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Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory
nofrance writes "As promised earlier this year, Samsung has unveiled the world's first 16-gigabit flash memory chip. These chips, when combined in a 16x16 configurations, will allow 32 GigaByte flash cards. Using 50-nanometer manufacturing technology, these chips will be in production by the second half of 2006, with Samsung promising that their 32Gb team will impress next year." From the article: "According to the company, the cell size of the fingernail-sized flash chip has been reduced about 25 percent from that of the 60 nm 8 Gbit NAND: The new 50 nm flash memory contains cells that measure 0.00625 square microns per bit. The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors, Samsung said. "
guess I should hold off on that Apple iPod nano, eh?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
FTA:
The 16Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors
Woah, that's a relief. I was afraid that I might be buying a device with billions of non-functional or even disfunctional transistors.
Now that Samsung has distinguished this for me, from now on, I'm going to make sure all the devices I purchase have fully functional transistors.
Falun Dafa is good!
Cue the "is that a 32GB pr0n flash card in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me" jokes.
Can this be put in an unpowered thumb drive? I feel it would be nice to have large, easily removable, USB storage that does not require external power. Right now, I store my accounting files on a 64MB stick that I can remove and take with me in an emergency much easier than taking my whole computer. The more room for backup, the better.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
That outta be enough for anybody!
Please let me know when we no longer need hard drives, and we no longer need to "boot" our PCs every time we switch them on.
Also drop me a line when we can store the world's music on a small memory cube and download it at the speed of light, virtually killing the RIAA overnight.
Amazing, the tech just keeps getting better and better.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
When I look at local computer parts prices, DRAM has been stuck at the $100 / GB range for three years now. Flash passed its price point earlier this year and is not looking back. I used to marvel at how RAM prices used to drop. (Flash is slower and can only be written a limited number (1E5) of times.)
Except that, due to idiotic manufacturers' policies, you will probably only be able to have 100 songs on your 8GB Flash Card, and then not be able to use them as ring tones...
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Yes, but individual memory chips often do not come rated in bytes but in bits and are configured in parallel to complete the byte. Hence "16x16 config" making 32GB.
Never has a rush for a quasi-legitimate first post been more transparent. Would this "type of memory" be good for my digital camera? Why yes, it would! How about for USB keys! OMG, it would there too!
Of course the storage size issue really isn't that huge of an issue anymore - I have an inexpensive 1GB flash card in my 8MP digital camera, and I always transfer pictures for other reasons before I do it to clear space. This will eventually put downward pressure on the smaller capacities, but already they're low enough that it isn't a huge issue.
The real question is what new markets will open up as Flash memory super-sizes - will we replace our laptop hard drives anytime soon? Would we want to?
Step 1: Pull out fingernails
Step 2: put fingernailsized flash memorychip on place of fingernail
Now just a way to power them up and use them. Any ideas
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Camera for video/etc. An audio recorder..
/var/tmp was mounted in a ram drive] but you could get away with a binary only Gentoo/Debian install just fine.
At 2Mbit/sec [250KB/sec] ~34 hours of recording with no moving parts other than the shutter. Current video recorders don't last super long on batteries and reporters in the field have to lug them around [or have their camera crew do that].
If they could make it last a while [e.g. handle wear] you could use it as a laptop hard drive. I probably wouldn't run Gentoo on it [unless
And in most laptops the harddrive is the second most waste of energy anyways. So while making the CPU take less power you can make the storage take less too.
Granted I wouldn't use this where I was doing many re-writes or needed quick writes. But for a normal user [e.g. email, web, im, word processing] it's more than adequate.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No WiMax. Less songs than a shuffle. Lame.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital and all the other storage companies better listen to what Samsung is doing here. Life is good when you are sitting in front of a really fast computer, but it's rather disturbing that the hard drives (and media players i.e. DVD) still operate at milliseconds instead of nanoseconds.
Has anyone thought about why hard drive development is so focused at increasing disk space by using similar technology and nothing beyond that? I mean, come on, this tech has been around for ages and you'd kind of want a solid replacement (read: no moving parts, nanosecond operation times).
Who knows what we'll see next in terms of hard drives AND WHEN?
