr equates to DVD quality? Most DVD films I know of run at 2-4GB/hr...
Sure, low-bitrate DVD is 1GB/hr or less, but is that true "DVD Quality?"
Few things - first of all the ram chip is GigaBITs. 8 bits = one byte, so that ram chip is actually 0.25 GB of space.
As well this is a ram chip, NOT a ram Stick. So you can have a number of this ram chip on one stick to make different sizes of ram sticks.
Once upon a time, not all machines used 8-bit bytes. Therefore, you bought your chips measured in bits, and used 8 chips for 8-bit machines, 7 chips for 7-bit machines, etc.
Also, bits has never been used for bandwidth. that's bits per second, often shortened by the lazy and irresponsible.
One gigabit is 128MB. Assuming a 64-bit memory bus width, one chip per bus bit, and 2 gigabits of storage per chip, you're talking about a 16GB DIMM.
So the the terminology inclined, it is a significant advancement.
A good summary of memory technology is here.
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Memory chips are most often rated in bits, it has been that way for decades, I think. Even the RAM sticks you buy have chips that are often rated in bits. Only when it is assembled into a memory module or card does the byte term get used to describe its capacity. Few end users use the bare chips so confusing the consumer isn't a concern..
256megabit doesn't mean a rate, but the fact that it has 256 million bit cells.
8 gigabits = 1 gigabyte
2 gigabits = 256 megabytes
And this was quoted from the article, which isn't talking about speed, which would be gigabits-per-second (sometimes abbreviated gigabits), this is size, as in (quote) Both chips hold far more data than current chips in their respective markets and are smaller, which should make them cheaper and more powerful than existing chips.
Smaller, mabey. Higher capacity? No.
Technological neophyte journalists.
~Wx
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RTFA...they're talking about using the chips to fit 16 gigabytes on one DIMM.
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Many people probably have more RAM than they need. However, certain operating systems tend to expand their needs to meet or exceed typical RAM configurations. Additionally, many of us in research really benefit from increased RAM, although you do need a 64-bit architecture before you can access more than 4 Gibibytes of it. For example, if you're doing large simulations, you benefit greatly from being able to keep everything in memory and not having to read/write to the hard drive.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Actually, increasing the RAM reduces the significance of other bottlenecks in a PC.
For example, you can buffer transfers that would otherwise go to or from the hard drive, so you spend less time waiting on I/O.
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I think the price would be prohibitive. A 120-gig harddrive can be found at about 90 bucks, meanwhile flash memory is about a gig for 90 bucks.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
The manufacturers of the actual silicon will always use *bit for the size because they are developing something independant of architecture, and therefore *bit is the most relevant notation of size. On a PC it might be relevant to use 'quads' as a measurement, as all machine code and addressing is done in 32 bits, whereas on some older microcontrollers the addressing is in 4 bits, so that would be nibbles. Perhaps some technologies want single-bit accessability, as the storage is not used to store addresses/instructions/ASCII. Using *bit is the only truly platform independant measurement, because the 8-bit bytes is aribtary whilst the bit is indivisible.
#include "disclaimer.h"
They are using conventional storage standards. Memory chips have been measured in (multiples of) bits for decades. When I started paying attention, around 1980 or so, the state of the art was something like 4k or 16k bits for DRAM and those chips were 1-bit wide. Even 8-bit wide chips were, and still are, quoted with storage capacity in bits. Again from the early days, an EEPROM with 2048 words of 8-bits each was described as a 16k device.
Further down in the article it is stated that "The flash chip is designed to let consumer electronics designers put up to 16 gigabytes of data on a single memory card". Note that they use the conventional units, bytes, for memory cards.
Remember, different conventions in different fields. You may think its silly, but that's life and you'd better get used to it.
And, since you ask: no, bits doesn't necessarily imply a rate connectivity. Raw connections are usually rated in bits per second but high level data streams, such as ftp download speeds, are often quoted in bytes per second. I do not know whether there is a parallel here between comms and storage in the different conventions used to specify what the raw technology gives you and what is built out of that technology. I would be interested to learn whether it is more than coincidence.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
He didn't mention 16 gigabytes anywhere. He said "2GB is a lot on one stick of ram."
First off, storage chip capacity is always measured in bits, and these chips are most likely (no, I haven't read the FA) 8Gib (eight gibibit, or 8x2^30 bits, i.e. 2^30 bytes or 1GiB). Look at your memory sticks and you will notice that they are equipped with mutliple memory chips, and the same goes for large capacity flash cards. This is not a 1GiB storage card, but a component that can be used to build large storage cards.
