Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory

nofrance writes "As promised earlier this year, Samsung has unveiled the world's first 16-gigabit flash memory chip. These chips, when combined in a 16x16 configurations, will allow 32 GigaByte flash cards. Using 50-nanometer manufacturing technology, these chips will be in production by the second half of 2006, with Samsung promising that their 32Gb team will impress next year." From the article: "According to the company, the cell size of the fingernail-sized flash chip has been reduced about 25 percent from that of the 60 nm 8 Gbit NAND: The new 50 nm flash memory contains cells that measure 0.00625 square microns per bit. The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors, Samsung said. "

Re:Sounds good for cell phones

[tabkey12]

Except that, due to idiotic manufacturers' policies, you will probably only be able to have 100 songs on your 8GB Flash Card, and then not be able to use them as ring tones...

Re:Sounds good for cell phones

[ergo98]

Never has a rush for a quasi-legitimate first post been more transparent. Would this "type of memory" be good for my digital camera? Why yes, it would! How about for USB keys! OMG, it would there too!

Of course the storage size issue really isn't that huge of an issue anymore - I have an inexpensive 1GB flash card in my 8MP digital camera, and I always transfer pictures for other reasons before I do it to clear space. This will eventually put downward pressure on the smaller capacities, but already they're low enough that it isn't a huge issue.

The real question is what new markets will open up as Flash memory super-sizes - will we replace our laptop hard drives anytime soon? Would we want to?

Re:Price...

[aXis100]

Whist the BIG flash may be more expensive, it will put downward pressure on the smaller flash sizes thus reducing prices.

All computer technology has a pricing sweat spot just a few revisions back from the bleeding egde. As big, expensive stuff comes out, that sweet spot moves forward.

Re: Yes & No!

[TheRaven64]

I might be missing something here. 16Gb is 2GB. There are 2GB flash chips already shipping in the iPod Nano. This is the first 2GB flash chip. Either this is very old news, or the important thing is the size of the chip rather than the fact it exists.

Harddisk replacement

[mnmn]

Am I the only one who thought the harddisk could be repaced with this? A minimal windows + office install easily fits 16gb. Ideally with no swap file given enough ram. Additional software may be run off a shared folder.

And if the windows (or linux) installation contains enough drivers, you could have a USB2.0 flash drive with 16 or 32GB space and carry the whole os around.

I know this is easier with knoppix on usb, but I'm thinking big, with the current windows install base. This can do wonders for the corporate maintenance until linux is ready for the desktop.

Re:Call me when

[iggymanz]

people have already used flash memory as system disks, who says you need tmp files, logfiles that are frequently written, or a web cache? All those things can be eliminated by configuration for Unix-like OS. I can put tmp files on a ram disk, I don't *need* to have a web cache on disk (or anywhere else), and I can choose what gets logged.

Re:Call me when

[TheRaven64]

Having a couple of GB of battery-backed DRAM as a write cache would help extend the life of flash - store log files there and only write the changes once a day or so. As to speed, I think you are underestimating flash. Most time-critical reads from my hard disk are very small segments (usually 4KB), and seek time on a hard disk really sucks compared with solid state storage.

Re:Sounds good for cell phones

[Transmogrify_UK]

Am I right in thinking that flash memory has only a finite number of write cycles? I don't know how many these are on average - I've heard as low as 500,000 - but I get the impression a flash drive being used as a hard drive, under normal use, will have a very limited lifespan.