We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
Worth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.
I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
I was so amazed when I held the Microdrive harddisk in my hands for the first time. And later the first iPod that was made possible with a Microdrive. These things lead to new gadget categories, not only making existing ones better.
SD download option is the answer. I think this whole issue shouldn't exist in the first place. I do understand that full voice over and 4k ready textures comes at a price but some devs are getting lazy and some games are just ridiculous. We're talking about handhelds like Steam Deck. Even if I plug it in as a console it won't have the juice to run at full resolution. When I want to quickly grab an episode of a tv ser…
I think many would be amazed at how the space used on a game today is broken down in space usage. Most will be along the lines of cut scenes, graphics, audio......library and librarys galore...logic code of the program that is unique to the game and finally some text file hidden away. But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space i…
In general: code Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.
The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
It was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
Worth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.
I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
Try a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!
They've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one.
If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]
This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.
This is obviously the direction of persistent storage: SD meets SSD. Technological innovations are reliably predictable at this relatively high level. If you didn't see it coming, better get in quick before everyone else catches on!