Full Tilt
But then 32GB appears to be fabricated by conventional means rather the new unobtanium substrates used by AtomChip.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Will the Nano be upgradable? that is, was the chip oldered in or is in in there in a stadard flash drive socket. If so did apple or the CPU maker, cripple the nano's address range? if not buy that nano now and upgrade it next year. On the other hand the Nano sells for about $30 bucks more than the retail price of the 4Gb NAND chip. Son unless you can buy it below wholesale like apple, you'll be better off buying a new Nano when the 32 GB ones roll out.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Err, it is Gb. The individual chips are rated in Gigabits, and only the final 16 chip products in gigabytes.
Thus the 16 Gb chip is 2GB and when you have 16 of those you get, you guessed it, 32GB.
East Coast Brewers
I shoot weddings. With my 10D I get approximately 540 images, RAW, written to the MD. I'll usually pound thru 4 batteries (2x2) in the course of a day event; I have 6 spares.
Assuming I win the lotto and/or can reinvest some of the wedding profit towards a camera instead of my leaking roof, I would move up to a 1Ds, selling for 3K, which writes out 11mb RAW files.
That means a 32gb CF card would store: 2400 images
Your typical wedding/reception lasts 7 hours. Add a couple of the bridesmaids getting dressed (You do NOT want to miss that, HAHAHA) and you're at a 10 hour day.
That means you're taking a frame about every 15 seconds, were you to fill that up.
Cost of film? Let's say you're shooting 35MM instead of medium format (arguably a 1DS is a little less in terms of quality than a Hassy at 16x20, but the customer would probably never see it) then thats 67 rolls of film. A propack of 400NC from BH Photo is 28.45 for 5 rolls, which translates 14 packs at a cost of 400$.
Plus processing, tack on about 10$ per roll and you're at $1000 worth of money.
Where am I going?
No one shoots 3K worth of photos. It's insane. It's insane by even MY standards. But on a trip it's definately worth it to have... and I'm not even adressing the transfer rate issues (my firewire transfer from CF is the fastest in the market at 7MB/sec that would take about 1.25hrs to transfer)
This is an incredible leap forward but the biggest advantage will be the price pressuer on lower sized cards.
After all, drop one of these babies and you're out a pretty penny.
Has anyone taken a bunch of the already available monster flash drives and built a PC on them?
I'm thinking 4x USB2 card readers (these are down to like $10 on eBay) each containing 8GB compactflash in a RAID-0 configuration = 32GB solid state storage that might not incur too bad a performance penalty.
With something like a 32GB compactflash, you could potentially create a 120GB RAID-0 with them.
Do CF cards have the reliability factor to act as primary storage? How about USB2 as the interface? I don't know enough about either set of specs to make a judgment.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Next, the 2GB has Toshiba Flash Memory Soldered to the board, whereas the 4GB has a daughterboard with 2x2GB Samsung chips. Therefore, it is possible that someone will reelase an upgrade to the 4GB Nano at some point in the future, but Apple may well have disabled support in the (closed) Nano sofware for flash support above 4GB in the current generation.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Just to translate for the masses, that comes to roughly .0032 LOCs (assuming 1 Library of Congress = 10 TB). Sometimes terms like "Giga Bytes" can get confusing.
Problem is, flash cards don't work quite as well as regular hard drives because you cannot flash them with consistent information all the time. I am not sure about what these chips can handle nowadays, but a couple of years back, such memory could be flashed about 10,000 times and that's it.
Full Tilt
I might be missing something here. 16Gb is 2GB. There are 2GB flash chips already shipping in the iPod Nano. This is the first 2GB flash chip. Either this is very old news, or the important thing is the size of the chip rather than the fact it exists.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's too slow.
It also has a finite number of writes that can be done before it quits working.
If you want your system to run faster, look at the gigabit ramdisk PCI cards that are coming out this month (?). Get four of those, a raid card, and hook them up together. Contents are kept even when the computer is switched off.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
The person who wrote TFA said it's both 16 GByte and 16 Gbit. Read it, you'll see that both are used throughout the article. So we'll never know which one it is.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
I thought of that. The problem is, is that my fingernails are pretty much curved, making it tough to glue anything on it. My guess is, is that the base of the nail is flatter, so pulling them out would be the way to go.
