HP Set to Release NAND Flash Replacement in 18 Months

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Hewlett-Packard has been promising delivery of a replacement chip for NAND Flash and SSD drives for several years now and at long last it is looking more likely to become a reality. At a recent conference a company representative announced that the Memristor should be a reality within 18 months.

"We're running hundreds of wafers through the fab," he continued. "We're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time."
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It would be pretty amazing to actually see some real game-changing innovation out of HP again...
 
I started a thread in the storage forum before I saw this, so I'll post what I posted there.

Seems to be a pretty big leap if true. They claim that wherever flash is at the time, they'll be 2x better. Whether that means throughput or density I don't know. Memristors offer nanosecond seek performance, as well as write cycles measured in trillions (10^12) instead of thousands.

More interesting is this part: "We put the non-volatile memory right on top of the processor chip, and, because you’re not shipping data off-chip, that means we get the equivalent of 20 years of Moore’s Law performance improvement," said Williams."

They claim they can offer 2GBytes per CPU core. Pretty insane to think about 16GBytes of CPU cache on an 8core chip. I'm sure it's not as fast as current cache, but still.
 
If this turns out too be a good as it should be this could potentially save HP despite their attempts to destroy themselves. Non volatile memory that could replace Dram and SSD/HD's and be signifacantly faster and more dense to boot would be pretty awesome.
 
oh and potentially cpu as well. This would have a huge amounts of potential applications from desktop PC's to cell phones and everything in between.
 
what would really suck is if consoles came out just before this tech. Imagine a paradigm shift in memory/storage/cpu cache and basically it all going to waste until 2020+ while we wait for consoles to catch up. For the home user that is, not research/medical/etc. because let's be real, what does a home user need all that for besides high end gaming. Maybe photo/video editing.
 
Think of the possibilities for mobile computing. On chip OS anyone?:D
 
lostinseganet said:
Could this make gpu vram near the speed of cpu l2 or l3 cache?
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theoretically, they could put it directly onto the GPU. Even better is to have just one big piece of silicon with everything on it. AMD is doing something similar to this, but I don't think it will have the power of their best discrete cards
 
Radagast~mod said:
It would be pretty amazing to actually see some real game-changing innovation out of HP again...
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They are already innovating, They are using crazy CEO ramblings to send their competition into a confused frenzy, and obliterate their stocks. You dont see that too often.
 
Ryan711 said:
what would really suck is if consoles came out just before this tech. Imagine a paradigm shift in memory/storage/cpu cache and basically it all going to waste until 2020+ while we wait for consoles to catch up. For the home user that is, not research/medical/etc. because let's be real, what does a home user need all that for besides high end gaming. Maybe photo/video editing.
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Honestly I dont think it matters consoles always ship with out dated small and slow storage. So even if it released first they certainly would not pay the premium to get it.
 
Ryan711 said:
theoretically, they could put it directly onto the GPU. Even better is to have just one big piece of silicon with everything on it. AMD is doing something similar to this, but I don't think it will have the power of their best discrete cards
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Honestly you could have probably put everything on 1 big chip for a long time. That is what an SOC is. The problem with this is it is not modular. So if you have 1 fatal error on that entire chip you have to trash it. Same with ram and everything else. You have to fab it at a size of chip that you can get reasonable yields out of and be able to take care of heat.
 
rudy said:
Honestly I dont think it matters consoles always ship with out dated small and slow storage. So even if it released first they certainly would not pay the premium to get it.
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This is not only about storage. This is also about DRAM and massive on die cache. Memristors have insane densities and can be stacked. I think it said they're already at 5nm and could potentially have 1pb, yes petabit per cm^3 using 1000 layer 3d design. So imagine so much memory that it basically fuses what has traditionally been storage and ram since it is also non-volatile. So imagine consoles come out and then the next year or two we get gigabytes of on die cache and hundreds of gigabytes of non-volatile ram/storage hybrids. While consoles are stuck with megabytes and probably less than 4GB of ram, and will be this way until 2020+. By that time, I don't even know what we'll be at. Will we even be on silicon at that time? It's insane that these machines last as long as they do.
 
Possibly but once again console are always more about proven tech and never about bleeding edge. If this becomes a revolution in computing that could change everything the console companies would not sit around sucking it up they would just make a quick redesign to include it. Well maybe if all 3 have a console are out then they will have no reason to bother upgrading. Consoles really do not directly compete with PCs so they have never really taken anything that happens in the PC world seriously.

Also much like SSDs we have to wait till this is really out before we know what is to be true. Every company spins their products the best they can and that was what we heard about SSDs. But the new technology presented new completely different challenges and the first generations of SSDs had alot of issues. So more or less I feel it simply means nothing to the console companies at this point.
 
Screw consoles think about what this will do to computing in general. You're talking massive amounts of high density volatile storage. This means that cell phones/laptops/desktops can be downsized in many ways and sped up.

With insane amounts of on die cache.....
 
I this the same HP that makes those crap computers? That HP?
 
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