Memory Wars May Herald Mobile Devices With Terabytes of Capacity 147
Lucas123 writes "With 3D NAND flash going into high production and one startup demonstrating a resistive NAND (RRAM) flash array, it may not be long before mobile devices have hundreds of gigabytes of capacity, even a terabyte, with performance only limited by the bus. Samsung announced it is now mass producing three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips, and start-up Crossbar said it has created a prototype of its RRAM chip. Both technologies offer many times what current NAND flash chips offer today in capacity and performance. Which technology will prevail is still up in the air, and experts believe it will be years before RRAM can challenge NAND, but it's almost inevitable that RRAM will overtake NAND as even 3D NAND heads for an inevitable dead end. Others believe 3D NAND, currently at 24 layers, could reach more than 100, giving it a lifespan of five or more years."
What would they store? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No need for a terabyte (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah... if you're lucky, and the BIOS can limp on the network enough to grab an IP address and do TFTP, you might even be able to use that floppy to bootstrap the rest of the Linux boot process.
Boot Linux from a floppy in any context meaningfully resembling a general-purpose operating system that can do at least as much as MS/DOS 5? No. Sorry, you can't.
For one thing, every Linux kernel since sometime around 2.6 has used fbdev instead of MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA textmode. I'm pretty sure fbdev ALONE needs more than a meg, especially when you add in the font definitions. So at best, you'd be limited to interacting with a remote serial terminal.
Networking? Forget it. Without tiptoeing into BIOS-land (if not outright UEFI-land), even getting TFTP to work enough to fetch chunks of raw data from the local network to continue booting from would be a major challenge.
Even during the golden era of DOS and hand-crafted assembly language apps, you'd have been spectacularly lucky to get something like a cut-down copy of WordPerfect 4.2 onto a floppy capable of booting DOS. Procomm+ fit onto bootable disks, but even THAT was kind of a battle.
The fact is, if you try to cut Linux down to something that can fully boot and run from a single floppy disc, you're going to be left with something that's basically DOS 6 + DOS4GW capability-wise. And you'll spend so much time trying to build it, you'd almost be better off just using the kernel as an inspirational starting point and writing your own OS from scratch. The harsh truth is, the need for networking and UTF-8 killed sub-megabyte kernels. RIP. You just can't do one, let alone both, and end up with less than 1.5 megs of binary boot data on an x86-architecture PC without relying on BIOS support, and even that's iffy.
Even worse, such an exercise is utterly and completely pointless when you consider that you can buy a brand new 4GB SD card for $5 and get change back, and could probably buy a Ziploc bag full of 256mb SD cards at a hamfest for a buck. Thanks to MMC mode's SPI interface, SD cards are dead easy to read and write (as long as you don't have to implement a filesystem anything ELSE can read or recognize).