Comments on: Virident Makes Flash Memory Go Green

By: vicaya

vicaya — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:41:23 +0000

It’s NOR, as the Virident folks told me. I wonder what’s the percentage of power is being used by RAM in a typical computer system though. I imagine it to be much smaller than CPU and hard drives. Remember their special memory controller uses additional power as well.

They’re in a weird cost/benefit space.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:26:50 +0000

@ Tony,

Thanks for the comment and pointing out my misuse of language in describing the flash. I wrote about the MirrorBit a paragraph down so my bad for not being clear.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:21:26 +0000

Actually, my impression is that Virident’s technology can’t use “vanilla Flash” because vanilla flash (especially NAND) can’t do a good enough DRAM impression – it requires Spansion’s MirrorBit technology.

Dameon – note that there are many different kinds of flash with different characteristics (SLC NOR, MLC NOR, SLC NAND, MLC NAND, etc). NOR memory has much better endurance than NAND (typically > 100K cycles) and much smaller block size. There are various solutions to the flash write endurance (and speed) problem – I’d like see what Virident’s solution is.

By: Dameon Welch-Abernathy

Dameon Welch-Abernathy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:20:29 +0000

The one problem they need to fix with Flash memory is the number of rewrites that’s allowed before the memory “breaks.” Try and install (and run) Windows on a flash drive, you’ll burn it out a matter of days!