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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.'"
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.
Speaking as someone in the NAND industry...
NAND does not have its own reliability controls on-die. Items such as wear-leveling, file management, and ECC mechanisms need to be handled somewhere. So the options are in software, which would then need to be validated and designed for each NAND manufacturer, die, and process; and would consume CPU and batter power from the tablet OS, or it can be done via a separate off-die controller.
And as to the choice of eMMC, it's a cost/performance/reliability trade-off. eMMC is relatively inexpensive (very small die), and includes all of the aforementioned reliability mechanisms at a low-power, and low-cost method, in an I/O language supported by most mobile architectures (SD/MMC). However, it severely lacks in relative performance to an SSD. The other option is an optimized SSD controller, which may cost many times more, but has much higher performance. The problem is how to include a $100 SSD in a $100-200 tablet BOM... impossible.
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."