{"id":114,"date":"2014-04-29T23:36:37","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T06:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/?p=114"},"modified":"2014-04-29T23:37:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T06:37:13","slug":"of-memes-and-memory-and-moores-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/114\/of-memes-and-memory-and-moores-law","title":{"rendered":"Of Memes and Memory and Moore’s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1000-fold<\/a>
1000-fold more memory in the same device – but will it scale indefinitely?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A post has been making the rounds on Reddit<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>, graphically demonstrating\u00a0the 1000-fold increase in (flash) memory density over the last decade. The question is, will this scale indefinitely, even through 2024? After all,\u00a0look at how far we’ve come<\/a>…<\/p>\n

I’ll posit this: a 128TB device 10 years from now might look the same from above, but it’ll likely be quite a bit thicker. Moore’s Law (such as it isn’t) is already breaking down at the transistor level, and as memory\u00a0cells get smaller they become more prone to “single event upsets” – bit flips caused by secondary particles from cosmic rays (though error-correcting coding helps [PDF]<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Then there’s the problem of heating – yes, you may make a little block with hundreds of terabytes of memory, but to use it takes energy, and write operations in particular are heat-intensive. And the more heat you have in a small space, the more chance you have for more random bit flips and other heat-related issues (electromigration<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n

Finally, there’s the problem of interfacing with this hypothetical 2.5D chip stack<\/a> or 3D\u00a0device… the micro-SD card above uses anywhere from one to four pins total for\u00a0its data path<\/a>, and write speeds aren’t scaling dramatically (most of the speedup we see today in newer USB 3.0 devices seems to be in fan-out…\u00a0several devices in parallel being written to \/\u00a0read from at once).<\/p>\n

That’s not to say there won’t be\u00a0applications for such\u00a0a high-density device – particularly in the scientific realm<\/a>\u00a0and the social- and mass-media space<\/a>. But\u00a0will they scale down to the consumer level, at today’s price points, with the reliability we’ve come to expect? I’m going to say no with a caveat – I think there will be far more interesting technologies and applications in 10 years, technologies that may necessitate new ways of looking at digital (and analog) memory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a7\u00a0An article citing Intel researchers<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a7\u00a0Another quick read\u00a0about Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling<\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A post has been making the rounds on Reddit and Facebook, graphically demonstrating\u00a0the 1000-fold increase in (flash) memory density over the last decade. The question is, will this scale indefinitely, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[107,85,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-marty","has-more-link","post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-commentary","category-electronics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}