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Intel, Micron Boost Flash Memory Speed by Five Times

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fastest-draw-in-the-valley dept.

Lucas123 writes "IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced they've been able to improve NAND memory and its circuitry in order to boost read/write speeds by five times their current ability. The new 8Gbit single-level cell, high-speed NAND chip will offer 200MB/sec read speeds and write speeds of up to 100MB/sec, which means faster data transfer between devices like solid-state drives and video cards. IM Flash Technologies plans to begin shipping the new chip later this year."

8 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Video cards? by repvik · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, video cards need fast RAM. If you haven't noticed, this article is about flash memory, not RAM. If you shove this crap into a video card, you'll be going a helluvalot slower than you are today ;)

  2. Re:Faster USB needed by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, but for solid state hard drives this is quite a leap. I'm starting to think winchester drives are going to be extinct within 5 years.

  3. Re:Faster USB needed by ciroknight · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're right. If only there was a new, faster USB standard that would be able to take advantage of these new data rates. They could call it "USB 3.0", or "USB SuperSpeed" or something. Oh Wait...

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  4. Re:Video cards? by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even with the bandwidth increases, what you're spouting is nonsense. The local bandwidth of ram is infinitely faster and cheaper then flash, period. Not to mention: It doesn't wear out. Why would you put flash in a video card which does insane amounts of reads and writes per second? You'd have to be an idiot.

  5. Re:Video cards? by Erpo · · Score: 4, Funny

    The blurb says this will lead to faster transfers between flash memory and video card memory, which is certainly true. Faster flash will lead to faster transfer between flash and just about anything.

    I think this is similar to how the latest greatest processors are marketed as improving the "internet experience." Well sure. Not having a CPU at all or having a CPU from twelve years ago will hamper your "internet experience" compared to any new CPU.

  6. Re:Faster USB needed by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They won't be extinct, but they'll be used for storage. If I'm booting my operating system from a spinning disk in 2013, I'll be pretty disappointed with technology!

  7. Some interesting possibilities open up. by jd · · Score: 3, Insightful
    LinuxBIOS was already down to 3 seconds, and I'll guess that slow flash access times contributed some to that. We could also see the revival of cartridge hard disks, only solid-state. A variant on that would be to have a RAID array where one or more of the disks were replaced with flash devices. In either case, you'd probably improve longevity and definitely improve resilience to things like shock. It wouldn't be cheap, sure, but the people mainly concerned with ruggedized technology (aircraft vendors, the military, war correspondents) are less likely to be concerned by price than by whether it'll survive the environment.

    It could significantly increase the usefulness of suspend/resume at the OS level. The limits on writes is a headache, but it would be possible to treat flash devices as additional swap space, making it theoretically possible to have hot-swappable swap devices as per some rather ancient mainframes. (Virtual swap space can be larger than the physical space directly available to a machine.)

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  8. Re:Wonder when... by Circle+of+Owls · · Score: 3, Informative

    AMD had a flash memory division; it's flash ran alongside their logic products in Fab25, but took a backseat to them in both production and engineering. As a result, their flash technology rapidly slipped behind the market leaders. AMD then formed a joint venture with Fujitsu called Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited (FASL) to jointly develop and market their products at about the same time that AMD was moving their logic line to Fab30. FASL was soon split from both companies into a separate entity, and renamed to Spansion. Spansion has been making significant progress to regain both the market share and technology that AMD's priorities lost for them.