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."
Gimme Memory Doubler! (Score:4, Funny)
Positive comment! (Score:1)
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I'm pretty sure the OP was a reference to Johnny Mnemonic [imdb.com] and not Go Bots ....
No need for a terabyte (Score:5, Funny)
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640 GB should be enough for anybody.
650 TB should be enough for anybody.
looka my lolcats in 3D video
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660 Exabytes wont even hold my midget porn collection.
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Thats nice cos right now Samsung refuses to sell any galaxy S4's with more than 16GB in Europe from what I can see. The cynic in me thinks this is because if they can sell you a phone with less memory then you will be looking to upgrade it sooner. My Galaxy S2 also has 16GB - and I've run out of app space on that so as soon as I upgrade I'll be close to running out of app space on a new S4 too.
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But I've added a 32gb SD card to mine. Pictures go there automatically & downloads play from there fine. It's also just a copy-paste to move big games to the 32gb card.
If you're using 16 + 32 = 48gb on your phone, consider your use-cases.
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I have a HTC Desire S which has an 8 GB SD card and 1 GB internal memory. I use about 300 MB internal memory, and about 1.2 GB from the SD card, and that's consisting of this week's pictures, 3 lossless audio albums and whatever else Android puts there.
That's because I don't put EVERYTING on my phone. I have a dedicated MP3 player, an USB stick for data that I travel with and (when needed) a 2 TB external HDD for backups.
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Forget phones. The memory wars mean the end of the optical disk drive and of course any spinning storage.
Blue ray didn't bring it about but the memory wars will have you replacing your dvd collection (or at the very least the big rip and write of shifting your content to new media).
Still trying to imagine that huge box to allow the pretty label with this tiny postage stamp sized storage media containing the actual content be it game, music or movie or combinations and multiples of them all.
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For what is essentially a network terminal, we really don't need huge amounts of storage.
Even tho you were being sarcastic.
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Linux can still boot up on a 1.44 MB floppy!
Shhh. Don't be telling people they can run an operating system in less than 2 GB.
Also... (Score:1)
Good luck actually fitting a kernel with your 'minimum hardware support' into that 1.44 meg floppy anymore. There might still be some legacy x86 platforms that you could, but nowadays a bare kernel seems to be at least 1 meg, and if you even just add in a KMS driver for one video card model it'll probably tip the scales out.
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While it isn't Linux, MenuetOS [menuetos.net] is a completely usable OS. Extra things like Quake of course need more space. These days you can just use a CD or USB Flash Drive to test out and use alternative Operating Systems. I keep telling people, you don't need to throw away your old PC just because the newest version of Windows doesn't work on it. There are options to make that old box live again.
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).
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More to the point: When have you last seen a new machine with a floppy drive?
When was the last time you saw floppies for sale at a shop?
When was the last time you dusted off a floppy you own and inserted it in your machine?
I have a floppy drive. I installed it so I could do BIOS updates 10 years ago. It's never seen a disk.
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Considering that you can network boot without a floppy at all, I'd say you *could* boot linux off a floppy and have an entire floppy's free space left over. You are clearly wrong on this.
Furthermore, the way you talk about struggling to get DOS-level function you seem to have forgotten, or never knew, that DOS would boot on a low density diskette and leave the bulk of that diskette free. Adding a network stack was no probleml. A megabyte is a lot of code.
In the old days I had Unix distributions that bo
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I remember it quite well, thank you. Wordperfect 4.2 would mostly fit in its entirety on a bootable DOS disk, but WordPerfect 5.1 required some major manual surgery to shoehorn it onto a bootable DOS disk. Procomm+ itself easily fit on a bootable DOS disk, but it didn't take more than a few downloaded files to fill the disk. I also remember feeling dirty and scandalized after buying the first version of WordPerfect for Windows, and realizing that it had more floppy disks in the box than WINDOWS 95 did. An
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The reason it wouldn't happen is because there's no motivation to do it, not because it's impossible. No one cares about hopelessly obsolete media.
Another problem is that PC hardware is so diverse, In the last debian release to support floppy initiated installs (etch) it had a floppy for loading the kernel, a second floppy for the core of the installer and then another two floppies for network drivers (there was also a floppy of CD drivers but generally you wouldn't use both the CD drivers and the network drivers floppies). IIRC in testing/unstable immediately before support was dropped they were up to three floppies of network drivers.