What is new and interesting (for chip process nerds) about this is the 60nm process. Current chips are generally produced in a 130nm process. There are also 90nm chips in general production, and they're pretty much the shitnitz at the moment.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
<newbie-alert>
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Hello?! That's 2 gigabit per chip
Those chips are small and your Compact-Flash/DDR modules are usually made of many such chips.
I'll bite, just for today.
RAM modules are usually "measured" in bytes. However, RAM chips are, and have always been, measured in bits. Mainly because it used to be common configuration in RAM modules to have 8 chips, and the module's total capacity in bytes would be the same as the chip's capacity in bits.
RAM chips used to be referenced as something like "1x8x1M", which would be eight memory chips, each with one megabit, and accessing one bit of data at once.
A 512MB RAM module usually is 8x8x512M.
I'm sure I didn't get everything right, I'm working out of my memory right now, and work is a bit tight to do heavy fact-checking. Anybody pls correct if necessary.
Because your CF card has more than one chip inside?
)9TSS
Yes BUT ... the general public is pretty stupid and would assume that a 2 gigabit flash chip advertized as 256 megabytes would mean 1 chip is all I need to upgrade from 128MB flash to 256MB flash. Needless to say that's not true (the chip is 2gbit x 1bit NOT 256mb x 8bits). In fact, in some applications you MAY need 9 or 10 of them to get 2 gigabytes of usable memory (parity or ECC memory applications).
Plus as someone pointed out, claiming 256MB is not good marketing. The 'general public' is going to say, 'So what, I can get a 512MB card at best buy today, no big deal'.
A single chip stores single Bytes. A DIM or SIM is a smal plate with 8 or more chips.
On a chip you can address every bit individually, or chunks of 4 or 8 bits, depending on your fetch and cash strategy.
However on a DIM/SIM you fetch from all chips one bit each, and those get combined to a byte, or a word or a long word, depending on your architechture and the architectue of the chip/DIM.
The logic on the DIM/SIM is responsible for combining bits from different chips to the words, the processor wants.
Depending on usage of he chip, I mean planned usage, the ship might be organized in arbitrary word sizes. A common word size on a chip can e.g. be 128 bit for video ram.
All the above is "principle" only. Today I guess it is far more complicated.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The reason DRAM prices have remained static (or have even risen a bit) and flash prices have fallen is because memory manufacturers have been moving a lot of their production off DRAM and onto flash ram.
This means that the supply of DRAM remains fairly tight, and that prevents further price reductions. Meanwhile, a glut of flash ram is now developing, and the resulting oversupply is driving flash memory prices into the floor.
They are using conventional storage standards for RAM CHIPS.
Putting the word "Byte" on it implies some layout. A memory chip is just a big array of bits and denotes mostly how big/small the chip has gotten. For example, if they say we've made a breakthrough and now are producing 1Tb memory chips using 60nm. This means that they have figured out a way to make a chip using 60nm that has 1Tb as a single unit. Later on, some company using the 1Tb chips can arrange them and design circuits with them to create any sort of layout that you want. They can use a 1Tb chip in a serial circuit to store 1Tb of information, or they can take a handful of these 1Tb chips (say 8 of them) and make a conventional 1TByte memory stick that is 8-bits wide, or whatever.
Also, the chip manufacturor may make a memory chip that is 1Tb but each chip is addressed as 256G rows that are 4-bits wide (a nibble for us old timers) and call it a 256Gx4. That way, you take 8 of these chips and you make a 32-bit wide memory stick for 1TB of storage.
It's all about the layout. To your PC, the layout is in bytes. To an individual memory chip, it is in bits.
The type of NAND Flash currently in use require just a single transistor to store two bits, either by the mirror-bit technology or by multilevel flash. A single NAND flash cell is 4F (F=smallest featuresize of the technology node). So it takes 2F to store one bit. Current DRAM cell sizes are 8F (or 6F with additional area sacrifice). Therefore the flash memory density is at least four times as high.
In addition to that flash is MUCH easier to produce than dram.
DRAM usually had redundant memory that is allocated during device test.
Last I checked, most memory technologies required at least 1-T per bit. I don't know if that's true for flash technology, but still.
Its currently at two bits per transistor. Search for "multi level flash", "mirror bit flash", "NROM"..