Not sure where you're getting that, I've seen lots of slow low/capacity flash drives for $1. Clearly though, major retailers have little interest in stocking them as their is not much profit in selling a 512MB flash drive for $1 when you can sell them an 8GB one for $8 and pocket $3+ profit instead of 30 cents.
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Just perusing UK shops. Are those cheap $1 drives new fabrications, or old stock (can be old chips) being discounted? Or in other words, is anyone manufacturing new, cheaper SD cards, pushing down the entry level price? I'm not really seeing that, but then I haven't been charting minimum SD prices for 5 years. 
Edit : I see Amazon has unbrand C4 SD for under £3. I need to change where I buy my SD cards.
Edit : I see Amazon has unbrand C4 SD for under £3. I need to change where I buy my SD cards.
I don't know. Without numbers that's plain guesswork and thus useless data. Do we even know if their cards are flash based?
2GB cards is great for portables. But for 50GB to 100GB and up, I don't think it's possible within the next generation.
We had a big drop in price when flash controllers started to map bad blocks in factory (better yield, larger chips), and another big drop when we switched to MLC, but there's nothing else in sight as far as I know for cost reduction. It's a silicon chip, so the cost of production cannot really go down any faster than the wafer production cost.
How much die area is required per GB, or transistors per GB, and how much more is needed for better speed?
What's the cost per area at 20nm? At 14nm?
How small can they go in the future and will it cost less? When?
They are not selling you blanks. How much time is needed to copy and verify 100GB on a flash chip at the factory? Lead time to have enough supply for launch? Cost of that factory?
They are now having problems with the smaller flash cells at 25nm and 20nm, it's more leaky and is less reliable, it will probably get worse at 14nm and beyond. I don't see the price coming down enough in the next 5 years, let alone by 20x in 2 or 3 years for the big flagship games. They wouldn't even be able to release a direct port of the flagship games from PS3, let alone improved versions with higher res textures and models.
For a price reference, according to iSuppli it costs Apple 40$ for 32GB flash chips. Now please argue that Apple isn't in a position to negotiate the best prices. Prices of dumping overstock are not comparable to ordering millions of chips per month. Current prices for the high speed SD cards is also extremely high.
http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/isuppli-iphone-4s-bom.gif
EDIT: Latest Intel/Micron 8GB MLC at 20nm HKMG is a 118mm^2 chip, planned for late 2012 production, so you need 944mm^2 for a 64GB chip with that latest process. Price is expected to remain high due to demand.
We had a big drop in price when flash controllers started to map bad blocks in factory (better yield, larger chips), and another big drop when we switched to MLC, but there's nothing else in sight as far as I know for cost reduction. It's a silicon chip, so the cost of production cannot really go down any faster than the wafer production cost.
How much die area is required per GB, or transistors per GB, and how much more is needed for better speed?
What's the cost per area at 20nm? At 14nm?
How small can they go in the future and will it cost less? When?
They are not selling you blanks. How much time is needed to copy and verify 100GB on a flash chip at the factory? Lead time to have enough supply for launch? Cost of that factory?
They are now having problems with the smaller flash cells at 25nm and 20nm, it's more leaky and is less reliable, it will probably get worse at 14nm and beyond. I don't see the price coming down enough in the next 5 years, let alone by 20x in 2 or 3 years for the big flagship games. They wouldn't even be able to release a direct port of the flagship games from PS3, let alone improved versions with higher res textures and models.
For a price reference, according to iSuppli it costs Apple 40$ for 32GB flash chips. Now please argue that Apple isn't in a position to negotiate the best prices. Prices of dumping overstock are not comparable to ordering millions of chips per month. Current prices for the high speed SD cards is also extremely high.
http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/isuppli-iphone-4s-bom.gif
EDIT: Latest Intel/Micron 8GB MLC at 20nm HKMG is a 118mm^2 chip, planned for late 2012 production, so you need 944mm^2 for a 64GB chip with that latest process. Price is expected to remain high due to demand.
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Right. First, let me know if that flash drive is significantly faster than bluray 6x to 12x.
Second, try to order millions of those per month, with a guaranteed performance, reliability and long term supply over a number of years. The cost of flash is volatile, it follows demand. Demand for the fast chips goes up faster than production capacity.
Considering that a 50GB Plastic disc that takes "seconds" to press is around a dollar i would be shocked if anyone consider it feasible to have 50GB flash games.
You may be 100% correct, but what about those games where it matters? This next round it's not a question about putting "DLC" on a second DVD. Or going with 4 disc games and swapping around.
A big game is going to require space, and if we have games now that require 50GB with the current smalish 512MB memory, then how about next gen. Just put out a 50GB flash based game? or 100GB?
And charge twice the amount compared to smaller games.. it does not make sense.
I tried to explain the rule of the 95th percentile once and how we used it in data facilities and how I saw that related to game storage. I even predicted, and was shown right, how a small percentage of games this generation would use multiple disks and that those that need more would resort to spanning and installation (I did not foresee Day 1 DLC, but that too has been a factor). Storage is not unlike any other bottleneck (shader cycles, L2 cache, RAM, etc) but I think the "consumer" difference is it is the one bottleneck they touch and some get very uneasy seeing developers hit the limit and being "constrained" by such. For as much talk about how optical drives have "held back" the industry this generation the same folks never put as much emphasis on other bottlenecks.
