Any kind of timescale? I understand that they have to squeeze every last drop out of current technology before it becomes worthwhile moving to newer ones. Does anyone know how long this is? Are we talking 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

I just want to know how long it'll be before I can walk around with a terabyte of porn in my pocket.

Remember everyone that this is 100 Gigabits (Gb) which is around 12.5 Gigabytes (GB). Although that's still impressive it's not as much as it sounds!

Surely a typo on the author's part...??

12GB+ flash is already out there.

this is talking about 100 Gbit in a single layer chip. Most high capacity flash chips on the market use 8 Gbit multi level cell architecture eg iphone which has 8 layers of 8 Gbit nand in one chip for 8 GB total. I think 16 Gb architecture will be out shortly and samsung announced last year they have created 32 Gb single layer in a lab and 64 Gb this year. They have also patented a process that allows 16 layers rather than the previous maximum of 8.

Put'em in a Sansa player.

@Tony

Single chips that hold 12GB? Engadget also has the story down as "100Gbit"

I'm not sure what to believe now!

12GB flash devices are out there, but they are made from multiple chips.

A 100Gb chip is a huge advance and getting down to 10nm is scarily small.

In real terms is that what will be possible by gen 4?

OK so it's only 12Gb's. I have never filled up my 512Mb SD card on my camera even at 500Kb per picture the new drive will give me 24000 pictures. Enough for a whole holiday. Just think how long that would take to upload to my Flickr account. Last time I took 300 pictures it took twenty minutes, so do the maths. Hopefully by the time it comes out, we'll have ADSL2 at 24MB connection, as standard.

If they know already that it's 4 generations away, why can't they just skip over a couple of the intervening ones?

First: some photographers use RAW formats, and then each picture can easily take more than 10MB. My 4GB card holds about 200 pictures in RAW, and that's not enough for even very short vacations. Second: some photographers do not dump their whole cards online and instead publish carefully selected pictures. Still, I would be more interested in SDD drive (say, 500GB capacity and near 0ms access time) than memory card for my camera.

Skipping gens is does not work because each generation has its lessons to learn and new problems to overcome. The tool sets that are used to create the chips have to be refined to work with the new generation.