SD 8.0 Specification To Allow 4GB/s Transfer Rates By Leveraging PCIe 4.0

[uid313]

Cheaper phones come with SD card slots to compensate the lack of internal storage. Modern 100-500 Megapixel smart phone cameras will produce gigantic photos, especially RAW files.

500 megapixel doesn't exist. Currently the best are 108 megapixel cameras and they are only in the flagship phones. These phones usually come with 128-256 GB storage. I think these phones does not have support for SD storage.

Some cheaper phones may still have support for SD storage, but they don't have these kinds of high resolution cameras.

[Guest]

500 megapixel doesn't exist. Currently the best are 108 megapixel cameras and they are only in the flagship phones. These phones usually come with 128-256 GB storage. I think these phones does not have support for SD storage.

Some cheaper phones may still have support for SD storage, but they don't have these kinds of high resolution cameras.

A decade ago, or tiny bit more, even 1MP camera on phone was a huge feature. Nowadays, it's common to have 48MP or at least 20MP on the majority of phones. I don't doubt, that there will be 192MP cameras quite soon.

Also, portable consoles, like Nintendo Switch would benefit from having capability to extend storage supporting very high transfer speed, ie. loading, which is occasional, not sustained load,.. or even caching some computed things on SD card for very fast game loads.

[uid313]

A decade ago, or tiny bit more, even 1MP camera on phone was a huge feature. Nowadays, it's common to have 48MP or at least 20MP on the majority of phones. I don't doubt, that there will be 192MP cameras quite soon.

Also, portable consoles, like Nintendo Switch would benefit from having capability to extend storage supporting very high transfer speed, ie. loading, which is occasional, not sustained load,.. or even caching some computed things on SD card for very fast game loads.

Rumors are that Samsung is working on a 200 megapixel camera and have expressed desire to develop a 500 megapixel camera.

I guess this is only relevant for Nintendo Switch and DSLR cameras. But will the existing Nintendo Switch benefit from the upcoming SD 8.0 cards?

[lethalwp]

These will overheat and throttle like nobody's business.

With the exception of one, every USB3 memory stick I have gives amazing read and writes for <20 seconds, but any sort of sustain for either results in absolutely ludicrous drops in performance.

That's the write cache effect of your OS.
Once your system memory is full with what to write, the system will fall back to the real speed of your drive.

If it is linux, you can also confirm this with "sync", once this command finishes, all the memory data has been flushed to your drive.

[Guest]

I guess this is only relevant for Nintendo Switch and DSLR cameras. But will the existing Nintendo Switch benefit from the upcoming SD 8.0 cards?

No,.. But, having this standard released could make Nintendo Switch 2 (if it ever gets released) to support it, even if cards will came later.

[coder]

Otherwise, I'd be more than happy to have an external PCIe bus for cheap, unlike ©Intel Thunderbolt™, which will cost a few hundred $s just to have a single device connected.

Thunderbolt is better known as DisplayPort 2.0 / USB4 and is now royalty-free.

[coder]

This is almost pointless. By their nature, SD cards are limited to a small number of very dense (read: slow, QLC) chips. Plus, there's what everyone has been saying about thermal-throttling.

And PCIe 4.0 is power-hungry, as would be any flash controller that could hope to saturate it, which is obviously an issue for portable devices.

So, I do wonder if it's not truly motivated by non-flash use cases.

[Paradigm Shifter]

That's the write cache effect of your OS.
Once your system memory is full with what to write, the system will fall back to the real speed of your drive.

If it is linux, you can also confirm this with "sync", once this command finishes, all the memory data has been flushed to your drive.

Hm. Possible. I will check that I disabled write caching (I usually do) and that it actually is disabled (since one system is Windows, and Windows likes to ignore explicit instructions sometimes)... I find write caching on removable drives to be a pain, largely because I've had people go, "Oh, it's copied!" *pulls out USB stick*. Then get angry at me when they are at fault for their data not being there.

It's that one drive behaving differently I mentioned which further leads me to believe that it's nothing to do with write caching and everything to do with the drives overheating - aside from the fact that under sustained load they get to temperatures actually uncomfortable to touch.

Anyway, it's a good idea to check, cheers.

[caligula]

500 megapixel doesn't exist.

It does: https://petapixel.com/2020/04/21/sam...the-human-eye/

Following the same logic, SD 8.0 doesn't exist either. I went to a store few months ago and didn't see any handhelds with SD 8.0 slots. Same thing one year ago. Hint: this article discusses future technology.

Currently the best are 108 megapixel cameras and they are only in the flagship phones.

Actually a 192 MP phone is rumored to appear in the coming weeks https://dazeinfo.com/2020/04/17/the-...far-from-over/

Some cheaper phones may still have support for SD storage, but they don't have these kinds of high resolution cameras.

Simply put, the main reason is, larger cameras require tons of processing power. Those cheaper SoCs don't support high megapixel count cameras yet, but it's easy to predict that the next gen mid level SoCs will adopt these technologies. This has already been the trend for years.

[kcrudup]

These will overheat and throttle like nobody's business.

I just had to 2nd what lethalwp said- it's not thermal throttling, but a phenomenon of both your system's cache and the cache on the device. If you run:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=8M oflag=direct status=progress of=/dev/<flash device>

You'll see the speed will drop really quickly at the beginning as the on-device cache is filled, then settle to the underlying flash media's true write thruput speed- which tends to be pretty crap on most cheap cards due to the storage they use. I have Micro-SD cards that do sustained writes at ~4MByte/sec and others that can do ~35MByte/sec.