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The value of his time, balanced against the pointless futility of it? I mean, seriously. If you're going to spend that much time on something like that, at least port Linux to something that's actually useful. In a world where you can buy a used Android phone on eBay for $5-25 that, when rooted, can be a USB host with color display, bluetooth, and wi-fi... and might even have a TTL serial port hanging off the USB port or headphone jack if you know how to activate it... what POINT is there in trying to run L
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Linux can still boot up on a 1.44 MB floppy!
Shhh. Don't be telling people they can run an operating system in less than 2 GB.
The hell with running an operating system in less than 2GB. Where can you find a computer that still has a floppy drive?
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QNX could boot from a single floppy too, with graphical interface, web browser and various applications.
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GEOS would boot from a 170k floppy on my C64.
It didn't have a web browser though.
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I seem to recall rather a lot of floppies making up GEOS - yes the "desktop" might have appeared eventually from one but it was a disc swapping frenzie I seem to recall to actually do anything.
As you say though - they weren't as spacious as those fancy new 1.44MB jobbies.
LOAF on the other hand got rather a lot out of a 1.44MB floppy.
Cheers
Jon
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According to http://cbmfiles.com/geos/geos-3.php [cbmfiles.com] the first disk came with
[....]the basic boot loader program, the kernal file which contains the actual GEOS operating system, the deskTop program which is the graphical user interface, and the Configure program which is used to set up your disk drives and ram disks. [...]
All that in 57k ... (well, it might be compressed off course, not sure how Wraptor works)
Amazing how much was actually included in the suite : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operat [wikipedia.org]
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Just as long as you compile your kernel the right way.
What would they store? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What would they store? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mega dittos! More RAM is never enough.
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Not if it is backed up somewhere else. Like your Google drive, or something bigger.
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Not if it is backed up somewhere else. Like your Google drive, or something bigger.
See that's what this is really about. Monetizing the online storage end of it. From the article, these huge 3D drives will have a useful life upto 5 years. Since you don't know exactly when in the 5 year period they will crap out, you better have all your stuff backed up somewhere. How much will Google or Dropbox or even Samsung charge your for a TB of storage? And what will your ISP charge you to transfer that much data? I'm pretty sure Sprint's unlimited plan won't cover TB transfers.
While I see some g
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Offloading doesn't give me instant access to my entire data collection on the go in poor 3G signal areas...
(granted I only need about 300 GB for that including all the family videos and photos of weddings and Christmases and stuff... hand have a portable hard drive to move stuff when I need to but its increasing every year and a hard drive is one extra thing to carry about...)
Just because I can carry all that data with me doesn't mean its the only copy of that data...
The hard bit these days is naming and in
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Yes, because you are looking at ALL your EVERY family weddings, christmases and whatnot ALL THE TIME.
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No. Because when I do want to view one of them its often when I'm out and about visiting friends and relatives and something comes up in conversation that I want the picture or video of someone or some event of. Locked up in my home system its worth nothing and trying to download them from my home server when I need them interrupts the conversation.
"have you seen Dave recently?"
"Yeah he's lost a lot of weight"
"really?"
(15 minutes pause waiting for crappy 2G with 1 bar download)
"yeah look here is the pictur
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So then you keep some relevant pictures, not the whole thing. 5 pics of Dave having lost weight are just as good as 300. It's the law of diminishing returns.
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I feel it's quite difficult to get less than none, which is what we have. (Clearly your taste is different from mine.)
Re:What would they store? (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot offline music. Until network coverage is perfect, and data is almost free, offline playlists are one of the most basic things you need on a mobile device..
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Music is not going to drive 100GB+ mobile capacity, let alone terabytes.
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Network coverage is good enough for most of us where we don't need *everything* we own locally. Sure. not 100% of all users, but the majority.
Sure a couple of GB for when you are in a pinch and want to have something to listen to, or don't want to risk a presentation online, but really we don't need to store everything, all the time.
Re: What would they store? (Score:2)
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Re:What would they store? (Score:4, Informative)
LULZ, I've got a 32GB with 4GB free, my music collection alone almost fills it, not to mention photos, video, and podcasts. At the rate I've been buying music my collection will fill the 32GB card by the end of the year (gotta love $5 albums from Amazon).
