Posted on 04/29/2007 7:03:24 AM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
SEOUL, April 29 (Yonhap) -- Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of computer memory chips, said Sunday it has begun mass producing 16-gigabit NAND flash memory chips using an ultra-dense 51-nanometer technology for the first time in the world.The full-scale production came after Samsung begun producing 8-gigabit NAND flash memory chips using 60-nanometer technology in August 2006, memory chips that have half the memory size and slower read and write speed than 16-gigabit ones.
NAND flash memory refers to the chips used mostly in digital cameras, USB flash drives, cell phones and music players such as Apple's iPod. Fewer nanometers mean more semiconductors can be produced from each wafer.
The new NAND memory chips produced can store up to 32 hours of DVD-quality movie files, 200 years of daily newspapers or 8,000 digital music files, the tech giant said.
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(Excerpt) Read more at english.yna.co.kr ...
Why’d they use the term 16 gigabit? Is 16 gigabit something other than 2 gigabyte?
I remember selling my used 20 Meg hard disk for $50 and the person was excited to get it. Now, 15 years later, basically 1000 times the density in 1/1000th the space for the same price!
I think the way to think about it is is that when you buy a storage device, it is actually composed of maybe 9 such chips (maybe 8 for data and one for parity). Or perhaps 17 (16 for data and 1 for parity). So while the *chips* are quantified in Gigabits, the *devices* on which they sit are quantified in Gigabytes. Just the way the industry does things. I wouldn’t be surprised if 16 Gigabit chips paves the way for 16 Gigabyte devices. And that’s a lot of storage.
It's the same amount of memory, assuming 8 bits per byte.
I think the bits could be used in other word sizes too, so gigabits may be the standard way to specify this part.
September 11, 2006: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, today announced that it has developed the industry’s first 40-nanometer (nm) memory device. The new 32 Gigabit (Gb) NAND flash device is the first memory to incorporate a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) architecture, a revolutionary new approach to further increase manufacturing efficiency while greatly improving performance.
The 32Gb NAND flash memory can be used in memory cards with densities of up to 64-Gigabytes (GBs).
THe article seems to be about one or two year old technology.
Appreciated.
Definitely! I wonder when computer manufacturers are going to start using these instead of disks. They should be far more reliable, but I wonder if they would be fast enough for multitasking. Would they perform well if a user is moving around lots of files while playing a DVD? This technology has lots of potential. I can't wait until flash memory can be used in servers and can replace disk arrays.
I think it’s not an either/or think i.e flash memory or hard disks. I think you’ll see (and are seeing) laptops with both, whereby the flash functions as a cacheing device. Such laptops would power-on instantly or nearly so (how cool is that?) but as you start launching programs and doing work programs and data would start to be fetched from the HD as before. Very much like how fast L1 and L2 cache can conceal the relative slowness of main memory. You keep stuff that’s most needed in the fast devices and you fetch the other stuff from the slower devices in the background.
McFly predicted this /obscure
It's the main reason soda companies went to 2 liter bottles. Consumers think they are getting much more product then if the bottle said half a gallon (which it essentially is).
Vista does something similar using flash drives, but when I used it, I was unable to see any significant improvement in performance.
iPhone
Given that Apple’s iPod nano and Shuffle models use flash memory with a large fraction of it coming from Samsung, I can guess that these chips will show up on the next-generation successor to the iPod nano.
Thats because for any noticeable difference you have to have twice the amount of readyboost capable flash than you do RAM. SAy you have 2 GB of RAM you should have 4 GB of flash, when you have that mount you will really notice a difference on boot up and loading of large programs.
As opposed to the unfair offshore producers on the moon.
Can't trust those people paying starvation wages...
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