Intel, Micron Boost Flash Memory Speed by Five Times

Lucas123 writes "IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced they've been able to improve NAND memory and its circuitry in order to boost read/write speeds by five times their current ability. The new 8Gbit single-level cell, high-speed NAND chip will offer 200MB/sec read speeds and write speeds of up to 100MB/sec, which means faster data transfer between devices like solid-state drives and video cards. IM Flash Technologies plans to begin shipping the new chip later this year."

Faster posts needed

[Anonymous Coward]

However if you consider all the other places flash is being used. It wil be a big boon. Now all we need is for MRAM to come online.

Re:Faster USB needed

[timeOday]

Yeah, but for solid state hard drives this is quite a leap. I'm starting to think winchester drives are going to be extinct within 5 years.

Re:Video cards?

[blahplusplus]

Even with the bandwidth increases, what you're spouting is nonsense. The local bandwidth of ram is infinitely faster and cheaper then flash, period. Not to mention: It doesn't wear out. Why would you put flash in a video card which does insane amounts of reads and writes per second? You'd have to be an idiot.

Re:Faster USB needed

[Dr. Spork]

They won't be extinct, but they'll be used for storage. If I'm booting my operating system from a spinning disk in 2013, I'll be pretty disappointed with technology!

Some interesting possibilities open up.

[jd]

LinuxBIOS was already down to 3 seconds, and I'll guess that slow flash access times contributed some to that. We could also see the revival of cartridge hard disks, only solid-state. A variant on that would be to have a RAID array where one or more of the disks were replaced with flash devices. In either case, you'd probably improve longevity and definitely improve resilience to things like shock. It wouldn't be cheap, sure, but the people mainly concerned with ruggedized technology (aircraft vendors, the military, war correspondents) are less likely to be concerned by price than by whether it'll survive the environment.

It could significantly increase the usefulness of suspend/resume at the OS level. The limits on writes is a headache, but it would be possible to treat flash devices as additional swap space, making it theoretically possible to have hot-swappable swap devices as per some rather ancient mainframes. (Virtual swap space can be larger than the physical space directly available to a machine.)

Re:What about lifetime?

[eebra82]

Well, consider this: NAND is commonly used in solid state drives. I doubt companies like Dell, Lenovo and Apple would sell computers configured with SSD:s if they sucked it down with only a few cycles. This was a problem in early versions, but things have improved much and will surely improve to a point that makes it practically "unbreakable".

filesystem

[yupa]

This is great, but we realy miss filesystem for such big NAND.
Either we use FTL [1](flash translation layer) to put FAT, but that that's quite ugly (FAT is not aware of flash and not robust to power lost, FTL is optimized for FAT).
Either we put flash filesystem like jffs2 or yaffs2, but they will eat lot's of RAM and take lot's of time on such big flash.

I wonder what are the performance with a filesystem.

PS : there is logfs or ubifs that should be better flash fs, but there are not ready.

[1] BTW FTL is patented.

Re:What about lifetime?

[Shadow-isoHunt]

Yes, but that doesn't stop the trolls and karma whores from bringing up an issue that plauged *first generation* flash devices, in order to appear insightful.