Amazing. Here we have a tier 2/3 company actually innovating, yet the engineers getting paid peanuts
Where the median home price is probably $500K
Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
101–110 of 131 posts
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the SSD should have a built in battery capable of doing whats necessary for years. Just like your computer has a CMOS battery that's capable of running the clock for years. It's no different. In fact, many computers will refuse to boot if the clock loses time because all the digital certificates on drivers aren't valid yet. Computer requires battery backup to remain functional. SSD requires backup battery to rem…
That's an extremely load-bearing "should"; are any current drives shipping like this?
The purpose of these drives is not for archive. In fact, individual SSDs in general should not be used for archiving. They are for performance. Since we're probably talking about laptops or phones typically, there's also the loss of the device or catastrophic failure (fire?) to worry about so there needs to be a disaster recovery plan regardless.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
What manufacturing changes do you imagine would make that possible? Making cells smaller gets unusable pretty quickly, and adding more bits to TLC/QLC is a mild price improvement at best. Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves, but if you're waiting for that then you don't need to sacrifice speed and durability.
>Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves That is not always true though. If we look at DRAM. There is a reason why we are still stuck with 8GB DRAM as entry level while 99.99999% of tech community including HN has been stating DRAM is cheap and it is only going to be cheaper for more than a decade. The cost to produce DRAM has only dropped 10-20% over the past decade, while pricing fluctuate a lot as…
How about Optane?
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted This is why I am not afraid automation is going to render us without jobs. We're going to get accustomed with better, and still need to work. AI exponential increase can't keep up with human entitlement.
> still need to work Us needing to work does not meant that the jobs will still be there for us to work at. The reason so much money goes into automation is simply because it cuts the payroll. The argument that there have always been jobs in the past, so there will always be jobs in the future, simply does not follow..
There will always be jobs, their nature will just be different. Even if you make the machines, someone has to design them, program them and set them up. And even if we automate the automating, we will still be able to create art and as long as it brings any value to others, it will be worth paying for, making it good old work.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an extremely load-bearing "should"; are any current drives shipping like this?
The purpose of these drives is not for archive. In fact, individual SSDs in general should not be used for archiving. They are for performance. Since we're probably talking about laptops or phones typically, there's also the loss of the device or catastrophic failure (fire?) to worry about so there needs to be a disaster recovery plan regardless.
No need for any "archiving". I live in a country where you get drafted for a mandatory army service once you reach 18 years of age. The user leaves his desktop (or laptop) at home, goes to the army, returns back in a year, and — whoops — there's no data left on the drive. You know the user should have kept backups, and I know that, but your average Joe is going to be pretty unpleasantly surprised.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
What manufacturing changes do you imagine would make that possible? Making cells smaller gets unusable pretty quickly, and adding more bits to TLC/QLC is a mild price improvement at best. Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves, but if you're waiting for that then you don't need to sacrifice speed and durability.
>Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves That is not always true though. If we look at DRAM. There is a reason why we are still stuck with 8GB DRAM as entry level while 99.99999% of tech community including HN has been stating DRAM is cheap and it is only going to be cheaper for more than a decade. The cost to produce DRAM has only dropped 10-20% over the past decade, while pricing fluctuate a lot as…
I bought 32GB for 100€. That is roughly 3€/GB which is 24€ for 8GB that is a ridiculously low price for something I would have had 10 years ago.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung rates their QVO (QLC flash) at about 0.36 DWPD for 5 years which works out to over 600 disk mean writes before failure. Even if we half that that's still easily 3x high end HDD's, with superior drive health monitoring and far superior recovery/rebuild performance. TLC Flash is 2-3 times higher than that, and exact endurance depends on the specific drive in question as there's more to endurance than single/dou…
It seems to me like initially people were worried about SSD endurance but now nobody seems to care anymore, because endurance hasn't turned out to be a significant issue. In fact, I suspect developers care a lot less about I/O patterns now because 1) the performance impact of bad I/O patterns is still high, but the performance floor is way higher on SSDs, so it basically "doesn't matter" for most 2) for end-user appl…
> endurance hasn't turned out to be a significant issue
To be fair, I think it's a bit like y2k. It's not an issue because steps have been taken to mitigate it.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea why you'd read that when the cells are the same size as before.
That outcome would be expected from either decreasing cell size, or increasing bits/cell (what used to be commonly called SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC). I don't see TFA mentioning either directly, but there are some hints that one of the two (or both) did happen: Number of layers increased from 176 to 232 (that explains 32% increase) but bits/chip area has doubled (total density increased by 100%). Where does the rest of this inc…
From a much better Anandtech article: 32% increase in layers, 40% increase in die area.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232-layer-nand-...
A bunch of the cost is test and packaging which is constant so there will be a small cost per bit reduction. But the new chip will cost significantly more to manufacture than a 512Gbit device. No free lunch.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, what I think is more amazing is how far we didn’t come given the enormous increase in processing power. Windows 95 was pretty good for it’s time, but windows 11 isn’t essentially different.
> windows 11 isn’t essentially different That's only if you ignore all of the differences! 8) There are many big and small differences that people just gloss over, because they feel it doesn't apply to them, or they don't even realise it's there. Windows 95 used to crash if you looked at it wrong. It was horrendously vulnerable to malware, even across the network. Its "maximums" were hilariously low due to many remai…
Yeah, but would you call all those framework improvements fundamentally different?
It’s more stable, secure, and drivers are plentiful (and included!), but those feel ancillary. Most people don’t need multiple languages in the same text box.
Obviously it’s fundamentally different in a ship of theseus way, in that pretty much all of what was Win 95 has been replaced.
But the way people use their PC is the same.
Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
What manufacturing changes do you imagine would make that possible? Making cells smaller gets unusable pretty quickly, and adding more bits to TLC/QLC is a mild price improvement at best. Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves, but if you're waiting for that then you don't need to sacrifice speed and durability.
>Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves That is not always true though. If we look at DRAM. There is a reason why we are still stuck with 8GB DRAM as entry level while 99.99999% of tech community including HN has been stating DRAM is cheap and it is only going to be cheaper for more than a decade. The cost to produce DRAM has only dropped 10-20% over the past decade, while pricing fluctuate a lot as…
Yeah, there's a minimum volume required to store an electric charge and memory has reached it.
Global demand is collapsing due to the Great NotARecession, whatever price we reach by Christmas will be the lowest planar DRAM ever gets. So buy up all the DDR4 you need. ArF immersion tools that sit in DRAM fabs are now full amortized and memory lines are not likely to be earning much more than the marginal cost of maintenance, power and materials that they consume, any lower in price and they get turned off.
I hear good things about vertically stacked thin film transistors as a future technology, but they haven't left the lab yet.