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Intel & Micron Show 34-nm, 32-Gbit Flash Memory Chip
Lucas123 writes "IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today's products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel's latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year."
Why do chipmakers put emphasis on ever-smaller processes with the notion that smaller == better?
Smaller is not usually better, as this points out.
The total cost to develop a chip product -- including all EDA functions as well as maskmaking -- has been nearly doubling each node from 90nm to 65nm to 45nm. Moving on to 32nm is projected to raise costs only ~50% over 45nm, but the absolute numbers are now making design-teams pause to consider their choice of manufacturing node. Kinugawa predicted that neither Japanese fabless nor customers nor IDM-internal designers are prepared to jump to the next node -- such that a "several year gap" will appear between the availability of 32nm node fab capacity and substantial demand! They're kinda jumping the gun with 32nm.
New tech is expected every 2-3 years.
32nm was expected for 2009-2010 and 22nm is expected in 2011-2012
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It just occurred to me while reading this that we can come up with a brand new metric for storage capacity.
When speaking with most non-tech people I know their eyes glaze over whenver I mention megabytes, gigabytes etc.
But now I think this can be solved with MP3, Kilo-MP3, Giga-MP3 etc metrics.
This:
me: "I have 64GB of RAM in my PC"
listener :
Becomes this:
me: "I have 2K-MP3 of RAM in my PC"
listener : wow!
hmm i think they meant 32 gigabyte cause 32 gigabit is only 4 gigabyte if i remember right or are they talking about transfer speed ? or i am missing something ?