Intel, Micron Boost Flash Memory Speed by Five Times 67
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."
That's fast (Score:2, Interesting)
AVAILABILITY? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about lifetime? (Score:3, Interesting)
As usual - the lifetime of a product also requires the consumers to buy a new hot version.
Re:Wonder when... (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD divested of their memory business years ago. You should look more often.
Re:Faster USB needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about lifetime? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really.
There's still cycle time limits. The main issue came from NOR flash, which is different from NAND. NOR flash came first (mid-80s), and the very early versions suffered from poor lifetimes (~10,000 write-erase cycles). (However, they're perfect for firmware, which is their initial purpose - even during development, it's rare to wear it out). Modern NOR flash has a cycle life of around 100,000 cycles.
In the early 90s, NAND flash came out, and due to their exploitation of quantum mechanics (NOR flash uses tunnelling and hot-electon injection (literally forcing electrons through the insulator). NAND flash uses tunnelling exclusively) resulted in a significant improvement in life - normally 1,000,000 cycles.
Add in wear levelling, and things get interesting. Assuming a perfect wear-levelling algorithm, and maybe a large-block NAND chip (128kB block size), a 128MB chip (tiny these days) has 1,024 blocks. To wear it out, requires over a billion write-erase cycles! A GB chip would have 8192 blocks, thus over 8 billion write-erase cycles. And you want 32GB/64GB SSDs? It's gotten to the point where an SSD in normal use will probably outlast a mechanical disk.
Oh, and most flash chips, these cycle times are very conservative - most will survive another order of magnitude of erase-write cycles before becoming unusuable.