Christie Marrian
New member
I had an interesting chat with David Eggleston, Principal, Intuitive Cognition Consulting*, about the erecent Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in Santa Clara, CA. Dave organized the couple of ‘new technologies’ sessions. The attendance at FMS was up ~30% from last year which is pretty impressive in these days of more or less continuous conferences.
While SSDs have been around in laptops and tablets for some time, Flash is now considered an integral part of enterprise performance SSDs. Now Flash has been introduced into faster memory channels, i.e. the DIMM sockets you probably have populated with DRAM on the motherboard of your desktop. The new development is to introduce Flash as an actively used memory with access times far faster than possible with a SSD. The trick is to hide the Flash limitations as working memory behind a controller which interfaces the memory with the rest of the system.
Looking further out one can see that there is no longer essential to have a homogeneous memory technology behind the controller and one can mix and match depending on price and performance at any given time. One can do this as logic is so much faster than even the best working memories that there are plenty of clock ticks available for the controller to do its stuff. See below from an IBM presentation by Jung Yoon at FMS
View attachment 8945
This has the important consequence for ReRAM/CBRAM (and other emerging memories) as it not necessary to be a 1:1 replacement for an existing memory type and performance enhancements can readily be passed on to the system.
View attachment 8946
The real ‘big’ news at FMS was Samsung’s announcement of not just Vertical (3D) NAND manufacturing but also a product (SSD) incorporating 3D NAND chips. A lot of people, not least Samsung’s competitors, were surprised! 3D is seen as a way to continue NAND scaling, i.e. reduce the cost per bit. SanDisk/Toshiba were quite clear about this by pointedly repeating their position from May that 3D NAND is “targeted to provide meaningful cost reduction versus 1Z” (their sub 19nm and possibly last, planar, 2D NAND) and don’t see their 3D NAND appearing until 2016. Samsung have taken an almost opposite tack by pushing 3D NAND as giving a performance enhancement over planar (2x faster and an impressive 10x improvement in endurance) and are pricing their 3D NAND at a higher cost per bit than planar. From Samsung's FMS presentation!
View attachment 8947
More on this and the future of non-volatile memory can be found at www.ReRAM-Forum.com.
Christie Marrian with a big thank you to David Eggleston who can be contacted at *dave@in-cog.com.
While SSDs have been around in laptops and tablets for some time, Flash is now considered an integral part of enterprise performance SSDs. Now Flash has been introduced into faster memory channels, i.e. the DIMM sockets you probably have populated with DRAM on the motherboard of your desktop. The new development is to introduce Flash as an actively used memory with access times far faster than possible with a SSD. The trick is to hide the Flash limitations as working memory behind a controller which interfaces the memory with the rest of the system.
Looking further out one can see that there is no longer essential to have a homogeneous memory technology behind the controller and one can mix and match depending on price and performance at any given time. One can do this as logic is so much faster than even the best working memories that there are plenty of clock ticks available for the controller to do its stuff. See below from an IBM presentation by Jung Yoon at FMS
View attachment 8945
This has the important consequence for ReRAM/CBRAM (and other emerging memories) as it not necessary to be a 1:1 replacement for an existing memory type and performance enhancements can readily be passed on to the system.
View attachment 8946
The real ‘big’ news at FMS was Samsung’s announcement of not just Vertical (3D) NAND manufacturing but also a product (SSD) incorporating 3D NAND chips. A lot of people, not least Samsung’s competitors, were surprised! 3D is seen as a way to continue NAND scaling, i.e. reduce the cost per bit. SanDisk/Toshiba were quite clear about this by pointedly repeating their position from May that 3D NAND is “targeted to provide meaningful cost reduction versus 1Z” (their sub 19nm and possibly last, planar, 2D NAND) and don’t see their 3D NAND appearing until 2016. Samsung have taken an almost opposite tack by pushing 3D NAND as giving a performance enhancement over planar (2x faster and an impressive 10x improvement in endurance) and are pricing their 3D NAND at a higher cost per bit than planar. From Samsung's FMS presentation!
View attachment 8947
More on this and the future of non-volatile memory can be found at www.ReRAM-Forum.com.
Christie Marrian with a big thank you to David Eggleston who can be contacted at *dave@in-cog.com.