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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."
More importantly, smaller allows it to fit into smaller devices, meaning larger-capacity USB drives, cellphones, and iPods.
You can combine them. Or make larger chips. The achievement in TFA is significant because of the storage density achieved.
Unfortunately most memory companies are worth a lot more than AMD is, and have their fabs booked solid for years in advance, so it's not likely they would cancel orders to be acquired by some company like AMD (which barely had the money to buy the fabless ATi, and is still considered to be a bad move by many investors).
Secondly, the technology is considerably different. Because RAM is so simple to build, there are a lot more corners you are able to cut. With some RAMs you can even get away with selling non-optimal hardware (due to built-in error resistant logic). AMD needs a world class, custom-capable fab like the ones IBM and Intel run, or like its own fabs. Chartered and the Taiwanese companies only take you so far.
And lastly, buying more fabs isn't going to magically make them catch up to Intel. Intel still has the brightest minds in the field and more money to throw at solid state physics research, so they're always going to be ahead. AMD's only chance is to make up for the deficit of silicon performance with logic performance. They've been able to do this for a couple of years, but Intel's finally decided they're going to pull out all of the stops, and AMD's fallen way behind (especially with the failure of the extremely overhyped Barcelona).
Not sure what you mean by raw speed. Currently, iIrc, hard drives still beat flash for sequential writes, but that may not last. Given the way flash prices have been plummeting and sizes have been increasing, hard drives' advantage in total storage space, even at the top end, will only last a few more years, too.
Sure, you're getting 200Mb/s, but you need four drives to do it. A SSD can give you the same performance and reliability as a RAID array in a single drive. Sure, right now, that single drive will cost as much as your entire array, but that situation will improve as manufacturing volumes increase and prices come down.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it