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."

Comments

Good stuff, but currently they are prototypes

[sczimme]

People tend to get excited about new products like these; in a separate but equally relevant phenomenon, they tend not to RTFA.

From the article:

Both chips, however, are prototypes. Companies just began this year to make chips on the 90-nanometer process. (The nanometer measurement refers to average feature sizes on the chips). Eighty-nanometer chips may not come for at least another year, and 65-nanometer chips won't debut until at least the end of 2005.

In other words, 16GB flash MP3 players will not be available in time for Xmas.

Re:Usage as Hard Drives?

[StateOfTheUnion]

I think that Flash RAM has limitations as to the number of times it can be rewritten . . . the number of possible rewrites is high (10's of thousands or more), but a swapspace in a hard disk would eventually read/write flash RAM into oblivion . . .