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Intel Doubles Capacity of Likely Flash Successor
Intel has announced a new technique that allows them to effectively double the storage capacity of a single phase-change memory cell without adding cost to the current fabrication process. "Phase-change memory differs from other solid-state memory technologies such as flash and random-access memory because it doesn't use electrons to store data. Instead, it relies on the material's own arrangement of atoms, known as its physical state. Previously, phase-change memory was designed to take advantage of only two states: one in which atoms are loosely organized (amorphous), and another where they are rigidly structured (crystalline). But in a paper presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, researchers illustrated that there are two more distinct states that fall between amorphous and crystalline, and that these states can be used to store data."
PCM litho tech in not compatible with CPU litho tech.
So I doubt this will be happening any time in the near future.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
"Intel Doubles Capacity of Likely Flash Successor" this from a site that had a huge Intel logo on it for how many months?
It's neat tech, but as long as flash keeps getting bigger and cheaper we won't see it's 'Successor' for a while.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
No, processor caches are made out of SRAM, which is very fast but takes a lot of silicon space. Flash and phase-change RAM are totally different technologies. They aren't intended to be as fast as SRAM, but they are non-volatile, storing their contents without power. Phase-change or a similar technology may end up giving DRAM a run for its money if it gets fast enough, but I've never heard of an alternative to SRAM for internal processor caches.
It's double the number of bits. If you look at the largest value a 16 bit number or a 32 bit number can store, its not "double" in size. When it comes down to it, they're just bits, how you use them is up to you.
Currently the phase change RAM can only store 1 bit per element, in two possible states -- 0 or 1. They are changing this four possible states, which corresponds to two bits -- 00, 01, 10, 11. Hence, the amount of data that can be stored is doubled. The number of bits held per element increases by one every time the number of possible states is doubled.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Even when a technology becomes shippable it tends to take quite a while for it to catch on. It is easy to make small lab batches, but reliable low-cost high-volume production takes a lot longer. NAND flash was invented in 1988 but only really got going in around 2003 - 15 years later.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
N/T
Another way of looking at it:
Say we use a bit to store the result of a coin toss. True for heads, false for tails.
With two bits, we can store the results of two coin tosses. There are four possible outcomes when two coins are tossed, ranging from neither of them being heads, to only the first or the second being heads, or both of them being heads.
If we double the number of bits, we can store the result of four coin tosses. There are now sixteen possible outcomes, but we're still only storing the result of four tosses.
(Note that this example assumes we're interested in storing off the result of each coin toss. If we're only interested in counting the total number of heads or tails and don't care which coin was tossed in what order, then we can use our bits to store the total number of successful tosses rather the result of each toss, which is a much more efficient use of our bits but carries less information.)
Dan.
You can label the now total of 4 states however you like, such as 00/01/10/11 or 0/1/2/3 or A/B/C/D or T/A/C/O. But whatever they are, Intel would need to, at some point, convert this all back to 2 bits with states 0/1 when interfacing with external binary circuits. If they don't know how to do that they are welcome to "Ask Slashdot".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601127
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You'd be surprised how much of your computer isn't "binary" per se. If you have a modem, I think the standard is a base-16 transmission code. Flash memory currently contains 2-bits-per-cell cells. Hell, the quad-pumped signal going from memory to processor (if you have a Core 2 or P4) isn't "binary" per se.
Not really. If you think about it, fundamentally there just as many states a bunch of atoms can arrange itself in as counting electrons. You're really only bound by Plank's constant in how resistive or conductive a collection of atoms are. Assuming you had a device sensitive enough to detect the variation.
The trick is, of course, in how fast you can change those states. I would imagine electrons are much easier to move than whole atoms. I understand how read speed for PCM is faster than a transistor but writing....I don't know.
...the reliable low-cost high-production facilities already exist, as the process deviates very little from the CMOS manufacturing process. It's the same material that is used in rewritable optical media, and on top of that, it's basically just glass. Where you once needed stable unchanging silicon for memory/data storage, now we're just using different states of glass. Most of your concerns are addressed in this technology, and this is why I'm watching it very closely. Go read up a bit here. (PDF WARNING)
Oh, it also does have the theoretical capability to replace SRAM and DRAM. But in order for it to do that, it would need to be a little faster and we would have to be able to fully exploit all four states that it can be in for data. Also, read/write cycles would need a few more orders of growth to be used as a processor cache or extended RAM replacement, but as it is they're great for hard disk usage.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.