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Mr. NANDs Wild Ride: Warning - Surprises Ahead
On May 21, 2005 Six Flags Great Adventure introduced Kingda Ka—the tallest, fastest roller coaster on the planet—to the public. This $25-million, Swiss-designed “rocket coaster” uses hydraulic motors to launch the trains along a horizontal section of track from zero to 128 mph in an impressive 3.5 seconds!
The train then begins a vertical ascent up a steel tower that peaks at 456 feet or 45 stories. Crossing over the apex the train enters a vertical descent plunging through a 270-degree spiral twist again reaching speeds in excess of 100 mph. Kingda Ka offers one final surprise before the brake run, a 129-foot tall camelback hill, that offers plenty of negative G’s also known
fondly as “airtime”.1
Just as the Kingda Ka roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey started plunging coaster fans straight down that first big, spiraling, 418-foot drop, NAND Flash pricing started its own precipitous drop—a long, long drop that’s lasted nearly five years. It’s proven to be a wild, terrific ride for system and subsystem developers who have used the opportunity to harness cheap, non-volatile storage for several exciting new uses, including SSDs and NAND Flash caches that fully exploit the new low-cost-per-bit leader in semiconductor memory. But just as there are several surprises waiting at the bottom of the big Kingda Ka roller coaster drop, there are several big surprises waiting for NAND Flash users in the immediate future.
To see the entire IP Doc from Robert Pierce, Denali Software (a Cadence company), please log in or register.
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