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To: Justa Werkenstiff who wrote (14988)	7/22/1998 11:57:00 AM
From: Andrew Vance	Respond to of 17305

AV -- All of the ones you list are in that group so you are on target. The larger the drive, at the same cost will lead to the DRAM issue real fast. At 4 Gig capacity (and lets say $200), you would want to have a RAID set up with 5 drives for close to 20Gig total(no redundancy) or as protection for the oodles of data stored that is history if the disk crashes. Then you would want to upgrade down the road. This is good business for chip suppliers, HD suppliers, head suppliers, RAID hardware/software suppliers. BUT NO!! They haven't learned from the DRAM debacle. You can now buy an 11 Gig drive for the same price you bought a 3 Gig drive about a year ago. Pretty soon you will totally eliminated the need for dual drive systems or even upgrade drives. Shrink and shrink and shrink and you extend the upgrade and obsolete replacement cycle. Couple this with the impetus to under $1000 PCs and you find the Drive and CPU to make up the bulk of the price. DRAMs-Very succinctly, you have a capacity, measured in square centimeters of silicon that can be manufactured. If you shrink the size of the die you get more die per wafer. You actually get more than the incrmeental % decrease in size. The smaller the die size the less % of the die are defective due to the finite number of defects induced in the process. Even if defect density shoiuld increase as you shrink devices, the process is usually improved enough to actually reduce defect densities. Couple this device shrink with increasing device densities (64K vs 256K DRAMs) and you get a double whammy. You do not need as many memory chips to provide the RAM memory desired for a PC and you will need less SIMM/DIMM modules. Remember the days of 4 SIMM modules to a bank, then 2 SIMMs per bank, now 1 SIMM/DIMM per bank. Do the math. Over time we went from 8 SIMM slots with 9 chips per SIMM module (parity) for a total of 72 DRAMs per Motherboard. We are now close to 2 DIMM modules with up to 16 chips per module but with most of them being only 8 chips per module. I am willing to bet that this goes down to 3 chips per module as they mix high capacity RAMs together like they did at the lower meory levels. As I said before, when the 256Meg DRAM chip becomes mainstream, you will need, at most, 16 chips to create 512M onboard RAM. That is way too much for 95% of the world's population today. Even if there is a use developed for it, by that time you have the 1 Gig chip where only 8 are needed to give you 1Gig of RAM. Astronomical!!!! Less and less chips needed for mainstream products due to density and die shrinks. That means less wafers needed. Now for the bright side. There will be new uses for the DRAMs developed that could pick up part of the slack. As of yet, I do not have a handle on it. For instance though, what about a Video Card with 64Mb onboard VRAM RAM. What about 1 Gig PCMCIA credit card size memory Cards for data storage that fits in your wallet<GG>. In other words, how about your entire medical and financial history on a PCMCIA card that would eliminate files, check books, etal. What about entire movies or music CDs on a chip. The list is endless. Whether it is EPROMs, SRAMs, SDRAMs, etc, someone will eventually find a use for the massive amount of memory available in such a small volume of space. With this said, all these neat ideas come at an expense. Theoretcially, I could use 1 Gig chips to build a 50Gig drive the size of a pack of cigarettes and eliminate some of the I/O speed issues associated with HD device. After all, you go from ms(milliseconds) to ns(nanoseconds). Okay, so this all seems like a drug induced hallucination<GGG>. But 50 years ago you would might have been committed if you said man would walk on the moon. Even today UFOs are considered the realm of the lunatics. But what if one UFO lands in plain sight. Most of us would give up drinking and still not admit to it<GGG>. The possibilities are limitless. However, I believe the technology is outpacing the need and ability to implement these advances fast enough as not to create a gap in the supply/demand equation. As we go half the distance to the door repeatedly from 100 yards, there is no real need to do this process more than 7 times before you can clearly see through the door. Manufacturing capabilities are outpacing the needs and we need to regroup. We have to develop more uses for what we have and not try to make something better. I do not need a computer to balance my checkbook but guess where the check register is located.<GGG> Okay, the drugs have worn off. Andrew