Slashdot Mirror
Intel and Micron Unveil 128Gb NAND Chip
ScuttleMonkey writes "A joint venture between Intel and Micron has given rise to a new 128 Gigabit die. While production wont start until next year, this little beauty sets new bars for capacity, speed, and endurance. 'Die shrinks also tend to reduce endurance, with old 65nm MLC flash being rated at 5,000-10,000 erase cycles, but that number dropping to 3,000-5,000 for 25nm MLC flash. However, IMFT is claiming that the shrink to 20nm has not caused any corresponding reduction in endurance. Its 20nm flash uses a Hi-K/metal gate design which allows it to make transistors that are smaller but no less robust. IMFT is claiming that this use of Hi-K/metal gate is a first for NAND flash production.'"
I love SSDs, especially for development work. Nothing like having a dev VM per client each on their own little SSD isolated from your non-work related default operating system. But SSD's are dangerous...
SSD's are like crack to bad applications. The magically make them feel better, while masking the underlying problem. I'm worried what the future is going to hold when the average desktop comes with an SSD drive. Already I've already seem some development companies demo financial software on striped SSD's as if that's what everyone runs these days. I guess it's no difference then an abundance of RAM and an abundance of CPU power. < Insert in my day rant here >
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
This isn't about storage size. That war is lost for the desktop ( see Bloatware ). If it wasn't for smart phones and tablets cause people to still think about storage size for some applications, it would be even worse.
When we talk about SSD drives vs HDD drives, were are primarily talking about drive bandwidth and access times. SSD's have no seek time, no spin up time, and their bandwidth in read/writes are at least 2x as fast, and can be up to 4x or 5x as fast.
Think of the engineering and time that goes into making an application 'snappy' to load. Like say Chrome or Word or Photoshop. Now weight that engineering cost vs simply installing an SSD. Now you see how this is going to affect future software development.
But GP ( or uncle, or 2nd cousin) is right, this is a Rant. Each of these Moore's law watermarks tend to have similar effects on software development. I think bleeding edge apps ( including games ) generally herald what is to come....
Buy stock in SSD manuf I guess.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
As a sanity check - I found some data from Mtron (one of the few SSD oems who do quote endurance in a way that non specialists can understand). In the data sheet for their 32G product - which incidentally has 5 million cycles write endurance - they quote the write endurance for the disk as "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" - which involves overwriting the disk 3 times a day.
That's for old-ish tech and a smallish drive. For consumers, large drives get written to exponentially less. Consider, the vast bulk of consumer "big" drives are and movies. These are big, chunky files that don't get overwritten very much. As a consequence the vast majority of your drive stays clean. For most people, they'll want or need to buy a new hard drive long before the old one wears out. Please read up on the facts before spouting nonsense.
This moralistic spin ("lazy" programmers) is absurd. The tradeoff between development cost and hardware requirements is obviously affected by cheaper yet higher-spec hardware. If you want to run WordPerfect for DOS at insane speeds on modern hardware, go right ahead. That piece of that software cost $495 in 1983 (cite) and was written in assembly language for speed. (I hope the connection there is not lost on anybody).
They aren't lazy, they're productive, and taking advantage of the resources available.
When they're tired of putting the first-to-market markup and the bleeding-edge markup in their bank accounts, then they'll address reports of sluggishness or resource starvation in less-profitable market segments.
Right now, though, the fruit that are hanging low are fat and ripe and still fit in their basket.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Most of the programmers I know don't care about timelines, eyecandy, popularity or selling points. These guys are computer nerds. Just as car nerds want their hot rods to purr when idle and roar when pushed, most programmers want their code to run fast, efficient and clean. The problem is that programmers are under thumb of timelines and feature bloat put on them by management and sales.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as if it were not for deadlines, no programs would ever be finished. Yes, code is more inefficient, but that is only because the hardware has allowed it to be. It does not hurt the bottom line if a customer has to wait 1.5 seconds for program to launch or 3. The bottom line is what management cares about, and to be fair, it is what drives business and keeps Red Bull stocked in the break room fridge.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I understand what you're saying but at the same time software that wastes compute resources is also wasting dollars. Dollars needlessly spend on employee hours (waiting for operations to complete), new/upgraded hardware to cope, and one that many people might not realize extra software development, maintenance and support costs. Inefficient software quite often reflects a poor implementation under the hood and frequently behind the wheel. One thing nearly every engineering discipline recognizes is that the fewer moving parts a system has the inherently more reliable and maintainable that system becomes. This is no different with software. Software bloat is the bane of those trying to implement features to support new requirements and a nightmare for those trying to ensure quality control. Software bloat often shows up in the user interface as well in poorly implemented workflows that further slow down productivity.
