* Posts by ECD Fan

2 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2009

Phase change memory arrives

ECD Fan
Stop

The actual speed!

The actual speed is disclosed in the datasheet on Numonyx' web site. It is less than 1 megabyte per second (can be as slow as 0.2 megabyte/second). Compare to modern NOR Flash (including the one from Numonyx) that can be written up to 2 megabytes per second.

Numonyx is simply lying to you.

By the way, this "new" product is the same as the "old" one, unveiled with great fanfare in 2008:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/numonyx_pcm_access/

Could Micron buy Numonyx?

ECD Fan

Chris, please use common sense!

Chris, you know better than to quote that PCM "has the promise of being faster to access than flash and be byte-addressable instead of having to be written to and erased in blocks." You know that is not true! PCM holds no such promise. As the recently published Alverstone PCM datasheet reveals, the thing writes at 0.3 megabytes a second. I repeat, 0.3 megabytes a second. You know that even the cheapest Flash SDHC Class 6 cards write at 6 megabytes a second, sustained (and some of the better ones, but still cheap, actually do over 9 megabytes per second), while Flash SSDs go well over 100 megabytes per second. Oh, and the thing holds just 16 megabytes - barely enough to store 3 MP3 files or two pictures - the price per gigabyte, is of course, is astronomical. Back in the real world, Flash costs $2 per gigabyte and Intel/Micron make 8 gigs chips at 34nms.

PCM is a techno-Ponzi. Numonyx management should be ashamed of misleading the technical community and letting rumors like that spread. Numonyx is a money-losing NOR maker (just read Intel's 10Q). Nothing more. And you remember the fate of the other money-losing NOR maker, don't you?