Re:What would they store? (Score:5, Funny)
It would be one thing if Netflix and other streaming sites allowed offline viewing
That's OK. I gather there's a Swedish video rental site which provides an excellent service. Great download speeds, especially for popular stuff, available in a variety of formats. They also have this excellent feature that allows you to view off line, copy to any device of your choice and even transcode the format and resolution if you have the right tools installed of which there is a wide variety of Free, free and commercial ones for either your phone or PC.
You should try it.
It's very easy to use, except that whenever I try to put my credit card in, it always takes me to a site where impossibly proportioned women want to date my testicles. I guess they still have a few wrinkles to work out but otherwise the UI is excellent.
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I think it's 1024 kibigrams per mibigram now.
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What about ripping videos and storing those? Or games? Lots of audio (seriously, 16gb isn't *that* much, especially if you do higher than 192kbit ripping), lots of pictures which keep getting bigger, lots of video which keeps getting better quality...
We're talking about a cell phone, right? Sure you can do all of that on a phone, but really, why? A casual user isn't going to need hundreds of GB of storage to do that and a serious and professional user is going to need tools that a phone can't provide.
Phones, like tablets are really about consuming data, not creating it. Sure you can take photos and video clips with one, but even most low end digital cameras will give better quality images. In the end, if you are a content creator, you will use the be
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640k should be enough for anybody! Hell, I remember getting a megabyte seemed to be overkill. Just ten years ago I wouldn't have believed that a gigabyte wouldn't be enough to run Windows well.
I'd say something about my lawn, but I really don't care about my damned lawn.
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a lot of iOS apps are HUGE
the newer games can easily hit 2GB of storage on your device if not more
and you can just download the cloud onto your phone. why pay the carriers when you can download over cheap home connections and carry your media everywhere you go
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16GB doesn't even cover a metric ton of any of those things, never mind all of those things.
You know what offers offline viewing? Those obsolete bits of spinning plastic that everyone likes to disparage so much.
Mobile devices have very restrictive bandwidth limits. Your monthly quota might not even cover a single movie.
Sometimes I wonder if the shills actually use any of the products or services they like to whine about.
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Lookup tables, for processor-intensive tasks (image recognition, 3d scanning, gaze tracking, etc.) that your phone's processor is too lazy to do in realtime.
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What would they store?
Everything. When you have Terabytes of storages you stop thinking about storing photos, you store a non-stop video stream of everything. A 'photo' will just be a bookmark into that video stream. It means high quality lifelogging will be practical.
Games are another thing, some modern games already take up 20GB and sooner or later they will find their way to smartphones and tablets. It would be possible to stream them instead of storing them on the phone, but so far there aren't really many games that do that
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Oh god if phones get that feature I hope I can turn it off.
This whole social networking, blogging, sharing videos, photos etc thing is not for me.
What I can see happening though is our technology for implants is getting better very very quickly. More quickly than pretty much any person has any clue about. If you could get a neural implant to do IO (keyboard, mouse, audio, video) then it would be pretty feasible to run some pretty nice games on a cell phone with full immersion and then all that storage spac
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I remember people saying that about hard drives larger than 20 MB.
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Well what would you store on your PC if you had a Terrabyte of data?
If you have more storage apps will find a way to make use of it. Less Cloud and more locally running. Is Cloud Computing a good thing or a bad thing now... I am getting confused.
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Well what would you store on your PC if you had a Terrabyte of data?
If you have more storage apps will find a way to make use of it. Less Cloud and more locally running. Is Cloud Computing a good thing or a bad thing now... I am getting confused.
Well, since most people don't have a TB of storage on their home computer and for most people their hard drive is not out of space, it would stand to reason that a TB of storage on their phone would also be underutilized. Most likely, a TB of storage will wind up being filled with cache and log files.
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A very large dump of /dev/random named " Secret plans to over throw the government" and mail it to the NSA from a anonymous postal drop box.
It will utterly break the Best NSA cytologists brains for the next 10 years.
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backups, movies, games, emulators w/disk images and virtual hard drives, lossless audio, OS images, virtual machines, installers from Windows days, backups of old Windows installs, distro images, twenty years of docs (admittedly, don't take so much space)... need I go on?
