Samsung Unveils 64-Gbit Flash Memory Chip

Lucas123 writes "The chips can be combined to create a 128-GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files. The chip was created using 30-nanometer processing technology that was developed with Samsung's self-aligned double patterning technology. Manufacturing will start in 2009; but the article quotes a Gartner analyst who reminds us, 'Samsung has had a difficult time adhering to its timelines for mass production due to the complexity of MLC architectures and ever shrinking process geometries.'"

64Gb = 8GB = incremental improvement

[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

I don't know if I want storage that can't be addressed in 4 bytes.

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[MyLongNickName (822545)]

Yup. This is why I prefer my bytes to be 16 bits long. My memory addressing is much more efficient this way.

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[Dunbal (464142)]

20 bits for the win! Anyone remember THAT? lol

Who uses 32-bits anymore (or will in 2009)

[Actually, I do RTFA (1058596)]

At least on their main machine... My work computer, home computer, and laptop are all 64-bit already. And by 2009, so will everyone elses'

Pocket PC 64? Nintendo DS 64?

[tepples (727027)]

My work computer, home computer, and laptop are all 64-bit already. And by 2009, so will everyone elses'

Including PDAs and handheld video gaming systems?

Combine

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

So you can combine 16 of these to get 128GB. Can you combine 32 to get 256GB? And what if you combine 128 of them for 1TB!? The possibilities are endless.

Re:Combine

[jimstapleton (999106)]

no, no, it's not like that. Flash memory chips are like uranium/plutonium/etc - once a chunk reaches a certain mass (depending on purity), they have a habit of exploding.

See, if you combine 16 of them, you'll probably just lose your computer, and be otherwise ok. However at 256, the room your computer is in will probably be a lost cause. At 128? Good by city.

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[William Robinson (875390)]

See, if you combine 16 of them, you'll probably just lose your computer, and be otherwise ok. However at 256, the room your computer is in will probably be a lost cause. At 128? Good by city.

What's the point in blowing up just a room, when I could blow up entire city with half the number of chips.:-P

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[MindKata (957167)]

What's the point in blowing up just a room, when I could blow up entire city with half the number of chips.:-P

256 is a more stable computer number than 128

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[jimstapleton (999106)]

Typo. Meant 32.

Whatever you do, DONT COMBINE 256 CHIPS. The world sucks, but I like it anyway.

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[dgatwood (11270)]

Danger, Will Robinson. You have just been added to the terror watch list [slashdot.org]. So now it's 755,001.

Analogies

[mrbluze (1034940)]

I collect baseball fields. Currently I can fit 0.0000000012 baseball fields on a flash drive, how many can I fit onto one of these?

I used to collect Libraries of Congress, but after the first one I couldn't find any others.

Great math, author.

[by Anonymous Coward]

"128-GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies"

Those must be some pretty small DVDs.

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[Ledsock (926049)]

It's Mbits, not Mbytes. Therefore, 128/8*1024/1400~11.7

Also, they specified DVD movies. Rips from DVDs are usually called AVIs, DivX, XviD, or whatever. If you compress a standard 2 layer DVD down to a little less than a single layer, then you might be able to get 4 crammed in that space, but there'd be some heavy compression.

God bless the summaries...

[doyoulikeworms (1094003)]

...that provide storage sizes in units easy to relate with, namely pirated media.

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[T-Bone-T (1048702)]

I have no idea how they got 80 movies from 128GB. DVD ISOs tend to be 7-10GB and divx rips tend to be 700MB in which case you get either 10-15 movies or over 160 movies.

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[J0nne (924579)]

I have no idea how they got 80 movies from 128GB. DVD ISOs tend to be 7-10GB and divx rips tend to be 700MB in which case you get either 10-15 movies or over 160 movies.

Most recent DVD rips are of the 2CD variety, so 1,4 GB total per movie (which gives us about 85 movies). You can see they know exactly what people use them for ;).

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[CompSci101 (706779)]

Hey, I'm an American, and I can't think in these fancy units. I have no idea how you'd represent this in Football Fields.

How many Car Analogies is that, and how many ripped DVDs equal a Football Field?

Have we no standards anymore?

C

Storage size limit?

[DoofusOfDeath (636671)]

"The chips can be combined to create a 128-GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files.

Am I missing something about that statement, or is it really as stupid as it sounds?

With some time, I could create a 128-*Peta*byte storage device with those chips. In the worst case scenario, you build a device out of multiple 128-GB flash devices.

Re:Storage size limit?

[Drizzt Do'Urden (226671)]

I'd prefer 128 YodaBytes, and let the force hold my data!

Re:Storage size limit?

[jollyreaper (513215)]

I'd prefer 128 YodaBytes, and let the force hold my data!

Yeah, but then Lucas will come along every few years and make changes to your data to bring it more in line with his original vision.