Then again, the flat base concerns a guess, so maybe I should start with one nail only.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Am I the only one who thought the harddisk could be repaced with this? A minimal windows + office install easily fits 16gb. Ideally with no swap file given enough ram. Additional software may be run off a shared folder.
And if the windows (or linux) installation contains enough drivers, you could have a USB2.0 flash drive with 16 or 32GB space and carry the whole os around.
I know this is easier with knoppix on usb, but I'm thinking big, with the current windows install base. This can do wonders for the corporate maintenance until linux is ready for the desktop.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Around the end of May, there were several sites
- on-Flash-disk-drives-2222.shtml
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23425
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Samsung-is-betting
reporting that Samsung would be having a 16GB flash hard disk (SDD) available around August 2005. Has anyone seen those? I know for a very good reason that I would be insterested in installing one of those in my Powerbook: the joy of silence.
Can you imagine that? Hard-drives without spinning parts!
:D
They will have to quadruple the throughput and we will have competitive hard-drives with seek rates to the order of nanoseconds.
You know, they could even replace CDs and DVDs:
- Data rate high enough for HD-DVD or BR quality
- Put them into a good plastic case (ala zip disks, but smaller)
- No scratches!
Sounds like the 21st century to me.
If Samsung plays its cards right, they can make some serious dough with that technology. We're almost there.
Giggidy-Giggidy
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
The third comment on this page (if they know anything) says that the 2GB modules in the Nano are made of 4 500MB chips, so these new 16Gb (2GB) chips would allow for 8 and 16GB Nanos.
What?! I think if you are going around, shooting weddings, and making profit off of this grisly business, solid state drives are the least of your concerns. I would be more worried about things like: law enforcement, two families revenge, and Kaiser Sose.
In related news, you may want to do us all a favor and put down the violent video games. Thanks!
Side note, solid business model:
The IceMan, from HBO's Iceman confessions, would be proud.You guys really should try at least to read the TFA. It says the chip is 16Gb, running in a configuration of 16x16 yielding 32GB (yeah, thats Bytes).
(No I'm not new around here, but comeon, lets start a trend and at least read some of the posted stuff before bashing)
Am I right in thinking that flash memory has only a finite number of write cycles? I don't know how many these are on average - I've heard as low as 500,000 - but I get the impression a flash drive being used as a hard drive, under normal use, will have a very limited lifespan.
On hearing a heckler in the front row question his sanity, George Carlin replied... "Nice...I see you've been given the gift of a functional brain - please let us know when you unwrap it and take it out of the box."
...for something to be a carburetor is for it to mix fuel and air in an internal combustion engine--carburetor is a functional concept. In the case of the kidney, the scientific concept is functional--defined in terms of a role in filtering the blood and maintaining certain chemical balances.
Ok, I'll spot you this one, but next time, do yourself a favor and pay attention during class...
Functionalism has three distinct sources. First, Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind. Second, Smart's "topic neutral" analyses led Armstrong and Lewis to a functionalist analysis of mental concepts. Third, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Sellars and later Harman.
In the world of transistors, during manufacturing, we have functional and non-functional dies, where the non-functional are discarded, and the rest are further tested and assigned a 'functional level'.
This is where we end up with ram (or processors, etc.) being 'speed' rated, such as 80ns, 70ns, 60ns... These different speed components can all surface as part of a yield from the same 'batch', when some refuse to lock at one speed, and then pass inspection at another. Samsung doesn't run production of 60's on one day, and then 70's on the next. It's all about their 'functional' status as they come out of the oven...
A 'functional' transistor can go thru as many as 300 steps before it earns that title.
You're going to cheap out on the CF readers, when the CF cards themselves will cost you a good $500+?
You're talking about $2000 minimum just to get off the ground here. How does the poor man afford this?
I can't imagine how the write performance would do anything but stink. In theory enough flash in parallel should have decent write performance, but I doubt this setup will manage to extract it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
All current flash devices have a built in wear leveling algorithm that ensures (within limits) that the whole device, on a block by block basis, sees even erase cycles (the damaging part). In addition to that, a flash drive will fail more gracefully than a hard disk would under most conditions. All in all a flash drive will wear out after the PC went through a refresh cycle (4 year cycles) anyway so it doesn't matter all that much.