I'm down to just 3.6TB and hurting (a half-TB drive recently died). If I went in and did some cleaning and consolidating, which I've been promising myself to do Real Soon Now, I could free up maybe a terabyte and lose a week in the process
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fuck that.
you know what has really been bugging me? I still can't get the same functionality as my ipod classic had out of a cellphone. I can't fit 80gigs of music into any of them and still have 80gigs of bugout data pack mashed on it.
and yeah pretty much the places and situations I'd like to access that stuff the cloud is unavailable.
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I would store more videos from my Tivo on a theoretical iPad with this new memory.. or heck, use this IN a Tivo instead of spinning hard drives.
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Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet (Score:3)
and I'll stop complaining about lack of SD slots. Especially since the SD cards mostly seem to run crappy FAT file systems. There's really no excuse for that.
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and I'll stop complaining about lack of SD slots. Especially since the SD cards mostly seem to run crappy FAT file systems. There's really no excuse for that.
I still want an SD card so I can get data on and off my phone when it won't fully boot.
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Agreed, but not only on FAT. There's still no excuse for that being our only option.
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and I'll stop complaining about lack of SD slots. Especially since the SD cards mostly seem to run crappy FAT file systems. There's really no excuse for that.
I still want an SD card so I can get data on and off my phone when it won't fully boot.
That's what we ran into here, I have a microSD to SD adapter clipped to the wall for when someone's mobile has gone inert.
Re:Give me 1TB on my phone and tablet (Score:4, Informative)
I still want an SD card so I can get data on and off my phone when it won't fully boot.
Well, Android phones run Linux, so unless they've intentionally crappidied it (which they do a lot) it should be able to use any FS which Linux supports.
To share a piece of wisdom that I got from slashdot, try formatting it in UDF. Every major OS can read and write it and even old ones like XP can read it without extra drivers.
Dunno if the Android devs decided to delete it for no good reason like so many other things.
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Haven't tried it but, http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf [ortolo.eu]
They mention XP might be read only if you go UDF on a device.
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There is a reason that SD and micro SD 32 gigs and under use FAT 32. operating system interoperability FAT 32 works with all conmen OS's and embedded devices exFAT is a joke NTFS sucks when it comes to Linux support and dont get me started on that dam Craple file system.
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NTFS support on Linux is just fine. You need to update your FUD playbook.
Got an NTFS USB hard drive from the warehouse store. Plugged it into the Linux boxes and it "just worked". Would reformat it if not for the lameness of Windows but it's all good anyways.
It's Macs that don't have NTFS support.
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Macs have NTFS read support, but not write.
MS and Apple alike are unwilling to support any filesystem they don't have a patent on, unless it's so common they have no choice. That is why we are stuck with FAT and its variations. MS have given their support to ExFAT - but as it's a propritary format and MS holds patents on it anyway, linux can't read it. Which is probably MS's intention.
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if you have a galaxy s3 you can transfer via the NFC chips in the phones
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...at agonizingly slow speeds.
Wireless in all forms sucks. Sometimes it sucks less but it always sucks. Wired transfer methods are universally faster, more reliable, and more secure.
Sometimes the difference is 100:1.
Wireless is one of the biggest shams ever perpetrated upon the willfully ignorant consumer.
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802.11ac gives USB2 High-Speed a run for its money, and any new flagship devices from this point forward will support it.
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Yeah, just like laptops.
Oh wait. it's convenient.
Consumers LOVE wireless because its... got a lack of wires. They can take their device throughout the house and use it without having to be tied to however long the cable is.
And for many, the convenience of wireless outweighs the fact it's slower, less secure, etc. because they can now get their fix of cat videos anywhere within range.
Convenience is also why laptops hav
Memory availability breeds memory use (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I have 32GB SD in my SGS4 I tend to be lazy about cleaning it out because it's so damn full of stuff. So it sits there and I contemplate adding more memory.
it's a vicious cycle
associative memory (Score:3)
What we need is associative memory (indexed by key, not address) where you can send a binary query to the blocks of memory and only those satisfying it return a value. This could be as simple as sending a bit mask or as complex as processing a SQL query. But you want this to happen in the memory block itself.
