ARM Community: A memorable week – Flash memory summit and a wedding - ARM Community

This week is turning out to be a truly “memorable” week.. Smart mobile devices that capture my memories and the thought leadership at Flash Memory Summit collided to bring me some interesting insight. It started off for me with a bout of wedding planning as my niece is getting married this Saturday. Indian weddings are designed to be memorable, not only because they are colorful, chaotic and noisy, but because they tend to last for days. So you might imagine the planning for these weddings is also colorful, chaotic and noisy and this week we have tried to create new memories by trying to relive old ones and what I mean by this is collecting pictures of the bride and groom from birth to current day for us to remember what has brought them to this memorable event, their wedding.

The process of planning the wedding, got me thinking about how much memory, these memories are going to take to capture.. pun intended.. and in general how much flash memory was going to be in attendance at this wedding through people with their smartphones, digital cameras and video cameras. I figured that of the 400 guests at least 200 iphones (average 8GB = 200*8GB= 1.6TB) would be present and at least another 100 other smartphones of at least 4GB of memory each(100*4GB=0.4TB). Plus at least 100 cameras (4GB *100=0.4TB) and 5 (120GB*5=0.6TB) video cameras not counting the pro who probably accounts for at least 2*120GB=0.32TB video cameras and 32GB of photos. So all in all this would be a 3 TB wedding and even going beyond that when you consider how these images are going to be distributed...

This week I also chaired a session at the Flash Memory Summit on SSDs. Some interesting notes about the summit. Attendance was up 60% from last year and compared to last year. At the last show there was a lot of PowerPoint, this year there was a lot of data and deployment examples on SSDs. Some people were predicting that 10 Million SSDs had been shipped this year.. I personally think this number is a little optimistic . I would expect to see more like 5 Million SSDs this year. One of the most interesting presentations that I got to hear was from Chris Bross from Drive Savers, a data recovery company.

The reason this presentation struck a personal chord with me was that this year we almost lost all our family photographs and actually paid quite a hefty sum to recover them.. and it was worth every penny. The presentation at the summit focused on the infancy of SSDs at least as IT deployment is concerned and how we don’t know what kind of problems we may encounter.. ie. “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Chris Bross said, that he came to the Flash Memory Summit specifically to issue a call to action to the SSD design community to ensure that they design a better product to help IT folks like him better support their customers. One of the key points that he made was that these days the secret sauce is really in the controller. The controller architecture is key to not only performance but also providing better reliability, endurance and recoverability. As NAND geometries shrink and host interface speeds climb (PCIe and next generation SATA etc.) the burden on the control processor is just going to keep going up! Already multicore architectures are the mainstay and many heterogeneous cores are coming. They key thing that I took away is that from an architecture selection standpoint, controller designers need a variety of cores ranging in performance and with reliability features like ECC, but more importantly, these cores have to play nicely together..that is where ARM’s total story around our cores, Coresight debug and AMBA/AHB story deliver the total package!

So this again got my thoughts back to the wedding.. in Indian weddings, given the complexity of the ceremonies and rituals, the length, and of course the extended family, it really takes a lot of different elements, ideas and family members to work together to pull off the individual events the make up the entire wedding. Sound familiar? Well now I am now off to create a lot of memories.

Lakshmi Mandyam, Enterprise Segment Marketing Manager, ARM, is thrilled to be working on products and technologies that she can excitedly point to when she is out and about with her family. At ARM she is delighted to be able to change people’s perceptions about being able to deliver high performance enterprise solutions in a energy efficient mobile power profile.

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