Slashdot Mirror
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."
FWIW, another article covering this same press-release noted that most flash costs $2.50/Mbit to manufacture, but this new stuff by Intel costs just under $1/Mbit to manufacture. So the rapid downward spiral of flash storage pricing should continue for at least the short term.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Because smaller is more energy efficient, which is useful on a number of levels: for one, it saves electricity, and it also means that the chips produce less heat, which lets them run better.
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!
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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 ?
More importantly, smaller allows it to fit into smaller devices, meaning larger-capacity USB drives, cellphones, and iPods.
There are two methods that I've seen:
The key is determining how much to add. Having too few won't allow you to hit your yield targets, and adding too many is a waste of area (i.e. money). And as you mentioned, products that are more logic intensive don't benefit from this very much.
Having a tight process with great yield is still the best approach (if you can achieve it), though, because you get the great yield with smaller die.
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?
And for me, I've never had a hard drive fail in my life (16 years of hard drives, sometimes several at once, and with a CPU dying in that time). Personal experience doesn't mean anything.
This space intentionally left blank
Correct me if I'm wrong but arent hard drives faster than flash when it comes to raw speed?
Flash obviously has better seek of course.
Oh and as a guy with a 4 drive RAID 5 array which can hit 200mb/s, hard drive speeds are not a big bottleneck.
And hard drives will always beat flash when it comes to raw data storage.
My raid array gives me a terrabyte of usable space with redundancy for a few hundred bucks (back 2 years).
Flash today would cost thousands for the same amount of storage.
Apparently an SSD will be part of Centrino 2: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/23/intel-bundle-ssds-centrino
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
Yeah I've been hearing SSD would replace spinning disks for a long time now. Still hasn't happened. Even early this year SanDisk was touting it's next products which I still do not see on NewEgg. When they've actually shipped a FAST 32-gig for under $100 get back to me.
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