Without that were stuck with serial memory access over a bus whenever we are searching for something. With so much memory I can't imagine a large scale use other than video streams that doesn't boil
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What you describe exists. It's called 'content-addressible memory.' It's used in a few niche applications, most most significent being ethernet switching.
Content-addressible memory is how such a low-power device is able to keep up with the stream of incoming packets, looking up the appropriate port to to use for reaching each MAC address.
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Also, it is extremely expensive, as its space requirement grows with the square of the number of storage locations provided. And there is _no_ way around that.
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I had a 32GB card on my SGS4, but I quickly started running out of space from nandroid backups (the huge system image for the S4 doesn't help...I was running low on space with only 2-3 backups). Combined with TitaniumBackup backups and other data, and it just wasn't enough. Ended up having to upgrade to a 64GB card.
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You're just lazy. It's not a vicious cycle.
Actually, I'm on the go so much I don't usually have the free time to organize things. Those unplanned sick days or times when I'm stuck in an airport are when I finally take stock of my SD card and clean it up a bit.
Because data center... (Score:2)
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Hahahaha, yeah right, when cellphone plans cap at 1,2.5, or 5GB streaming everything is kinda stupid.
I for one... (Score:2)
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They will not anytime soon. They have about 80 years head-start on any other technologies (only 50 on FLASH) and except for some special scenarios will continue to provide the most bytes for the buck by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Also, there is no reason to retire them, as they work fine for a number of applications and their characteristics are well-known.
In the future... (Score:2)
We'll have computers where just one chip will have the CPU, RAM and the storage. We'll also have humanoid robots, that will use these chips as their brain.
However, the chips will be volatile. So one day, your robot will be running low on power, trying its best to find a source of electricity. But then it'll run out, and essentially die. However, it will get to be born anew.
And there will be faint traces of who/what it was before its death, left in its brain as echos of a past life.
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One chip package, maybe... one chunk of silicon, probably not. The fab processes are too different. You can fab RAM with a CPU process, but it's totally not cost effective. That's why even today, ARM9 microcontrollers normally max out around 256kB, and it's more like 16-64kB.
CPU-fabbed RAM is VERY expensive. The more recent crop of SoCs increase the ram by stacking 2 or 3 wafers in the same package, so each type (flash, ram, or CPU) can be made via the most cost-effective process, then combined into a singl
"Memory Wars" (Score:2)
Crap ... (Score:2)
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again. ;-)
Slightly more seriously, unless we go through another round of media files getting bigger ... I have no idea of what I would need terabytes of stuff on my phone for.
Having said that, I'm willing to find out.
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"I have no idea of what I would need terabytes of stuff on my phone for."
That would defeat efforts to control online "piracy" for once everyone can swap terabytes of music, apps, movies and porn as easily as our ancient predecessors traded cassette tapes, the need to go online would be reduced.
So much data... (Score:1)
With BS it is BS that BS will BS! BS! (Score:2)
Why do these stupid stories creep up time and again? There is nothing revolutionary here. And a start-up demonstrating anything is more of an indication that this will not ever materialize, than the opposite. A look at past "revolutions" show that basically noting materialized, and the few things that did took decades and were far less revolutionary than advertised.
major US carriers (Score:2)
And still, major US carriers will still refuse to offer 64GB or larger smartphones (except perhaps the iPhone due to Apple's clout) while the rest of the world enjoys terabyte smartphones.
Backup (Score:2)
Storage is sorted as far as I'm concered, I'm pretty happy with the size of micro-SD cards, HDDs etc.
But backup has a long way to go, I'd love to see some kind of open distributed File system where you offer up say 1tb to get .5tb of peer space where you're data gets encrypted locally before being stored across a fault tolerant distributed file system, with other people using the same software and no middle men, so no NSA snooping etc.
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The iPhone already has slipped from dominance.
The apathy of soccer moms and grannies is a double edged sword here. While they don't care about the finer things, they also don't care about the finer things.
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Indeed. There will be gradual improvements, prices may go down, but nothing revolutionary will happen. So far the only viable non-volatile memory is FLASH which derives from EEPROM and is about 30 years old, or 50 if you count EEPROM. Yes, it took _that_ long to make it into a somewhat viable alternative to magnetic disk storage. It is completely stupid to expect something demonstrated in a lab under very controlled conditions to be a cheap mass-produced product within less than a few decades and most of th