Contrary to popular opinion, fancy GUIs replete with eye-candy generally aren't the problem--normally they're built on top of highly abstracted, well optimized and tested frameworks--it's evolution. One of the more common sources of inefficiency is software bloat. Bloat can even plague software that was initially well constructed. Over time, after several iterations of evolution the feature requests, the various modifications and the resulting baggage train required to support them can grow substantially and weigh down a system. It isn't that the bloat is a requirement of a given feature set per-se but rather reflects a set of compromises made necessary by an initial architecture that wasn't designed to support them. Management and even sometimes the engineers have a hard time accepting that a significant or even complete tear down and reconstruction with a new architecture is the best and most appropriate choice. One of the easiest and most notable places this problem can be recognized is in web browsers. Take a trip down memory lane and compare the features, bloat, and usability of the various web browser throughout time.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
A lot of the tablets, etc. are coming out with eMMC type flash instead of raw flash for internal nonvolatile memory. How come?
I would think eMMC would be more expensive (has built-in controller) than raw flash chips. And slower, too, because eMMC has no concept of file-systems and therefore cannot do optimal space selection or wear-levelling. I'm sure the teeny, tiny controller in the eMMC does the best that it can, but I'm also sure that JFFS2 and YAFFS manage flash chips a lot better. The only savings I see are is that the device manufacturer has to layout and route a fewer traces on a circuit board when using eMMC.
Does anyone really know why eMMC is being used?
There are some of us who are quite proficient with assembly language. We also had some very sloppy compilers back then, so the two went hand-in-hand.
Back then, I would build a first prototype in straight C (or whatever), then identify the bottlenecks and rewrite those functions in assembly. Heck, in school I wrote a few QBasic games/apps that linked in some assembly calls. Sometimes I'd get cocky and copy the assembled code directly into a QBasic variable, then execute it. For common stuff like blits and mouse calls, I could type those opcodes from memory. You wouldn't think a QB game could handle 3D graphics as 320x200 on a 386, with sound effects and digital (MOD) music, but with a modest application of hand-tuned code, you can write the script-like glue in whatever language you want with only a minimal impact on final performance.
I'm not saying we need to write all apps in raw assembly, that's absurd. We rarely did that back in the day, except for extreme situations and bragging rights. Today's compilers seem to do a good-enough job, but the faster they get, the more our so-called developers push into truly wasteful practices like nested script interpreters - most PHP and Ruby frameworks fall into that category. Do we really need 16-core machines with 48gb of Ram to push a few pages of text ? Not if we were writing actual computer code, and not this navel-gazing techno poetry that's more for humans than machines.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Not exactly. The older SSDs didn't do write leveling. Also, most OSs don't force a write to disk when a single byte in a sector changes (perhaps it does on linux, I don't know). Most SSDs also have write caching today so even if the OS was silly enough to request a write to disk, it would quickly get invalidated by the next request to write to the same sector before it even hit the flash portion of the SSD.
Lastly, even if you disregard all of that, then you also must realize that you don't need to do an erase if all the changes you are making are turning bits on. In that case, you just do a write instead of erase and write, and that doesn't wear out the SSD at all (I believe).
Also, there is nothing keeping the SSD from periodically moving data with low write counts to the high write count portions of the disk in the background in hopes that the semi-static data will remain semi-static.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Your comment is either naive or disingenuous. There are plenty of reasons that lead a specific software to do a good job under a specific scenario but do poorly under another which is completely different, and all this without incompetence being a factor. Let me explain.
