Samsung to do up 32GB flash memory chip

Yeah Samsung, you sure know how to pack it in. First you get us all hot and bothered with your 16GB solid state laptop drives, and now you tantalize us with promises of a 32GB flash memory cards based on your new 16 gigabit (i.e. 2GB) NAND memory chips. They're aiming to start commercial production on these chips by the second half of next year—all well and good, but we're quite sure we won't be able to afford any of it on a tech writer's salary. At least not for a bit.

[Kyle Darling @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Wow... Technology is advancing so fast, it's amazing.

[Anonymous Coward @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Strictly speaking, Samsung already sell 16Gb (2GByte) chips - there are two in the iPod nano 4GB. However, each of these chips - and for chip, read "piece of black plastic with legs" - has currently got four 4Gbit flash dies inside it, wired up in parallel... well, apart from the chipselect lines.

The way I read this announcement, they've got 16Gbits on a single die coming out next year. Soooo, stack four of those in a chip and you get a single 8GByte chip (and a 16GByte iPod nano if you can afford it)

[diem @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

The MB / GB typo had me a litle confused for a second, I thought I was reading a post from 1995.

why are we not seeing computer systems with these solid state memory chips used for running an operating system. load windows onto the chip and start-up with zero lag time.

[Woolly Mittens @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Windows really trashes a disk, it'd wear out the flash memory in very little time. But some sort of hybrid system could be possible, by having a small harddrive for the disk trashing and the flash memory for unchanging data.

[homer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

i hope nintendo is talking to samsung. they could use this to counter the whole harddrive fiasco that microsoft is going through by making it cheap enough to put mass storage in every console. i'd rather have a smaller amount of storage (say, 4 - 8 gig) that all developers can use. the current specs for the rev of 512 mb is too small.

[Kamalot @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

512MB in the Nintendo Revolution may be small, but compared to the competition, it is VAST! It also saves consumers around $40 since they no longer have to buy a memory card like the Xbox or PS3.

Too bad Microsoft chickened out and deciced to sell the Xbox without a HD by default.
-Authored on a Treo-

[Gil @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

diem: flash memory has a limited number of writes to it. You won't get to the end of it if you don't abuse it but windows running of it will kill the chip

[nefarious @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Yeah... still 100K writes... not faster that HD.. etc. Very cool for severe use environments though. http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Flash/NAND/16Gbit/K9WAG08U1M/K9WAG08U1M.htm

[Jeffrey Schrab @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

So does that mean a 32GB iPod Nano in early 2008? (Samsung is Apple's flash memory provider for the iPod Nano)

[racaruso @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Hey....
PALM ONE. Put this in the next Treo - or I shall hunt down every member of your engineering and marketing staff and torture them until they realize that 24MB is soooooooo 1993.

Seriously, though - this better make it into the next wave of phones. This 64-128MB nonsense is ridiculous.

[Ken @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

That would be a lot of pictures!

[hall @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

omg, it's so huge. I can have all my songs on it

[Anonymous Coward @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

Yes, there are 100k write limitations (technically I believe it's actually 100k erases per block) but a software layer above the actual flash chip deals both with mapping out "worn" blocks (take a block from the spare area and use it instead), and a process called "wear levelling".

For every area that gets written frequently (eg the FAT of a disk), there are plenty of areas which don't - say, one of the windows binaries. Wear levelling will cycle these blocks, moving the largely static area into blocks that have had a hammering in the past, and using fresh blocks for the bits getting hammered. This process happens flash-wide over the life of the flash disk, which in effect extends the visible cycle limits to hundreds of millions of cycles.

This happens already (and totally seamlessly) in all controller-equipped flash memory - eg, CF cards, SD cards, MMC cards... well, at least those from reputable manufacturers.

[josh @ Dec 19th 2005 1:25AM]

First off I want to say that i really like your site!!! it is really clean. Second check out my site www.freeapplestuff.com, you can get the nano for free and tons of other free apple stuff. hope to hear from you.