The limits to the wear leveling are that the flash device will not move data in order to wear level, thus if you have a flash drive with all but one block full of data and you then constantly update a single file on that disk, it will alternate between the block it was on and the unused block while all the other blocks are untouched. In the real world this would be less of an issue because windows bombs when it's disk is that full anyway.
Some of the benefits are that the OS can be stored on blocks given hardware level protection against erasure, making it more difficult to get a virus that damages the host OS. Defrag is completely unnecessary, and access times should be awesome. I already run a tablet PC off only Flash memory, and while it is somewhat limited with current capacity drives, a 32gig drive would be awesome.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
WTF?
What are you talking about? Increased demand raises prices, decreased demand lowers prices. Likewise, weak demand in a market causes an increase in competition with its attendant reduction in prices. (Think about airfares after the 9/11 attacks: no demand = rock bottom prices.)
Prices are high due to a lack of excess supply.
A much better answer to the OP's question is that DRAM has reached an equilibrium point where the suppliers are able to charge a price low enough to discourage new entrants, beyond which they have no incentive to lower prices. Once (marginal cost = marginal revenue) you stop looking for increased volume through lower prices because your profit is already maximized. Lowering your price further just decreases your profits.
Make no mistake about it, if demand increased tomorrow for DRAM, prices would rise. If that demand stayed steady, the prices would stay high. They would come down if the demand collapsed because new entrants would be trying to recoup the fixed costs they had incurred to enter the market. That's not a function of a healthy market though, that's a function of poor demand forecasting.
Saying that prices are too high because there's no demand for the product (assuming the production is into efficient economies of scale, which DRAM production is) is like saying all of those people in Africa starved to death because they weren't hungry enough to eat.
To clarify: Samsung has developed a process to create 16Gigabit(2GB) chips that when set in a 8(chips)X16(Gigabit) configuration yields a 16GB flash drive. The 16(chip)X16(Gigabit) configuration yields 32GB flash drives.
put the what in the where?
am i missing something? a 16GigaBit chip can hold 2GigaByte, and a 16x16 array contains 256 chips, so, this array should be able to hold 512GBytes.... i assume the article should say 4x4 array (32GBytes) (sorry about my english)
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
* In Soviet Russia, card flashes YOU!
* Sounds great, but does it run Linux?
* 1. Create huge flash memory card
2. ???
3. Profit
* I for one welcome our new 32GB overlords
* Rumor has it these cards will be shipped with Duke Nukem Forever.
* 32 GB of pr0n in your pocket
* ALL YOUR MEMORY ARE BELONG TO SAMSUNG!!
* CowboyNeal posted this two months ago.
* Free iPod with 32GB flash filled with naked and petrified Natalie Portman!
* Stephen king is dead/you must be new here/I have no memory you insensitive clod/no carrier/^H^H^H^H^H^H/BSD is dead/Google will do this better/Hot grit down my pants/etc.
There - no need to post any joke posts. And PLEASE don't reply with the ones i missed.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Replacing disk with flash RAM is not feasible: flash isn't fast enough, and doesn't survive enough re-writes to the same blocks.
It's not only feasible, it's been done. It's horrifically expensive, but it works. A "wear leveling" algorithm is used to ensure the same flash cells aren't erased and re-written continuously. Heck, even the flash keychain drives and digital camera cards do that. No, it probably won't hold up to as many write cycles as a magnetic disk will, but writes are much less common than reads, especially in some database and web applications. The drive doesn't need to last forever anyway, since the computer it's part of won't either. I've heard that these guys have had one of their flash drives on a continuous rewrite cycle for a few years now - no errors yet.
Where do you get the notion that flash is slow? It's slow compared to RAM, but it's way faster than a hard disk. That's one of the selling points of these things.
Where do you get the notion that flash is slow?
Right here:
Timing cached reads: 1584 MB in 2.00 seconds = 791.72 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.20 seconds = 6.26 MB/sec
Timing cached reads: 1568 MB in 2.00 seconds = 784.12 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 118 MB in 3.03 seconds = 38.92 MB/sec