Consider one of the most basic subjects which is taught right at the start of any programming 101 course: writing data to a file. For that task, a programmer relies on standard interfaces, either de-facto standards such as platform-specific interfaces or those defined in international standards such as POSIX. This means that a programmer tends to not be aware of any specification regarding the file system or even the underlying hardware when developing a routine that dumps data to a file. Basically, what tends to be taught is to open a file, write to it and then close it. This tends to be acceptable in most scenarios, but this is a dangerous thing to do. After all, just because some data is written to a file it doesn't mean the data is immediately written to that file. The underlying platform may rely on IO buffers to be able to run things with a bit more efficiency. This means that even though your call to write() does succeed, and even though your program can successfully read your data back, that data isn't in fact stored in your file system. This means that if your program is killed/crashed or if your computer dies then you risk losing your data and corrupting the file. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
This problem can be mitigated by flushing the data to a file. Yet, calling flush() doesn't guarantee that every single bit of your data will be successfully stored in your file system. The thing is, this only guarantees that, when flush() returns, the data is flushed. If the system dies while your program is still writing away your data then you quite possibly lose all your data, and no call to flush() can save you from that. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
Some clever people took a bit of time to think about this, and came up with some techniques which avoided any the risk of corrupting your data. One of the techniques is to dump the data to temporary files and then, after they succeed in saving the data, the old file is deleted/renamed to a backup file name and the newly created temporary file is renamed back to the original name. With this technique, even if the system dies then the only file which might have been corrupted is the newly created temporary file, while the original file is kept in its original state. With this approach, the programmer guarantees that the user's data is preserved. Yet, this also has the nasty consequence of storing what's essentially the same file in entirely different inodes. This screws with a lot of stuff. For example, it renders hard links useless and screws around with the way versioning file systems work. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
So, no. This hasn't anything to do with what you arrogantly referred to as "lazy programmers" or even incompetence. Times change, technical requirements change, hardware requirements change, systems change.... And you expect that the software someone designed a couple of years ago will run flawlessly and avoid each and every issue which are only being discovered today and might only be discovered tomorrow. How can programmers avoid these issues, if they don't even have a working crystal ball? This isn't realistic, and you can only make such claims by being completely clueless and out of touch with reality. So, please tone down your arrogance and spend a moment thinking about this issue.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
If you have 12GB in your PC, and you're using it normally, you can disable swap entirely. Sure, your commit rate will jump a bit, but you still have several times more Ram than you need. Swap space has a usefulness even when you have memory available, because a properly tuned VMM will treat it as low-priority commit fodder - meaning if an app requests 10 gigs of buffer space, but has not yet put anything in there, the VMM will earmark swap first, so as to not tie up physical RAM until it is actually needed (if at all). In a sense, it's an accounting trick that allows the OS to "borrow" memory without necessarily using it. It's like a line of credit for memory; you're best to avoid using it, but if you need a security deposit for something, that mastercard is ideal. Swap is like that mastercard. It can help swing you through tight spots, but if you abuse it, you enter a world of pain...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Yeah, Java 1.2 ran like crap on my 133 MHz 5x68 with 16 MB of RAM in 1998, but today's Java isn't too bad on my dual Six Core CPUs with 32 GB of RAM.
Except with SSD write lifetimes falling with every generation
Except this isnt true. Flash lifetimes are dropping due to process shrinks, but SSD lifetimes are remaining steady due to increasing capacity made possible by those process shrinks.
This is the problem with you SSD critics. You get that one nugget of information and then gleefully go on spitting bullshit at everyone on forums like this one. To be quite clear, YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
Why do you volunteer to talk about a subject that we both know that you are poorly informed about? You dont see me talking about JAVA performance because... guess what... even though I know a couple things about JAVA, I refuse to make declarative statements about topics where I know that I only know a couple of things about.
If you are an expert in something... wait for that topic before you act like an expert.
"His name was James Damore."