Re: How would you steer Delphi if you were Nick?

Perhaps you are able to listen to more marketing speeches than I do but AFAICT ReadyBoost is just as widely and loudly hyped as ever as one of the bright new features of Vista to improve performance.

Well somehow I must have evaded the loud hype, because I didn't knew its "ReadyBoost" name ;)

If it is as likely to cause failure and kill memory cards as you imply I'm sure that Microsoft wouldn't take the risk of including a non-critical feature that would subject Vista in a year or so to be tagged as the operating system that turns into a killer. Just doesn't make sense.

Wouldn't be the first time. Wouldn't be the last either.

[...]Samsong for instance acknowledges limited life of their existing flash
> memory technology and has said they are able to "design around
> the problem".

Since nothing was trumpeted recently on this front, a safe bet is to assume they're referring to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling

Which is only truly effective on flash if you have lots of freespace, and/or regularly empty most of the space (common usage pattern in cameras and USB keys).

As for evolving technology, recently Samsung announced their new PRam technology claimed to have a life expectancy 10 time longer and be 30 times faster than conventional flash memory and be able to write data without first having to first erase it.

You read the announcement a little too fast ;)
The key here is what they call "conventional flash memory", especially since the only tech they name is NOR flash, and if you're 30x faster than NOR flash, you might actually be close to the performance level of NAND flash, see f.i.
http://www.edn.com/article-partner/CA6256966.html

As for the life expectancy, they didn't give much details just yet as to what they meant (data retention? write cycles?) neither did they say which flash technology they were comparing PRAM to AFAIK.
Also, consider that their PRAM comes in chips of 64MB, while NAND flash achieves chips of 1GB, so there may be other issues...

Eric
.

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