Slashdot Mirror
Memory Wars May Herald Mobile Devices With Terabytes of Capacity
Lucas123 writes "With 3D NAND flash going into high production and one startup demonstrating a resistive NAND (RRAM) flash array, it may not be long before mobile devices have hundreds of gigabytes of capacity, even a terabyte, with performance only limited by the bus. Samsung announced it is now mass producing three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips, and start-up Crossbar said it has created a prototype of its RRAM chip. Both technologies offer many times what current NAND flash chips offer today in capacity and performance. Which technology will prevail is still up in the air, and experts believe it will be years before RRAM can challenge NAND, but it's almost inevitable that RRAM will overtake NAND as even 3D NAND heads for an inevitable dead end. Others believe 3D NAND, currently at 24 layers, could reach more than 100, giving it a lifespan of five or more years."
Fire it up Jonny
640 GB should be enough for anybody.
It would be one thing if Netflix and other streaming sites allowed offline viewing (use similar drm to how Google does it with Google Music and Youtube), but as it stands, no one really needs more than 16GB--enough to store a metric ton of photos and cell-phone-camera-quality video.
and I'll stop complaining about lack of SD slots. Especially since the SD cards mostly seem to run crappy FAT file systems. There's really no excuse for that.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Because I have 32GB SD in my SGS4 I tend to be lazy about cleaning it out because it's so damn full of stuff. So it sits there and I contemplate adding more memory.
it's a vicious cycle
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
By the time those levels materialize, wireless speeds will too, so any 'storage' burden will be on the backend/cloud, not the device. That's why slots are not being bothered with now.
would love to see hard disk drives become history. They had a good and long run. It's about time they retire!
Making a positive comment to influence the remainder of the conversation to be less troll ish and more constructive. Yay! It is a nice day today. I heart my gf. I hope everybody wins the memory wars!
We'll have computers where just one chip will have the CPU, RAM and the storage. We'll also have humanoid robots, that will use these chips as their brain.
However, the chips will be volatile. So one day, your robot will be running low on power, trying its best to find a source of electricity. But then it'll run out, and essentially die. However, it will get to be born anew.
And there will be faint traces of who/what it was before its death, left in its brain as echos of a past life.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
When I first read the headline, I thought it was about something else.
Here's an example of the type of products we used back in the day to try to get more RAM without taking out another home mortgage.
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again. ;-)
Slightly more seriously, unless we go through another round of media files getting bigger ... I have no idea of what I would need terabytes of stuff on my phone for.
Having said that, I'm willing to find out.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Good luck actually fitting a kernel with your 'minimum hardware support' into that 1.44 meg floppy anymore. There might still be some legacy x86 platforms that you could, but nowadays a bare kernel seems to be at least 1 meg, and if you even just add in a KMS driver for one video card model it'll probably tip the scales out.
...so little battery power to process it all.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
What we need is associative memory (indexed by key, not address) where you can send a binary query to the blocks of memory and only those satisfying it return a value. This could be as simple as sending a bit mask or as complex as processing a SQL query. But you want this to happen in the memory block itself.
Without that were stuck with serial memory access over a bus whenever we are searching for something. With so much memory I can't imagine a large scale use other than video streams that doesn't boil down to searching it at some point.
As the post I'm replying to noted that with more memory comes more accumulated rubbish. If you are searching it, this is a drag. But with a distributive associative memory search it's all in parallel and saving old stuff doesn't slow it down.
Even if the hardware needed to do associative memory searches in was as large as the memory it backed, at some scale it would be vastly faster than serial searches over a bus.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The iPhone already has slipped from dominance.
The apathy of soccer moms and grannies is a double edged sword here. While they don't care about the finer things, they also don't care about the finer things.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Non-volatile memory cons are like the holographic optical disk cons. In both fields, multiple companies promise world changing miracles, but always the date is some vague tomorrow.
E-squared (electrical erasable) that then became flash, and CD->DVD->Bluray both represent solid, reliable, well proven technologies. Replacing either with alternate approaches is almost infinitely more difficult than you might imagine.
Non-flash, non-volatile memory solutions have existed BEFORE the days of Flash/EE, but they were/are expensive, unreliable, and defy the need to scale their densities every 1.5 years. They may be compared to plasma displays, vs the traditional LCD. Where is plasma now?
To explain better, think about this. Write-once DVDs are notorious for being unreadable a few years later. The discs use dyes to store information, and the dyes are very sensitive to ambient light and heat. If a writeable DVD used a METAL layer, the data would never be lost, so why are dyes used instead (and NO cost isn't the answer, since commercial pressed DVDs always use a foil layer).
The RRAM con is a lot like someone saying they are going to build writeable DVD disks with a metal layer, not a dye layer. If you are an idiot, you will focus on the "metal" bit and think the plan a good idea. If you are NOT an idiot, you will ask yourself why every other company opts for dyes, and guess there are VERY VERY solid engineering reasons for this fact.
Finding a non-volatile material is child's play. Making a prototype chip from this material, when you can control ALL the conditions in the lab, is child's play. AND, if your potential investors are VERY VERY stupid, this con has already gained you a big infusion of cash. Scaling this chip to the density of current flash, with the read/write speeds of current flash, and the safe programming energies of current flash, will be UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE. Just ask the dozens of other non-volatile memory companies that have fallen by the wayside.
The best a company like Crossbar will likely do is produce the world's most expensive ROM chips, with horrendous programming times and memory densities.
PS if you care, go Google "bubble memory" to see how these games pan out.
Anyone have a good meta data analysis program?
Now that I said that, I fell better.
Pie in the skyrmion...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A while ago (sorry couldn't find it) somebody posted a nice chart showing how garbage collection performs poorly in memory constrained environments; but has negligible impact when there is plenty of memory.
Why do these stupid stories creep up time and again? There is nothing revolutionary here. And a start-up demonstrating anything is more of an indication that this will not ever materialize, than the opposite. A look at past "revolutions" show that basically noting materialized, and the few things that did took decades and were far less revolutionary than advertised.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just to be more specific: "May". There is nothing else than vaporware still.
Why is Slashdot constantly reporting news from Gizmag DAYS after it's announced? WTF?
Maybe Apple will finally lower their flash memory prices from what they set in 2010, which was a ripoff then. I doubt it though.
And still, major US carriers will still refuse to offer 64GB or larger smartphones (except perhaps the iPhone due to Apple's clout) while the rest of the world enjoys terabyte smartphones.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Storage is sorted as far as I'm concered, I'm pretty happy with the size of micro-SD cards, HDDs etc.
But backup has a long way to go, I'd love to see some kind of open distributed File system where you offer up say 1tb to get .5tb of peer space where you're data gets encrypted locally before being stored across a fault tolerant distributed file system, with other people using the same software and no middle men, so no NSA snooping etc.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.