Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory 290
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. "
Thumb drive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
whatever happened to regular RAM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard drive industry vs Flash card industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anyone thought about why hard drive development is so focused at increasing disk space by using similar technology and nothing beyond that? I mean, come on, this tech has been around for ages and you'd kind of want a solid replacement (read: no moving parts, nanosecond operation times).
Who knows what we'll see next in terms of hard drives AND WHEN?
Re:Call me when (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some fascinating megnetic storage technologies in the works that might provide easily preserved live OS's that don't need that lengthy "bootstrap" procedure on every boot, but none have yet hit the commercial market.
more seriously however (Score:3, Interesting)
With a 4gb microdrive I get 540 images (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming I win the lotto and/or can reinvest some of the wedding profit towards a camera instead of my leaking roof, I would move up to a 1Ds, selling for 3K, which writes out 11mb RAW files.
That means a 32gb CF card would store: 2400 images
Your typical wedding/reception lasts 7 hours. Add a couple of the bridesmaids getting dressed (You do NOT want to miss that, HAHAHA) and you're at a 10 hour day.
That means you're taking a frame about every 15 seconds, were you to fill that up.
Cost of film? Let's say you're shooting 35MM instead of medium format (arguably a 1DS is a little less in terms of quality than a Hassy at 16x20, but the customer would probably never see it) then thats 67 rolls of film. A propack of 400NC from BH Photo is 28.45 for 5 rolls, which translates 14 packs at a cost of 400$.
Plus processing, tack on about 10$ per roll and you're at $1000 worth of money.
Where am I going?
No one shoots 3K worth of photos. It's insane. It's insane by even MY standards. But on a trip it's definately worth it to have... and I'm not even adressing the transfer rate issues (my firewire transfer from CF is the fastest in the market at 7MB/sec that would take about 1.25hrs to transfer)
This is an incredible leap forward but the biggest advantage will be the price pressuer on lower sized cards.
After all, drop one of these babies and you're out a pretty penny.
Poor man's solid state hard drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking 4x USB2 card readers (these are down to like $10 on eBay) each containing 8GB compactflash in a RAID-0 configuration = 32GB solid state storage that might not incur too bad a performance penalty.
With something like a 32GB compactflash, you could potentially create a 120GB RAID-0 with them.
Do CF cards have the reliability factor to act as primary storage? How about USB2 as the interface? I don't know enough about either set of specs to make a judgment.
Flash is unusable for a hard drive. (Score:3, Interesting)
It also has a finite number of writes that can be done before it quits working.
If you want your system to run faster, look at the gigabit ramdisk PCI cards that are coming out this month (?). Get four of those, a raid card, and hook them up together. Contents are kept even when the computer is switched off.
Re: Yes & No! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:With a 4gb microdrive I get 540 images (Score:5, Interesting)
But no one would ever shoot that sort of number of shots if they were shooting film - it's crazy. Digital cameras have created shot inflation in the wedding market. Folk advertise 300, 400 or 500 pictures in their wedding packages and the customers who don't know think that more is better.
It's not as if weddings days are fast moving affairs. So you're right, where this will shine is on things like overseas trips, safaris, and maybe even for photo journalists who might not know when they'll next be able to dump the files on their camera to a decent backup medium.
where is the Samsung SDD, then?? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23425 [theinquirer.net]
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Samsung-is-betting
reporting that Samsung would be having a 16GB flash hard disk (SDD) available around August 2005. Has anyone seen those? I know for a very good reason that I would be insterested in installing one of those in my Powerbook: the joy of silence.
Re:whatever happened to regular RAM? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I look at local computer parts prices, DRAM has been stuck at the $100 / GB range for three years now. Flash passed its price point earlier this year and is not looking back. I used to marvel at how RAM prices used to drop. (Flash is slower and can only be written a limited number (1E5) of times.)
Demand. There just simply isn't the demand for that much RAM. It used to be that you could always use more, because new operating systems required it, and new games needed it, etc. But now, with Longhorn/Vista still en route, and given that Tiger's requirements are not much more than Panther's or even Jaguar's, the OSs aren't driving people to get that much more RAM. And games are becoming less and less of an issue on computers as consoles grab bigger pieces of the marketshare.
In short, without the demand driving the competition, there simply isn't the incentive to drop prices that much. Flash, on the other hand, let's you work toward solid-state hard drives, bigger memory cards and MP3 players and so forth. So the demand still exists in that sector.
