China scientists develop flash memory 10,000× faster than current tech

This article appeared in my feed just above another article about how China has the world's first operational thorium reactor. Meanwhile, the US is about to fight a civil war over whether vaccination causes measles and stripping away the last of our social programs in order to get our wealthiest people another 2% subsidy.
- Fuck the idiotic Americans that won't bother to immunize, never mind understanding science as a whole.

China scientists
So, Chinese scientists?
- Probably because is an ethnicity and nationality. There are ethnic Chinese people all over the world and a few countries and regions are made of a majority of ethnic Chinese but are not related to China. Calling them the same thing is playing into the PRC's "all ethnic Chinese pledge their allegiance to China" nonsense.
- I think it's a slightly different connotation. "China scientists" infers scientists residing in China while not presuming their ethnicity, while "Chinese scientists" implies their ethnicity but not their location.
  
  You literally never hear "America scientists" even if some of them might be from another country. Same with every single other country I can think of, except China.
- Real talk, why is discussion around people and subjects in China so fucking weird?
  If it's not referring to the entire population when it only applies to the government or a subset of them as a global "the Chinese" or doing silly shit like "China scientists" everyone's grammatical skills suddenly tank when even broaching a topic even tangential to the PRC.
- No they are people who study the China Science.
- No, it's people who study fine tableware.
- Seriously, for me a "China scientist" is someone doing research on China, like a space scientist would do research on astronomy and similar. But I'm not a native English speaker, so, idk
  
  Someone doing research on China is a chiologist.
  Same as someone doing research on biology is a biologist.
  
  The wording of the headline would be different if it were trying to convey that.
- Me stutter? No think so!
  
  Him legend.

Yeah, but endurance. and accuracy. and longevity. How about those?
- And price and maye write more than 1 single bit

Link to the actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08839-w
The repro and verification will take time. Months or even years. Don't trust anyone who says it's definitely real or definitely bunk. Time will tell.
- Speaking of, did you hear there's a new room temperature super conductor?
- Damn. I just pulled all my stock out quantum computing and thru it all into this…
  
  Easy when you have zero

By tuning the “Gaussian length” of the channel, the team achieved two‑dimensional super‑injection, which is an effectively limitless charge surge into the storage layer that bypasses the classical injection bottleneck.
- Which episode of Star Trek is this from?
  
  The one where there's a problem with the holodeck.
- They're just copying the description of the turbo encabulator.

Clickbait article with some half truths. A discovery was made, it has little to do with Ai and real world applications will be much, MUCH more limited than what's being talked about here, and will also likely still take years to come out
- The key word is China, let us not kid ourselves. Otherwise it would be just another pop sci click but now it can be an ammunition in the fight with imperialist degenerated west or some bs like that

AI AI AI AI
Yawn
Wake me up if they figure out how to make this cheap enough to put in a normal person's server.
- normal person’s server.
  I’m pretty sure I speak for the majority of normal people, but we don’t have servers.
  
  Yeah, when you're a technology enthusiast, it's easy to forget that your average user doesn't have a home server - perhaps they just have a NAS or two.
  (Kidding aside, I wish more people had NAS boxes. It's pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives. In a good day. I do have a USB floppy drive and a DVD drive just in case.)
  
  Ikr...Dude thinks we're restaurants or something.
  
  You... you don't? Surely there's some mistake, have you checked down the back of your cupboard? Sometimes they fall down there. Where else do you keep your internet?
  Appologies, I'm tired and that made more sense in my head.
- You can get a Coral TPU for 40 bucks or so.
  You can get an AMD APU with a NN-inference-optimized tile for under 200.
  Training can be done with any relatively modern GPU, with varying efficiency and capacity depending on how much you want to spend.
  What price point are you trying to hit?
  
  What price point are you trying to hit?
  With regards to AI?. None tbh.
  With this super fast storage I have other cool ideas but I don't think I can get enough bandwidth to saturate it.

Too bad the US can't import any of it.
- they can if they pay 6382538% tariffs.
  or was it 29403696%?
  
  “These chips are 10,000 times faster, therefore we will increase our tariffs to 10,100%!”

Does flash, like solid state drives, have the same lifespan in terms of write? If so, it feels like this would most certainly not be useful for AI, as that use case would involve doing billions/trillions of writes in a very short span of time.
Edit: It looks like they do: https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/life-expectancy-of-a-drive/
Manufacturers say to expect flash drives to last about 10 years based on average use. But life expectancy can be cut short by defects in the manufacturing process, the quality of the materials used, and how the drive connects to the device, leading to wide variations. Depending on the manufacturing quality, flash memory can withstand between 10,000 and a million [program/erase] cycles.
- For AI processing, I don't think it would make much difference if it lasted longer. I could be wrong, but afaik, running the actual transformer for AI is done in VRAM, and staging and preprocessing is done in RAM. Anything else wouldn't really make sense speed and bandwidth wise.
  
  Oh I agree, but the speeds in the article are much faster than any current volatile memory. So it could theoretically be used to vastly expand memory availability for accelerators/TPUs/etc for their onboard memory.
  I guess if they can replicate these speeds in volatile memory and increase the buses to handle it, then they'd be really onto something here for numerous use cases.

Brother, have you heard of buses? Even INSIDE cpus/socs bus speeds are a limitation. Also i fucking hate how the first thing people mention now is how ai could benefit from a jump in computing power.
Edit: I havent dabbled that much in high speed stuff yet but isnt the picosecond range so fast that the capacitance of simple traces and connectors between chips influence the rising and falling edge of chips?
- That's pretty much my understanding. Most of the advancements happened in memory speeds are related to the physical proximity of the memory and more efficient transmission/decoding.
  GDDR7 chips for example are packed as close as physically possible to the GPU die, and have insane read speeds of 28 Gbps/pin (and a 5090 has a 512-bit bus). Most of the limitation is the connection between GPU and RAM, so speeding up the chips internally 1000x won't have a noticeable impact without also improving the memory bus.

Wow, finally graphene has been cracked. Exciting times for portable low-energy computing

This sounds like that material would be more useful in high performance radars, not as flash memory
- It‘s likely BS anyway. Maybe it’s just me but reading about another crazy breakthrough from China every single day during this trade war smells fishy. Because I‘ve seen the exact same propaganda strategy during the pandemic when relations between China and the rest of the world weren‘t exactly the best. A lot of those headlines coming from there are just claims about flashy topics with very little substance or second guessing. And the papers releasing the stories aren‘t exactly the most renowned either.
  
  It's definitely possible they're amplifying these developments to maintain confidence in the Chinese market, but I doubt they're outright lying about the discoveries. I think it's also likely that some of what they've been talking about has been in development for a while and that China is choosing now to make big reveals about them.

Is that fast enough to put an LLM in swap and have decent performance?
- Note that this in theory speaks to performance of a non volatile memory. It does not speak to cost.
  We already have a faster than NAND non volatile storage in phase change memory . It failed due to expense.
  If this thing is significantly more expensive even than RAM, then it may fail even if it is everything it says it is. If it is at least as cheap as ram, it'll be huge since it is faster than RAM and non volatile.
  Swap is indicated by cost, not by non volatile characteristics.

- Whatis?
  
  I don't remember the scene but it looks like memory from an Android. Not sparkly enough for star trek, maybe terminator 2?

Well, I'll never see it, unless TI or another American company designs their own version.
- Or they can do what they normally do, steal it and then sue to be considered the original invento/founder and then make a Hollywood film about how they invented it/found it.
  
  It's called an iPod, it's not an mp3 player.
  They are called airpods, they are not earbuds.