Get Today's Headlines on your cellMore good news for flash memory
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February 2008
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On the same day that InfoWorld reported that the price of "4Gb SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory chips has fallen 73 percent since mid-August to $4.96 late Thursday," Intel and Micron Technologies announced that they'd developed a second generation flash memory device that's five times faster than anything currently available. Let's start with more good news from InfoWorld: Toshiba and Samsung have both developed new 128GB SSDs based in MLC NAND to expand their use in notebook PCs. The new SSDs are less expensive, giving notebook PC designers more choices in storage. But that's not the coolest news... The speedier flash memory developed by Intel and Micron is immediately available for testing by companies that make electronics and it will enter mass production this year. Of course, today's flash memory is already faster than the hard-disk drive in your current computer and this next generation will be much faster still. Here's some of the technical details from the announcement: SLC high speed NAND can read data at speeds up to 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and can write data at speeds up to 100 MB/s, achieved by leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four plane architecture with higher clock speeds. In comparison, conventional SLC NAND is limited to 40 MB/s for reading data and less than 20 MB/s for writing data. Yes, this stuff will be quite expensive when it hits the market later this year, but the development of second-generation flash should further cut the cost of the first-generation stuff. E-mail entry: |
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