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[rossdee (243626)]

I'm waiting for a 256 Zigabyte drive (Ziga is the binary equivalent of a zillion)

Re:Storage size limit?

[somersault (912633)]

Surely nobody needs that many porno movies one one drive?

Oblig. Porn Comment

[R2.0 (532027)]

So if I can hold all my porn in one hand, and work the keyboard with the other...

How's this supposed to work, again?

This Is Great, But...

[MrCrassic (994046)]

Has Samsung improved on the inherently bad Flash write speeds? If not, then I don't really see too much of a point for anything other than desktops (where much more revenue could be made for server or workstation-based uses).

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[networkBoy (774728)]

You're thinking of NOR devices.
NAND organized flash has good write speeds but poor read speeds and NOR is the other way round.
The controller has a lot to do with overall performance as well.

Finally, Hynix has demonstrated a 22 die stack, but not in HVM. Samsung could *possibly* do a 16 die stack, but I'm betting on two packages, each with 8 die when this comes out.
-nB

Why?

[darthflo (1095225)]

This flash based player thingie Samsung's building will extremely probably be way more expensive than it'd be using a 1.8" hard drive. OTOH they can shape it more freely (why would they? Hard drives are shaped quite like widescreen displays. Perfect for portable media players) and probably shave off a few millimeters in thickness while providing the same battery runtime.
While this might turn out to be something awesome, I can't really imagine to be willing to pay double (or more?) just to have a 10-15% sli

Say Goodbye to Microdrives

[wolff000 (447340)]

I never liked the micro drives for portable devices. I move around a lot and the micro drives tend to die on me. Where as the flash players I have had last well forever so far. The only one that died was one I dropped from 300 feet up while rock climbing.

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[Firethorn (177587)]

The only one that died was one I dropped from 300 feet up while rock climbing.

I'm surprised you found it at all.

I wonder if the only reason you couldn't access it was because the interface was damaged - IE you fix the USB port and it'd work again.

Stuff as small as thumb drives tend to have a pretty low terminal velocity - 20 ft and 300 ft end up being pretty much the same.

What about the limited number of rewrites?

[ke_da_wei (1154533)]

Until they make it possible to rewrite as many times as you can on a traditional hard drive, why would you need one so big?

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[pla (258480)]

Until they make it possible to rewrite as many times as you can on a traditional hard drive, why would you need one so big?

Decent wear-levelling algorithms accomplished that at the interface level almost 20 years ago. On top of that, modern flash usually has some degree of on-chip healing capability (remapping failed blocks from a small pool of reserved good ones).

Virtually all of the traditional objections to flash no longer apply. They last longer than HDDs, they can read/write faster (at a bulk le

Re:

[Torne (78524)]

remapping failed blocks from a small pool of reserved good ones
Is that before or after you save data to that block?!

During. Flash blocks fail while you are writing to them (or more specifically, when you are reading back the data to verify the write), so you have the data you wanted to write right there to save to another block. Flash blocks, under normal circumstances, don't go bad when they are just storing data or having it read out.

Now for the serious part of the discussion: How does flash determine wh

Bad math

[damn_registrars (1103043)]

Am I the only person tired of seeing storage listed in terms of "songs"? Come on,

32,000 MP3 music files

Really, that number doesn't mean squat. I have a friend who love punk music, where the songs are on average about 45 seconds long. I have another friend who listens to classical music, where many songs are 5 minutes or more. How could you possibly equate those two?

Wouldn't it just make a lot more sense to say it could hold X hours of music, instead?

Re:Bad math

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

How much does that work out to in Libraries of Congress?

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[wwahammy (765566)]

That was the very first thing I thought of when I read the summary

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[hackstraw (262471)]

Wouldn't it just make a lot more sense to say it could hold X hours of music, instead?

How many hours of music are in the library of congress?

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[tomknight (190939)]

I'd want to be told how many reams of sheet music. Reams? No, make that furlongs of score.

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[xigxag (167441)]

Seems to me they provide the mp3's as a BOTE [gaarde.org] estimate, an order of magnitude for point of reference, nothing more. If anybody wants to calculate it into hours (which is meaningless without a corresponding bitrate), then they've got the actual storage space, 128GB, and can do the math themselves.

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[jollyreaper (513215)]

Really, that number doesn't mean squat. I have a friend who love punk music, where the songs are on average about 45 seconds long. I have another friend who listens to classical music, where many songs are 5 minutes or more. How could you possibly equate those two?

By ignoring them completely. The standard length for pop songs is three minutes. Anything above or below that is discarded as sample bias.

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[raulzero (529788)]

No, you're not the only one. I, for one, will not be buying a bag of these "chips" until they can hold data other than just music and video.

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[tomstdenis (446163)]

Yeah except that 128Gbit is 16Gbyte.

