Researchers develop picosecond-level flash memory device

(fudan.edu.cn)

13 points | by croes 2 days ago ago

7 comments

  • slicktux a day ago ago

    It’s nice to see how the AI ‘hype’ is accelerating (no pun intended) technology like storage…but at what point does processing become the bottleneck and not storage? Is that not already the case?

  • superkuh a day ago ago

    Is the latency in flash devices really from the charge trap physics itself? I thought it was more in all the overhead to make sure the bit(s) are actually what it seems like. Also, if there were a market for low latency storage surely Optane wouldn't have died and we'd be living a better, more random read/write performant world.

    • AndrewDucker a day ago ago

      Optane was too expensive for not enough of an improvement. It either needs to be as cheap as flash or it needs to be so much faster that people are willing to pay a premium (say, as much faster than an SSD as an SSD was faster than an HDD).

      • orev 5 hours ago ago

        I find it very frustrating that people expect new technologies to immediately beat existing ones on every metric, when the existing ones have the advantage of a long timeline of iterative refinement. Optane looked amazing, but it just wasn’t given enough time to go through that process. I know it’s a function of how the market works, but it’s still sad to see promising things die on the vine like that.

        • AndrewDucker 5 hours ago ago

          They don't have to beat on every existing metric. But if they are more expensive for a gain that most people don't care about then they'd better have a niche that pays well to keep them going.

          Also, Optane had 5 years. That's a pretty good run for something that never delivered enough to gain its own niche.

      • superkuh a day ago ago

        Optane is still faster for random IO (latency, peak and average) than any pcie5 modern consumer SSD by quite a bit. Some enterprise SSD are about equal but come with equal cost and size constraints.

        • AndrewDucker a day ago ago

          And enterprises will pay for that. But it wasn't going to go mass market because the effect to the average consumer wasn't big enough to sell to them.