LSI talks about future flash and it's problems

Semiaccurate ^ | Nov 27, 2012 | Charlie Demerjian

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

"During AIS, LSI gave an interesting talk about the trends in shrinking flash memory, and the problems it creates."

You may be familiar with some of the problems with flash, the most common one is write endurance. If you think of each flash cell as a tiny capacitor, shrinking it gives you less space to hold electrons, the layers holding in the electrons get thinner, and the space between cells lessens. That means with each write, the degradation, as a percentage, is higher so write lifetimes decrease as well.

LSI says that the flash cells of 2004 held about 1000 electrons, today’s only hold about 100. Worse yet, old SLC flash was usually rated at 100K write cycles, today’s common MLC is around 4K cycles, and the newer TLC flash dies after 500 or so writes. All of these are what you might call a big problem.

You can see the problem

To make matters worse, with increasing density of chips, the number of I/O channels in a device goes down too. The example LSI used was a 128GB SSD, three years ago it took 32 4GB die to make one, now it only takes 8 16GB die. This means that the number of channels that can be simultaneously accessed goes from 32 to 8 as well. While this does mean potentially cheaper controllers, it also means bandwidth craters too, as does the ability to service parallel operations from a long queue of I/O operations. The net result is speed plummets, as do random I/Os.

[Marine_Uncle]

RE: "Where is the inaccuracy?".
Ok so my little bro in his Fine Line Processing group at Bell Labs, obtains one of "those new RAM chips". Opens it for analysis, and finds out all they did was connect four 4K rams together. The world thought IBM was selling a 16k RAM.
Over the years I have taken a cautious view of the many pronouncements of new technological advancements.
If anything for all our sakes. I would hope what LSI has made known proves to be a bit on the pessimistic side.
So many very critical things could be at stake as your well aware.

[Marine_Uncle]

For some reason this sentence did not proceed the first in my #21 post.

"I take such broad statements with caution. Lets go back in time. I can think of when IBM announced a totally new technology to produce the world's first 16k RAM."

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Hey,....we never lied....LOL!

OK sometimes the plants and marketing people got a bit too enthusitic.

BACK to the story....

I think that so many have just been totally enamored with the Flash Technology....totally beyond reason...

It is Fast and very USeful....but it does have some specific problems....

And a smart consumer should want to know the True Facts.

I believe Rotating storage is going to be useful for quite awhile yet.

[Marine_Uncle]

"I believe Rotating storage is going to be useful for quite awhile yet."

And I believe your prophesy is a correct one.