Tom

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[doombringerltx (1109389)]

Even listing "2133 hours and 20 minutes of music" is going to need a footnote of thats its of mp3s encoded at a bit rate of 128kbps. I listen to punk and hardcore and 128 kbps is more than enough for most of my stuff, but I know some people who listen to real music and will complain to no end if its less than 256 kbps.

Nobody else pointing this out?

[tomstdenis (446163)]

64Gbit is only 8Gbyte which is still fairly big, but not enough to store 40 DVD movies (hell it could hardly hold two).

Me thinks whomever wrote the summary was a bit off to lunch that day.

Tom

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[tomstdenis (446163)]

That's the stupidest rant I've read all day. It's only cool to hate on MSFT if you're old enough to remember using DOS. If your entry to computers was Windows 98 you might as well shut up since you don't know what you're missing anyways.

That said, not an MSFT fan in the slightest, but if you're going to rant against them at least make sense and stop pulling rancid poser comments out of your ass.

Will they be arrested for conspiracy to commit...

[Simonetta (207550)]

Will they be arrested for conspiracy to commit piracy? Let's see 30,000 MP3 songs at $250,000 each time 1,000,000 chips. A lot of zeros means a lot of money! Everyone knows that if you sell a memory device that can hold 20000 MP3 songs that all but a handful will be 'pirated', that is to say copied without permission of their so-called owners. No one except loud-mouth fuckhead billionaire Steven Jobs is actually paying $30000 for 30,000 iTune songs. So if you make a device that facilitates file copying, aren't you guilty of conspiracy to commit intellectual property fraud?

    And don't tell me that there are alternative legal uses for hard drives and memory chips. After all, isn't the scope of the intellectual property crisis dire enough to overrule such petty and superficial uses of these devices? Isn't that what the entertainment industry is telling us? Aren't they the most important 'industry' in the USA and the world?

  In my town any teenager can have his life ruined by being arrested for having a little piece of blank paper in his pocket. The pigs (excuse me, I meant to say 'the Republicans') here call it 'conspiracy to possess marijuana paraphernalia', and it means just a cigarette rolling paper. And it's a serious crime with serious time.

  But every consumer electronics store in the city sells drives and media that are specifically used to commit so-called 'intellectual property theft'. Listening to music, having a little scrap of paper in your pocket, even suggesting that this is all nothing but corrupt,racist, selective law enforcement, it's enough to get you arrested and thrown into the vast American rape-torture gulag.

  But if the MPAA/RIAA is so smart and so bad, then why aren't they actually going up face-to-face, lawyer-to-lawyer against the manufacturers that make the hard drives and memory chips? Sure they'll go after single mothers making $8/hr and win $250,000 with their $300,000/yr lawyers and hand-written laws. But will they go after the Fry's, Walmarts, and BestBuys for selling the drives, PCs, and modems that make it possible for ordinary people to 'steal' their 'intellectual property'? Why not? They have the money, they have the lawyers, they have the testicles! So where's the beef?

  If they won't do this, then the entire music and entertainment global industry (it's what now, four giant companies?) should be taken over by the government as a RICO enterprise. We should make them do it. After all, it's us that are the most embarrassed by this corrupt extortion. Why aren't we doing anything about these assholes? Of course, they will self-destruct on their own, but they will do a lot of damage on the way down. We should put our collective heads together and deliver a coup-de-grace to these pathetic losers. Consider it a mercy killing. Which is legal here, but carrying a little piece of rice paper is not.

30nm?

[keithjr (1091829)]

I don't like how the article doesn't state any projected costs. 30nm is on the bleeding edge of process sizes and I'd be surprised if they don't take pretty severe hit to their chip yield as a result. We'll see.

What cost ?

[Alain Williams (2972)]

and how long does such storage last before bits go bad ?

Don't ask "but how many writes before it fails?"

[by Anonymous Coward]

Every single fucking time a flash memory article is posted some bunch of fucktards asks the same damn bunch of asshat questions or makes the same stupid "observation".

The claim is that flash memory will somehow wear out too quickly to be useful; or "only lasts a few thousand writes" or some other stupid ass comment.

Please please please - look up older articles and read the comments or just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling [wikipedia.org] and shut up. Flash memory and its controllers have improved to the point where it's reasonable to expect an SSD to last longer than a typical PC or laptop's useful life.

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[djupedal (584558)]

And we all know that anonymous cowards, with their anecdotal remarks, are always way right on.

Samsung hasn't enjoyed worldwide success & growth [samsung.com] since 1970 by being 'off'. As well, it is more important to focus on who will buy what Samsung produces...in this case, Apple.

Your agenda? ...blather would be my guess.

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[pthor1231 (885423)]

No, it doesn't. I'm willing to bet there aren't even 4 flash chips in the ipod. It would take 10 of these chips just to equal your ipod.