The world's first 128Gb NAND Flash Chip

Intel and Micron's latest puts 128 gigabits of storage in a tiny chip designed for use in cellphones, solid-state drives and tablet PCs. By stacking 8 dies, the company says, it'll be able to put a terabit (128GB) of data in an area the size of a fingertip. As the marketing photo reveals, however, it cannot make you better at photoshop. [Intel Newsroom]

• [Cicada Mania]

  I can haz 1 terabyte thumbdrive?

• [Alex Garnett]

  Bits and bytes much?

• [John Spurlin]

  Gigabytes?  Gigabits are 1/8th the size. 

  Also, “latest”.  Perhaps the first sentence could use some proofreading.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Gigabits. 128 gigabits (Gb) per die; 8 stacked therefore make 1 terabit (Tb), which is equivalent to 128 gigabytes (GB).

• [scifijazznik]

  it cannot make you better at photoshop.

  How do you know it doesn’t float half an inch above your finger when you try to hold it?

  It’s a shame that here they have a seriously cool piece of tech and that’s the best they can do.  They should have shooped it next to the invincible gun-wielding scorpion.

• [HahTse]

  If they had touched it with bare finger in the state shown, it would have destroyed this awesome (and at the moment incredibly expensive) piece of tech.

  Seeing that, I can live with a shopped picture.

  Also, microSD-cards give me the creeps.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Upvoted for “Also, microSD-cards give me the creeps.”

• [Lobster]

  My house has terabits.  I had to call the Orkin man.

• [Cicada Mania]

  So, if we wedge 8 of these cards into one thumb-drive, that makes a 1 terabyte thumb-drive, right?

• [nixiebunny]

  In case you’re wondering how densely the transistors are packed, they fit ten of them in one wavelength of visible light. That’s frickin’ magic.

• [Mister44]

  Amazing. In 55 short years we arrive here coming from this:1956: IBM ships the first hard drive in the RAMAC 305 system. The drive holds 5MB of data at $10,000 a megabyte. The system is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch platters.

  • [awjt]

    At the time, it made analysis of fairly large datasets… possible.  Analysis of anything larger than a few thousand rows was theretofore, not really done.  It was absolutely revolutionary in its day.  Now, hardware outpaces data size much of the time.  Complexity is our new master.  Volume, less so.

• [telechi]

  I remember my first gigabyte of storage.  Took up a whole wall of linked drives.  Crazy.

• [Palomino]

  It’s not  floating, there’s 7 others underneath it. 

  I’m don’t know much about electronics, but isn’t this statement false? “The industry’s first monolithic 128Gb part can store 1 Tb of data in a single fingertip-size package with just eight die-a new storage benchmark that meets the ongoing demand for slim, sleek products.”

  Shouldn’t it be: ”Eight of the industry’s first monolithic 128Gb chips can store 1 Tb of data in a single fingertip-size package. With just eight chips, a new storage benchmark can meet  the ongoing demand for slim, sleek products.”

  Then this too needs correction: “Intel and Micron have both confirmed that they will not be using the 128Gb parts in SSDs until 2013.” This means they are a long way off from stacking 8, they don’t have any devices running  ONE 128Gb yet. Currently, their standard is 64Gb, or 8GB. 

  I remember car ads in the late 60′s, early 70′s. The new years model would be positioned next to “a car of the future”, usually a flyer with bubble windows and a trunk that turned into a picnic table and chairs. This reminds me of the same thing. 

  What about the heat?

  • [Lobster]

    It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.

    • [M Carlson]

      Or if you’re in New Orleans (as I saw on a mug for the tourist trade there) “It’s not the heat, its the stupidity”

• [ncinerate]

  My first hard drive held a whopping 428 megabytes. I still have the old brute wired into my home server – it has been in continuous operation for roughly 18 years now and it still works. I’ve never had the heart to stop using it and it’s decided to keep on working. My recent upgrade to a fully SATA motherboard means it’s running off an old PCI IDE card, but it’s still faithfully holding it’s tiny amount of data. No idea when it will finally give up the ghost. 