I totally agree that at 50GB for next generation it will be an artificial bottleneck for most. Cost alone will prohibit many from fill such. The horrid *real* transfer speeds will be a major stalemate. A lot of games will pack games with major redundancy to address the technical limitations, thus filling space that artificially makes the game sound larger. And those who truly do begin hitting the limits will resort to older techniques of packing denser instead of a lot of redundant data. What that fails they will disk span, or just as likely, offer Day 1 DLC and use it as a means to tie the title to a user (allowing a money grab on the used sale). And yet we will hear the same arguments how if one chose 25GB they hold developers back versus the 50GB models, all along while the consoles totally throttle developers with a measly 2GB of memory--2GB because the optical drive is toooo sloooooow to justify mooooore. But oh now, it will be the low optical storage keeping developers down
I've already posted some
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extre...6G-A21/dp/B003D5MY5I/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
$25 bucks gets you 16 gigs of flash that writes around 30MB/s
Thats between a 6x and 8x drive speed for a bluray.
Oh yea and those sd cards hit in 2010
This newer guy costs more of course
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extre...?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1334146743&sr=1-22
16 gigs for $50 but your also getting read speeds around 85MB/s according to benchmark reviews by buyers.
A 12x bluray drive will transfer at 54MB/s
Now i know your going to claim thats to expensive , but look at the first card , it released in january of 2010. The 16 gig card was $195 at launch and here we are 2 years later and its sitting at $25 .
Each generation of flash will get faster and larger
The 360's disc space has been static for much of the generation and even when it did increase it was by less than 1GB of space.
Flash will continue to double in size and costs will continue to shrink. Perhaps in the first half of the generation games will be limited to 16GB / 32 GB sizes but in the second half we could see 64GB /128GB and larger sizes becoming avalible.
Aside from that, what game actually requires 50GB and isn't a game filled with uncompressed sound for cut scenes , diffrent languages and tons of redudant data to make up for slow drive acess times ?
So what will the cost be in 2014? $10, versus a $0.50 BRD. $5 for 16 GBs when games are feeling the pinch at 20GB BRDs? Midway through the generation, flash may be quite economical, but at the beginning it is going to cost. Of course, not spending on hardware inside the machines will offset some of that.
No, it's $25 for dumping old stock, which is slower than bluray anyway.
$50 for a fast 16GB card (listed at $160). It would be 400$ for a blank 128GB versus maybe $2 for a pressed BDXL 128GB.
If you have the volume of Apple, according to iSuppli you pay over $1 per GB. What new production technology do you think will exist to drastically reduce the price in the future... by a factor of 20 to 100? I can't see any, and still I think it will follow the chip production cost per die area.
Apple probably don't use TLC chips. However, if you just want a mostly read-only media then TLC is fine. Current TLC contract price is well below US$1 per GB (~US$8 for a 128Gb chip). But even MLC is not that expensive now (IIRC it's ~US$10 for a 128Gb chip). SLC remains very expensive, of course.
This is like saying a 33cl coke has stayed the same size until the raised the size of the can to 44cl
It is NOT a surprise that 360 games isn't bigger.. they just can't get any bigger.
GT5 takes up about 20GB on my harddrive, and it still loads from the disc. Those 20GB is hardly redundant and the sound on the harddrive is unlikely to be uncompressed since it has to fit in the memory.
GT5 is a semi late PS3 game, there is no reason why a launch game on the PS4/720 should stay at the same size, unless the media doesn't hold anymore data. And that is a game on a 512 MB Console that doesn't even have maxed out graphics for every car in the game.
And do you expect Forza 5 to fit on a 16GB flash cart? with at least 8 times the memory available for textures and sounds? It would be a sure way to compromise your hardware by forcing N64 texture compressing instead of letting the hardware shine.
One thing is for sure, Flash will make it much easier for the Optical side to secure exclusives games like Final Fantasy. And launch games will be compromised for great profit justice.
TLC will provide ultimately a 33% reduction in cost per die area versus MLC. I'm looking for a 20x reduction.
Nobody is using TLC right now, despite it being available. Compared to MLC, reliability issues rise exponentially, and shelf life is as low as four years, and this will get worse as we go smaller, because the cells will be more leaky. All that for 33% improvement.
2012 paper about the future of nand flash:
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf
This paper contains price projection for SLC, MLC and TLC. In fact is contains everything to answer the 65 pages of cyclic arguments about flash cost, performance and future.
Nobody is using TLC right now, despite it being available. Compared to MLC, reliability issues rise exponentially, and shelf life is as low as four years, and this will get worse as we go smaller, because the cells will be more leaky. All that for 33% improvement.
2012 paper about the future of nand flash:
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf
This paper contains price projection for SLC, MLC and TLC. In fact is contains everything to answer the 65 pages of cyclic arguments about flash cost, performance and future.