New Orleans explanation (Score:0, Interesting)
SPEAKING TRUTH TO HYSTERIA
The rains from Katrina's aftermath had barely begun to taper off before the utterly predictable, knee-jerk, blame-Bush for everything hysteria began to rage. The attacks are loud, strident and given top billing by the media, who have shamelessly and blatantly added their own negative, anti-Bush spin without investigating the facts or questioning the political motives of the critics.. It seems, those of us who look to the actual facts before we draw our own conclusions are forced to endure a hurricane of rhetoric, speculation, and just plain nonsense. So don your waders, as there are some actual facts amidst all the debris. Let's start with the tin-foil hat stuff.
THE THEORIES OF THE LUNATIC FRINGE: THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MEDIA.
CLAIM: Global warming is Bush's fault and global warming caused Katrina.
First, of course, hurricanes in the US have not in fact been increasing in number or intensity since the supposed onslaught of global warming. As this schedule from the national weather service ( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml [noaa.gov]) shows, both the number and intensity have actually decreased in recent decades, and were generally much more severe in the first half of the century.
More to this point, however, let's accept the global warming alarmists on their own terms, and assume global warming caused Katrina without inquiring too closely into what caused all those other hurricanes. Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, and the day after his inauguration managed to get the US Senate (who had rejected the Kyoto Protocol
95-0 during the Clinton administration) to ratify and then fully implement its provisions in the US immediately, and had every other major country in the world also done so, the projected decrease in global warming after 20 years was projected, by its own proponents, to be only 0.7 degrees centigrade. In the first few years, that is, by now, even if it had been implemented in 2000, the supposed decrease would be essentially zero. So there is simply no conceivable scenario in which Bush's policies could possibly have had an impact on hurricanes. These claims, retailed widely in major US newspapers and by German and other European politicians, are nothing but despicable political posturing.
CLAIM: The Iraq war has dangerously depleted our National Guard Resources,and that's why help took so long to arrive.
Facts can be your friend. There are roughly
1,000,000 army personnel in the US, including active duty, National Guard and reserves. A bit over 100,000 or 10% are in Iraq (the rest of the forces over there are from the other branches of service). The Pentagon has agreed with the states that it will not mobilize more than 50% of the National Guard from any state, and only about a third of Louisiana's National Guard is on active duty. The National Guard units that have been mobilized for active duty in Iraq are for the most part heavily armored combat units, not the more lightly armed military police and search and rescue units that are the primary source for domestic disaster support.
You might never know this if you watched network news, but the Commander-in-Chief of each state's National Guard is the governor of the state, not the President, unless and until the National Guard units are called by the Department of Defense to active duty. It is also worth noting that it is against federal law, the long-standing Posse Comitatus law, for active duty troops to be used for law enforcement-the only National Guard troops that can be used this way are those commanded by state governors. There has been some talk since 9/11 of repealing or amending the Posse Comitatus law, but the changes were strongly opposed by groups from both the left and right.
Would it also be crass to point out the undeniable fact that by Sunday, September
Re:16x16 configs (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, the real news is the 50nm process, not the capacity.
Re:Call me when (Score:2, Interesting)
the poor man can't afford this... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're talking about $2000 minimum just to get off the ground here. How does the poor man afford this?
I can't imagine how the write performance would do anything but stink. In theory enough flash in parallel should have decent write performance, but I doubt this setup will manage to extract it.
So, demand lowers prices? (Score:2, Interesting)
What are you talking about? Increased demand raises prices, decreased demand lowers prices. Likewise, weak demand in a market causes an increase in competition with its attendant reduction in prices. (Think about airfares after the 9/11 attacks: no demand = rock bottom prices.)
Prices are high due to a lack of excess supply.
A much better answer to the OP's question is that DRAM has reached an equilibrium point where the suppliers are able to charge a price low enough to discourage new entrants, beyond which they have no incentive to lower prices. Once (marginal cost = marginal revenue) you stop looking for increased volume through lower prices because your profit is already maximized. Lowering your price further just decreases your profits.
Make no mistake about it, if demand increased tomorrow for DRAM, prices would rise. If that demand stayed steady, the prices would stay high. They would come down if the demand collapsed because new entrants would be trying to recoup the fixed costs they had incurred to enter the market. That's not a function of a healthy market though, that's a function of poor demand forecasting.
Saying that prices are too high because there's no demand for the product (assuming the production is into efficient economies of scale, which DRAM production is) is like saying all of those people in Africa starved to death because they weren't hungry enough to eat.
Re:Thumb drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
But yes, the distinction of "flash" memory is that it is non-volitile, meaning it requires no power to keep the data once written, so it's exactly what is used for these kind of memory sticks/keydrives.
Re: Yes & No! (Score:3, Interesting)