On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 08:54:41PM -0700, Michael Christopher Robinson wrote: > A google article suggests that data corruption and not drive > failure is the greatest issue with SSDs. If the data corrupts, > that is equally as bad as a drive failure. Intel is working on > a new technology using Ferro Something for a semiconductor, it > is ultra low power and more reliable potentially than current > solid state flash memory technologies. Perhaps someone else > can fill in the gaps with what Intel is working on.
Intel "announced" 3D Xpoint solid state memory last year; much fanfare, no details. Their first Optane products are scheduled for 2018. Those will start out far more expensive than flash or DRAM, with performance somewhere in between. "3D Xpoint" is probably chalcogenide phase change glass, which Intel published a lot of journal papers about, and filed a lot of patents ... then stopped about a year before the big press conference announcing 3D Xpoint. This is Intel's usual behavior. Phase change glass is sometimes called "ferroelectric". http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/memory/has-intel-invented-a-universal-memory-tech The pretty picture is a computer rendering, not an actual physical device. In semiconductors, a scheduled release of a new chip technology more tham one year out means there are serious problems, and no clue when or even if those problems will be solved. Remember bubble memory? Nantero has a competing technology involving carbon nanotubes (gee whiz gosh wow!). They've been working on it for more than a decade, and are trickling out samples now. Starved for cash, like most startups. I've talked with their CEO, who claims that Xpoint won't work. Maybe nothing in the pipeline will work. This is a struggle for investment dollars. Those dollars are migrating towards molecular biology, and Intel and Nantero and others are fighting over crumbs. My guess is that all of this is at the bleeding edge of the possible, and when the fog clears, there will be one player with enough customers and resources to go into production with one more big change. The semiconductor industry is maturing; dense solid state memory may be like Boeing's supersonic transport. Much is made of Moore's law, doubling capability every two years. What is neglected is Moore's SECOND Law: the cost of a chip-making FACTORY doubles every FOUR years. When the cost of a higher-capability factory exceeds a company's slowing annual revenue growth (Intel is at 5% now), the rate at which new factories are built slows down, which slows down the rate of process improvement, whcih slows down new applications. Intel has already announced that the cadence of new processes will slow. We may be nearing the end of the fast exponential, as we did with automobiles, aircraft, electricity, telegraph, telephone, television, rocketry, ... Sorry, no singularity, just a cascading series of S curves. It was fun while it lasted. Further discussion belongs on plug-talk, but the overall problem frames future Linux development, and software in general. I hope that, facing resource limits, new software startups will focus on reliability and stability and efficiency rather than exponential accumulation of buggy complexity. Perhaps we will have time for regression testing ... Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
