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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"
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.
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
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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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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"
Could you point out where I can find a 256 MB RAM chip? I don't mean a ram stick with 8 or more ram chips, I mean just one ram chip.
Ditto for the flash memory chips. Can't seem to find any 1GB flash chips (again not the drive, just the chip).
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
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.
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
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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.