Chips and Speed

The beat goes on.....Engadget reports that Samsung's latest flash memories have reached 20 nanometers--I frankly don't know how small that is but it is really really small. And remember, smaller geometries in semiconductors leads to a faster, cheaper and smaller/denser (i.e., pack more in a small package) device. They report:

Let it sink in, 20 nanometers. It wasn't that long ago when 45-nm manufacturing processes were all the rage. Now we've got Samsung following Toshiba with a sub-25nm flash memory announcement all its own. Samsung's 20-nm class 32Gb (gigabit) MLC NAND is sampling now, however, for use in embedded memory solutions and SD memory cards ranging from 4GB to 64GB. In addition to increasing densities and decreasing manufacturing costs, Samsung's 20-nm class NAND is claimed to be more reliable and 30 percent faster than the 30-nm MLC chips forming the core of its existing 8GB and higher SD cards. That translates to cheaper class 10 (20MBps read, 10MBps write) SD cards when these ship to consumers later this year -- always a good thing.

And speaking of Korea, Gigaom reports on the finding of Akamai (a content distribution company), which shows that Korea (again) has the world's fastest networks per the chart below. And the world's fastest mobile networks are in......Austria, followed by Russia, Italy and Poland.