  Funny side-note. Over the years I’ve had tons of hard-drives. Every time I’ve upgraded the new drive has been so much larger that I’ve just dumped the contents of the old one into a folder called “olddrive” (8 characters long, a legacy of the dos days). Anyway – that meant every new drive ended up with a directory that had all of the old drive info, and in that directory, was another directory holding the previous hard drive, and on and on and on. 18 years of data, recursively stored, going back all the way to that 428 megabyte drive. It’s fascinating to dive in there and dig back a handful of drives, you can basically build a picture of what I was doing on the computer at any given time. It’s like a data-archive of my life. Video, photos, keylogs, sound recordings, BBS files, e-mails, surfing histories, poetry, a half-finished book from my “I’m going to be an author” days, oddball collections of coding (including a self-coded BBS client I used to basically cheat-to-win at tradewars on a local BBS) from my “I’m going to be a programmer” days, my very first installation of netscape navagator, the very first web page and the software I used to build it, games that were popular at that time, and a laughably large collection cataloging the history of porn on the internet. 

  I’d be crushed if I ever lost it. My current setup is insanely fault-tolerant because I’ve come to realize the intrinsic value of the data sitting there. I’ve even considered tossing a bunch of it into the cloud, but it’s just such a personal collection and so impossible to filter that I have a hard time with that idea.

  Was thinking recently about how crazy hard-drive volumes are now easily attainable. Floods in far east cities notwithstanding, my last hard-drive purchase was a 2 TB unit for less than 100$. Consider this for a moment:

  You can store roughly 140 minutes of video (2.33 hours) at DVD quality (xvid) per gigabyte of space. That means you could carry around a dvd-quality camera and use it 24 hours a day, and only use 10 gigabytes per day. Recording video non-stop 24 hours a day at DVD quality, you would fill that 2TB drive in 200 days. Perhaps more impressively, an entire day would basically fit on one of those tiny cheap throw-away thumb drives or an SD memory card. If you only recorded the time you were awake, you could easily cover an ENTIRE year of your life and it would all fit on that one tiny little 2TB drive. In fact, you could very nearly cover an entire year of data shot from 2 cameras (for 3d playback). Obviously there is more to consider (for example, running a dvd-quality camcorder 24/7 would require some significant battery purchases to handle the times away from an outlet), but it could be done on today’s technology, and it could be done cheaply. I’d bet you could easily set up for a year of continuous video recording on a sub-1000$ budget. 

  5000$-7000 worth of consumer-available retail hard-drive space in -today- dollars and -today- technology could store someones entire life from birth until death. That little chip on his finger up there could store roughly 25 days (waking hours) of your life in DVD quality.

  • [pKp]

    Yeah, it’s mind-blowing, really. What you’re describing is actually being done by some people, who call it “life-logging”. The problem here isn’t data capture or storage, it’s actually searching/indexing (want to recall your first date with your future wife 10 years later ? Hope you’ve got a good memory for dates, or you’re hosed).

    Another mind-blowing factoid: the Apollo Guidance Computer they used to put a freaking man on the moon had less that 50 kB of internal memory. You can’t even find memory units that small anymore.

• [joeinhell]

  Damn I get a hardon when I think about 1 megabite, you suckers have 1+ terrabysts avaiable to you and you don’t use it.  Of couse, I’m from the anciet times of Hollorith cards and paper tape back up.

• [BarBarSeven]

  I need that on an iPhone. NOW!

• [Jayarava]

  For the other non geeks the small b = bits, and the large B = bytes. 1 Byte = 8 bits. So one chip can store 128 Gb (gigabits) and 8 can store 1024 Gb or 1 Tb (terabit). But a B = 8b so the 8 chips will store 128 GB (gigabytes). But as someone has already pointed out they haven’t yet made a commercially available storage device with one chip yet, so don’t get too excited.

• [Gluck]

  It seems i don’t need one, but many people like it, right?