van der Waals' radius of silicon is 0.21 nm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon so current 19nm process nodes are already 45 atoms wide, there simply isn't much room for improvement left.
and it looks even deader for Flash than it does for CPU's, as ever finer processes are already producing ever slower and less reliable Flash cells. Those can be, and certainly are, mitigated by ever more extensive read/write parallelization and error correction in the controller, but only so much. "The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications" is a nice way to say that write performance sucks, relatively speaking.
So, if the semiconductor industry won't come up with something unheard of (which it just might, given the scale of the stakes involved) this might be one of the last radical upgrades available.
van der Waals' radius of silicon is 0.21 nm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon so current 19nm process nodes are already 45 atoms wide, there simply isn't much room for improvement left.
and it looks even deader for Flash than it does for CPU's, as ever finer processes are already producing ever slower and less reliable Flash cells. Those can be, and certainly are, mitigated by ever more extensive read/write parallelization and error correction in the controller, but only so much. "The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications" is a nice way to say that write performance sucks, relatively speaking.
So, if the semiconductor industry won't come up with something unheard of (which it just might, given the scale of the stakes involved) this might be one of the last radical upgrades available.