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."

Comments

Gimme Memory Doubler!

[NeoStrider69]

Fire it up Jonny

Re:Gimme Memory Doubler!

[BaronAaron]

I'm pretty sure the OP was a reference to Johnny Mnemonic and not Go Bots ....

No need for a terabyte

[Anonymous Coward]

640 GB should be enough for anybody.

Re:No need for a terabyte

[Miamicanes]

Yeah... if you're lucky, and the BIOS can limp on the network enough to grab an IP address and do TFTP, you might even be able to use that floppy to bootstrap the rest of the Linux boot process.

Boot Linux from a floppy in any context meaningfully resembling a general-purpose operating system that can do at least as much as MS/DOS 5? No. Sorry, you can't.

For one thing, every Linux kernel since sometime around 2.6 has used fbdev instead of MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA textmode. I'm pretty sure fbdev ALONE needs more than a meg, especially when you add in the font definitions. So at best, you'd be limited to interacting with a remote serial terminal.

Networking? Forget it. Without tiptoeing into BIOS-land (if not outright UEFI-land), even getting TFTP to work enough to fetch chunks of raw data from the local network to continue booting from would be a major challenge.

Even during the golden era of DOS and hand-crafted assembly language apps, you'd have been spectacularly lucky to get something like a cut-down copy of WordPerfect 4.2 onto a floppy capable of booting DOS. Procomm+ fit onto bootable disks, but even THAT was kind of a battle.

The fact is, if you try to cut Linux down to something that can fully boot and run from a single floppy disc, you're going to be left with something that's basically DOS 6 + DOS4GW capability-wise. And you'll spend so much time trying to build it, you'd almost be better off just using the kernel as an inspirational starting point and writing your own OS from scratch. The harsh truth is, the need for networking and UTF-8 killed sub-megabyte kernels. RIP. You just can't do one, let alone both, and end up with less than 1.5 megs of binary boot data on an x86-architecture PC without relying on BIOS support, and even that's iffy.

Even worse, such an exercise is utterly and completely pointless when you consider that you can buy a brand new 4GB SD card for $5 and get change back, and could probably buy a Ziploc bag full of 256mb SD cards at a hamfest for a buck. Thanks to MMC mode's SPI interface, SD cards are dead easy to read and write (as long as you don't have to implement a filesystem anything ELSE can read or recognize).

Re:No need for a terabyte

[msobkow]

More to the point: When have you last seen a new machine with a floppy drive?

When was the last time you saw floppies for sale at a shop?

When was the last time you dusted off a floppy you own and inserted it in your machine?

I have a floppy drive. I installed it so I could do BIOS updates 10 years ago. It's never seen a disk.

Re:No need for a terabyte

[Lumpy]

660 Exabytes wont even hold my midget porn collection.

Re:No need for a terabyte

[dfghjk]

Considering that you can network boot without a floppy at all, I'd say you *could* boot linux off a floppy and have an entire floppy's free space left over. You are clearly wrong on this.

Furthermore, the way you talk about struggling to get DOS-level function you seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that DOS would boot on a low density diskette and leave the bulk of that diskette free. Adding a network stack was no probleml. A megabyte is a lot of code.

In the old days I had Unix distributions that booted a fully functional kernel on a single floppy. That's how the installs got done. With multi-stage boot that problem got easier, not harder.

The reason it wouldn't happen is because there's no motivation to do it, not because it's impossible. No one cares about hopelessly obsolete media.

Re:No need for a terabyte

[Miamicanes]

I remember it quite well, thank you. Wordperfect 4.2 would mostly fit in its entirety on a bootable DOS disk, but WordPerfect 5.1 required some major manual surgery to shoehorn it onto a bootable DOS disk. Procomm+ itself easily fit on a bootable DOS disk, but it didn't take more than a few downloaded files to fill the disk. I also remember feeling dirty and scandalized after buying the first version of WordPerfect for Windows, and realizing that it had more floppy disks in the box than WINDOWS 95 did. And then, there was the day the UPS guy showed up with the small shipping crate from Borland containing the full edition of Borland C++. The box of disks ALONE had to have weighed at LEAST 30-40 pounds. And I still have nightmares about the one time in my life I was unfortunate enough at my first job after college to have to install Netware from scratch, and spent literally an entire day just feeding the installer disk after disk after disk.

Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[intermodal]

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.

Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[BradleyUffner]

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.

I still want an SD card so I can get data on and off my phone when it won't fully boot.

Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[intermodal]

Agreed, but not only on FAT. There's still no excuse for that being our only option.

Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[serviscope_minor]

I still want an SD card so I can get data on and off my phone when it won't fully boot.

Well, Android phones run Linux, so unless they've intentionally crappidied it (which they do a lot) it should be able to use any FS which Linux supports.

To share a piece of wisdom that I got from slashdot, try formatting it in UDF. Every major OS can read and write it and even old ones like XP can read it without extra drivers.

Dunno if the Android devs decided to delete it for no good reason like so many other things.

Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[jedidiah]

NTFS support on Linux is just fine. You need to update your FUD playbook.

Got an NTFS USB hard drive from the warehouse store. Plugged it into the Linux boxes and it "just worked". Would reformat it if not for the lameness of Windows but it's all good anyways.

It's Macs that don't have NTFS support.

Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet

[SuricouRaven]

Macs have NTFS read support, but not write.

MS and Apple alike are unwilling to support any filesystem they don't have a patent on, unless it's so common they have no choice. That is why we are stuck with FAT and its variations. MS have given their support to ExFAT - but as it's a propritary format and MS holds patents on it anyway, linux can't read it. Which is probably MS's intention.

Re:What would they store?

[donut1005]

I need more. Between videos, pictures, music and podcasts I am regularly looking for things to offload to my computer. Never assume enough is enough.

Re:What would they store?

[somersault]

You forgot offline music. Until network coverage is perfect, and data is almost free, offline playlists are one of the most basic things you need on a mobile device..

Memory availability breeds memory use

[ackthpt]

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

Re: What would they store?

[Stashiv]

I don't think you've done much video recording on a smartphone lately

Re:What would they store?

[Suki I]

Mega dittos! More RAM is never enough.

I for one...

[Alejux]

would love to see hard disk drives become history. They had a good and long run. It's about time they retire!

Re:What would they store?

[afidel]

LULZ, I've got a 32GB with 4GB free, my music collection alone almost fills it, not to mention photos, video, and podcasts. At the rate I've been buying music my collection will fill the 32GB card by the end of the year (gotta love $5 albums from Amazon).

Re:Because data center...

[afidel]

Hahahaha, yeah right, when cellphone plans cap at 1,2.5, or 5GB streaming everything is kinda stupid.

Re:What would they store?

[serviscope_minor]

It would be one thing if Netflix and other streaming sites allowed offline viewing

That's OK. I gather there's a Swedish video rental site which provides an excellent service. Great download speeds, especially for popular stuff, available in a variety of formats. They also have this excellent feature that allows you to view off line, copy to any device of your choice and even transcode the format and resolution if you have the right tools installed of which there is a wide variety of Free, free and commercial ones for either your phone or PC.

You should try it.

It's very easy to use, except that whenever I try to put my credit card in, it always takes me to a site where impossibly proportioned women want to date my testicles. I guess they still have a few wrinkles to work out but otherwise the UI is excellent.

associative memory

[goombah99]

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.

Re:What would they store?

[jedidiah]

16GB doesn't even cover a metric ton of any of those things, never mind all of those things.

You know what offers offline viewing? Those obsolete bits of spinning plastic that everyone likes to disparage so much.

Mobile devices have very restrictive bandwidth limits. Your monthly quota might not even cover a single movie.

Sometimes I wonder if the shills actually use any of the products or services they like to whine about.

Re:What would they store?

[war4peace]

Yes, because you are looking at ALL your EVERY family weddings, christmases and whatnot ALL THE TIME.