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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."
Anyone can check the spot price for flash anytime by looking at this site:
http://www.dramexchange.com/
Scroll down to the flash section.
SLC is the good stuff used in the big fast SSD's you get from people like Apple.
MLC is the slower, less long lasting, stuff commonly used in thumb drives.
$2.08 for a Gigabyte in MLC
$6.70 for a Gigabyte of SLC
If you want to know the long term price improvement rate for flash, you can join that site for $1000 a year or if you want the cheap version, I've been tracking retail flash (MLC) prices for 9 years at my site here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html
HDs though, go bad quickly. For me not a single flash chip has ever catastrophically failed like many HDs I have had. Also, do you really want to carry a hard drive in your cell phone? And flash chips are much, much, faster then most hard drives. And really, HD speeds are one of the biggest bottlenecks in high-speed computers, RAM is cheap enough to get 1 GB for less then $50, CPUs are multi-core, Linux has a fast and usable OS, USB is fast enough for most devices, so all we need is faster HD read/writes and we have a much faster computer, problem is, the way to speed up a HD is only via either A) RAID 0 which costs reliability or B) increase RPMs which add price and chances are, decrease reliability over time. So as of now, the only way to get large amounts of space, without spending a fortune and having it be reliable (no moving parts) and fast is with Flash chips and SSDs.
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Memory is almost always ahead of the curve when it comes to silicon manufacturing. These were the guys who were at 55nm when the processor industry was temporarily stuck at 90nm.
All kinds of memory can use smaller processes because the logic is much simpler; you're basically laying the same thing out over and over and over again on a die. For the same exact reason, most companies use SRAMs to test their processes before moving up to higher level logic like processors.
Since we're on the subject of flash memory, I find this article confuses me a tad bit. I was reading an article yesterday that mentioned that the current iPhone has room for a single flash chip, which means the current 16GB variety has a 128Gbit chip in it. But then TFA implies that 32Gb chips are as big as flash memory comes right now, which leaves me at an impasse. How does a device like the iPhone fit 128Gbit as a single chip if chips only come up to 32Gb in size?
Celebration! 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of this claim being made at a die-shrink -- or at least 1983 is the first time I heard it. People were talking about the 1u (1000nm) "holy grail" and how it would likely never happen because it wouldn't be worth the cost...
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If you die in debt, you're ahead.