New high speed memory format

[Jjoshua2]

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0704/07041601sxsmemorycardformat.asp

Sandisk is making a new flash memory format that is native pci-express for video. The target transfer speed of SxS? memory cards is 800 megabits per second. So how fast is this compared to gigabyte i-ram, a raptor, and system memory?

 

[Matthias99]

Slow. PC3200 DDR RAM is 200Mhz * 64 bits * 2 (DDR), for 3200 megabytes per second (that is, 3.2GBps; 800Mbps is only 0.1GBps). Dual-channel RAM doubles that again. I-RAM is, IIRC, using single-channel PC3200 RAM (or maybe PC2100), but in any case it's still way faster.

A hard drive can normally read or write ~50-80 megabytes per second (or about 400-700Mbps), but the latency is very high compared to flash memory or DRAM.

 

[Jjoshua2]

Ok, so this would be like a Raptor 2.0, but not a competitor to i-ram. However, it's data would not be lost with an electrical outage right?

 

[myocardia]

No, it isn't anything like any hard drive. It's exactly like a Compact Flash card, only it can hold more data. And no, it doesn't need power to retain what's in it's memory banks, just like every other memory card ever made-- which is most of the reason why it's so slow, compared to HD's and system RAM.