In Silicon Valley for this week’s Flash Memory Summit. Looking forward to meeting flash heavies from Intel, Micron and some startups.

Flash’s impact on architecture is entering a new phase. On the consumer side shipping 3-bit MLC will drive cost down and adoption up. That’s the volume side of the market that keeps multi-billion dollar fabs busy. And a headache for drive vendors.

On the system side the quick-easy-cheap SSD swap-ins are joined by products that capitalize on flash benefits at a deeper level. A little non-volatility can go a long way in making current products faster-better-cheaper.

The StorageMojo take
There have been some teasing pre-summit emails that intrigue. NVDIMMS?

It looks like flash prices have started declining again. Good news for broader adoption, especially on the consumer side. 3-bit MLC will accelerate that.

Hope to see greater advantage taken of increasing flash storage capacities: as capacities increase the importance of write-cycles declines. I’ll be looking for other creative takes on flash today.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.