X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 9)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

That’s all about the high life chronicles, and I am now supposed to cover some finished products. Well, I really doubt the purport of doing this. It’s all the same month after month: a couple of overclocker modules under the pseudo-standards like PC4000-PC4200 (this time they came from OCZ and the new one in the filed, SimpleTech, who unveiled its Nitro series) and a pair of SO-DIMM modules for notebooks and 1U servers (both from Kingmax, both are standards-compliant, PC2700 and PC3200).

512MB PC3200 SO-DIMM from Kingmax

One more company has started to sample new DDR-II-533 modules. This time it was Elpida with its 2GB models (it already has 512MB and 1GB variants, just like the rest of the companies). They say they can start mass shipments right now, but such a rush is unnecessary. So we wait until the Grantsdale comes, closer to the next spring. Anyway, this is a good opportunity of reporting success to one of Elpida’s stockholders. The one who made this very Grantsdale thing.

DDR-II 533 memory from Elpida

So it’s all calm and quiet in the memory market. No prices jumping, or attempts at merging or bankrupting anyone, and no legal quarrels. This is all gone and now we can only dig in the new (or better, newest) technologies area for anything interesting. As for new technologies, Samsung released a second generation (288Mb) of Network-DRAM chips (a.k.a. FCRAM). These are actually DDR SDRAM chips with reduced latencies for working in network equipment. Samsung also produced another multi-chip package (MCP) product in November. It is 6-layer rather than 4-layer. The miniature casing now conceals 256Mb of NAND flash, 128Mb of NOR flash, 64Mb of UtRAM, two units of 128Mb DRAM and 16Mb SRAM. That’s a perfect solution for a smartphone or PDA.

In the newest technologies category, we have HP Labs offering one-write permanent memory. That’s a second, after the molecular memory, offer from them lately. They suggest using a polymer film as the medium, and the main disadvantage, like with similar proposals of other firms, is the access time. They work upon the problem. Interestingly, Intel has become active in this area of research, too.

As for the longest-term perspective, the scientists from Dresden reported their dealings with nano-tubes of a 10nm diameter that are filled with various magnetic materials like iron, cobalt and nickel. Of course, it’s all very raw so far, but the potential growth of the memory density in hundreds times above the today’s densities cannot be underestimated.