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We have built the world's most powerful memory chip

Samsung claims
Tuesday, 23 October 2007, 10:17

SAMSUNG claims it has developed the world's most powerful memory chip, which can be used to build a memory card capable of storing 80 DVD movies.

Up to 16 of the new 64-gigabit NAND flash memory chips can be combined to make a 128-gigabyte memory card, the firm said.

Such devices will be hitting the shops in 2009, Samsung sang.

Kwon Hyosun, a senior manager in Samsung Electronics's investor relations department, told AFP that the chip is the biggest storage capacity of a single memory chip ever developed in the world.

It will find its way into a new $20-billion market offering fresh applications for various multimedia items such as mobile handsets, digital cameras, MP3 players and PCs.

More here. µ

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Comments
I'm thinking...

... what about the content? All this storage space has to be utilized somehow, and when you think about entertainment use (music, movies, photos...) it's pretty clear that you won't buy all this content, because it's just too much. You'd have to pirate it and hold on to it just for keeping sake...

And the hw industry is very, very aware of this :)

posted by : Mad Ant, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
big

16x64 gigabit != 64 gigabit... is 128 gigabytes i believe.

Wonder how big it is... volume wise.

posted by : mashles, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Please get more bandwidth!

Seriously - theinquirer.net pages (at least the text of the articles) have been loading very sloooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwlllllllllllyyyyyyyyy lately. It keeps saying "connecting to data.as-us.falkag.net

posted by : Nick (Chicago), 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
re:big

1 gigabit = .125 gigabytes

Cheers,
John

posted by : John, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
All your memory is belong to us

Are there 80 DVD movies worth storing?

I'm not impressed by mere capacity gains, that is simply tweaking current designs.

What I am waiting for is the holy grail of memory, non-volatile, high-speed, infinitely-writable memory that would replace volatile DRAM used for main memory. Imagine if that 128GB of memory would be accessible directly by the processor at DRAM speeds, but would be non-volatile and have infinite writability. Now wouldn't THAT be something?

posted by : Rich Wargo, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Why waste flash space on movies?

Why waste expensive flash space on 80 movies when the movies won't get better or faster playing or copying? It's a waste. 

A better way to use flash is for OS and programs that need fast access. But then who would pay the astronomical price? And who will sacrefice so much sequential speed for a fantastic access speed?

Samsung should focus on faster transfer rates and Raid0-like solutions for flash.

posted by : Simen1, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
It's all good

This would make it a lot easier to build a 128GB SSD, and I really want one of those for my notebook. Not going to shell out the money until it reaches that capacity at a sane price though. Higher density chips like this will definitely help drive down the price.

As for faster access, RAID0, etc. - that's all orthogonal to the chip technology. You act like nobody is doing anything on those fronts. The fact is that stuff is obvious, and there are many people working on those fronts. They're just not talking about it in this particular announcement.

posted by : Howard Chu, 24 October 2007 Complain about this comment
mram will do much better (hopefully)

"What I am waiting for is the holy grail of memory, non-volatile, high-speed, infinitely-writable memory that would replace volatile DRAM used for main memory. Imagine if that 128GB of memory would be accessible directly by the processor at DRAM speeds, but would be non-volatile and have infinite writability. Now wouldn't THAT be something?"

Yeah, its called MRAM. Unfortunately it is not being developed as much as it should be right now because of all the investments that have been made by the major players in the existing flash/dram technology, plus it still needs some work to get even close to the density of current dram capacities. it's been around for a few years, actually.

here for more info:
http://www.mram-info.com/introduction
a few articles by the inq'
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2002/08/09/sandia-invents-instant-computer-boot-technique
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2002/09/16/japanese-pitch-in-to-develop-next-generation-memory
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/06/10/infineon-and-ibm-develop-advanced-magnetic-memories
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2004/03/03/magnetic-memory-capacity-gets-boost

posted by : Ryan B, 27 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Why not use the Raid0 technology aggresively to speed up

IMHO, As a 128 GB SSDs have a minimal of 16 sub units (ICS). all 16 can be connected to Raid 0 (16 way Raid 0) tı increase speed. The connection can be over a special high speed bus directly to Nortbridge.

CanT Raid0 chips handle 16 100mB/s chips (totally 1.6GByte/s) . Maybe the processor overhead is the problem what do you think?

posted by : incal99, 16 December 2007 Complain about this comment
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