Samsung ships 16Gb flash chips

Samsung on Monday began shipping the world's first ever 16 gigabit flash memory. Originally sampled in March, the new memory is built on a 51 nanometer process that shrinks the storage enough to allow 16 gigabytes on a typical memory card. The shortened traces combined with processing data in larger chunks also greatly speeds up transfers compared to earlier large-capacity flash, according to Samsung's estimates. Where today's flash reads at 17MB per second and writes at 4.4MB, the new technology nearly doubles that claim to 30MB/sec reads and 8MB/sec writes.

Though no partners have been announced, the shipment has ramifications for the near future of portable media players, music phones, and higher-end digtital cameras that may use as much as the full 16GB. Notably, however, Apple has reportedly ordered a large amount of memory from Samsung and other suppliers for future iPhone and iPod devices to be released in the second half of the year.