Intel's 1 GB phone

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.theregus.com/content/3/26676.html">http://www.theregus.com/content/3/26676.html</a><br /><br />Interesting article - it's becoming quickly apparent that the amount of storage that future devices will have far outstrips the average ability of someone to fill them. Unless we start thinking outside the box that is - I wonder if with 1 GB on my phone I'd even need a local hard drive for my critical data? Sure, you can fill up 1 GB quickly with music and video, but that's plenty of space for documents. If Bluetooth offered more bandwidth, I could imagine keeping my important documents on my phone and working off it at my desktop PC like it was a local hard drive. Then imagine sitting down at a public terminal and doing the same thing - your data is always with you.<br /><br />"Intel yesterday announced what it described to us as "a Flash sandwich" - the first 1.8V flash memory allowing four 256 MB modules to be integrated with an XScale to create 1GB of code and data in a phone. That's a lot of memory for a phone. Such phones won't be appearing until later next year, it's safe to assume. Intel has yet to announce a Tier1 design win for XScale, but the StrataFlash package is already sampling with volume production promised for next year."<br /><br /><b>UPDATE:</b> I was led astray...it's 1 Gigabit, not 1 Gigabyte. 1 Gigabit is 0.125 Gigabytes, or 125 MB. Bah! Boring! :evil:

[alexjlee]

thats 1Gb not 1GB
gibabits not bytes.....

[WillyG]

I could imagine keeping my important documents on my phone and working off it at my desktop PC like it was a local hard drive. Then imagine sitting down at a public terminal and doing the same thing - your data is always with you."

...and finally imagine someone steal it. :wink:

But seriously 8O Thats a lot of storage. But i will not say its to much. Everytime i upgrade my harddrives i keep thinking "im never going to be able to use up this space"
And everytime im mistaken. I thought the same when i came back from the Palm side of the fence, from a 8MB PalmVx (after owning a Casiopeia E10 with 4MB before that) to a 64MB iPAQ, needles to say, i was wrong again.

EDIT: :lol: -> :) -> 8O -> :oops:
But its still not that bad

[Jason Dunn]

thats 1Gb not 1GB
gibabits not bytes.....

DOH! 8O The Register just posted a correction to their article about it being 1 Gigabit...it wasn't there when I posted the article. :oops:

[vincentsiaw]

i relief it's not 1 gigabyte, if it is i regret buying the ipaq 3900... just to be beaten by a phone..

[jlp]

since the year 2000 you can store 1 GB of data in a postage stamp-sized Microdrive.

Just take a pocketable CF adapter with you and you can access all your data from any computer equipped with a USB port. And that's on top of your CF slot fitted PocketPC as well.

And Sandisk, SimpleTech and probably others have 1 GB flash CF-I cards too. You can have them from $250 for the Microdrive and from $600 for the flash card.

(And it's most certainly 128 MB and not 125)

[Jason Dunn]

since the year 2000 you can store 1 GB of data in a postage stamp-sized Microdrive.

That wasn't quite the point. :D There's a big difference between having 1 GB of built-in memory on a device vs. having it in a storage card. I had a Microdrive. and in addition to be extremely power hungry mine stopped working just after the one year warranty expired. :evil: It was a very cool concept, but ultimately too power hungry and fragile to compete with solid-state memory.

[Sslixtis]

ok, so this 125Mb is built into the Xscale right? So wouldn't that mean the in the future, for PDAs we would see atleast 125Mb ROM? That would in turn free up more space for increased RAM. More is better as far as I'm concerned :lol:

I know it says for Phones but that is what the Xscale itself was designed for and it is the defacto PDA CPU now as well, so I don't forsee this going only to phones in the future.

And lastly, why am I NOT surprised that the Register had something wrong in thier article? Is it me or does anyone else feel like they are the National Inquirer of the tech world?

[Janak Parekh]

ok, so this 125Mb is built into the Xscale right? So wouldn't that mean the in the future, for PDAs we would see atleast 125Mb ROM? That would in turn free up more space for increased RAM. More is better as far as I'm concerned :lol:
Actually, it's almost certain that the flash memory is not physically built into the XScale packaging. It's "integrable" with the XScale as a solution.

But yes, 64MB or 128MB flash ROM's won't be so surprising in the future. Why would it be? Everything keeps on going up, and PDA's aren't anywhere near Moore's law or its friends... yet. ;)

Hardware is not the issue long-term, software is... we've gone through several generations of handheld hardware and PPC has been relatively unchanged to take advantage of said new hardware. (Palm is even worse...)

--bdj

[rlobrecht]

And lastly, why am I NOT surprised that the Register had something wrong in thier article? Is it me or does anyone else feel like they are the National Inquirer of the tech world?

I'm with you on this one. I'm always wondering if their news is news or a spoof.