3 ms·

> Intel's claim has been in the past that its density can exceed SSDs by a healthy margin Seems doubtful they would reach that goal until SSDs hit some kind of

by mtgx 10y ago

> Intel's claim has been in the past that its density can exceed SSDs by a healthy margin Seems doubtful they would reach that goal until SSDs hit some kind of hard plateau (kind of like HDDs did). Toshiba plans to make a 100TB SSD over the next couple of years, and I believe Samsung has already announced a 16TB SSD. I doubt 3D Xpoint can catch-up with those in the given time frame.

wtallis 10y ago
NAND flash memory already hit the wall for horizontal shrinks, and some products plowed past that limit and into the regime where day to day use was invoking the second level error correction methods to compensate for data degradation. 3D NAND turned the clock back on horizontal scaling and cell sizes by several years, and now the only scaling opportunity is to increase layer count. That's not going so well. Samsung started with 24 layers but didn't ship retail products until they hit 32 layers. Their 48 layers was about a year late and caused several products to be scrapped entirely. Toshiba's on their third generation 3D NAND and it's only just starting to show up in the market. SK Hynix is doing worse than Toshiba. Intel and Micron started off reasonably well with their 32-layer and are working on ramping up 64-layer. By the end of this year, all four manufacturers should be shipping 64-layer (72 for SK Hynix) 3D NAND in volume, or else it's time to admit that 3D NAND just doesn't scale up as well as we hoped it would. There's some reason to believe 3D XPoint memory might be able to avoid the worst vertical scaling problems that are holding back 3D NAND flash. Each pair of 3D XPoint layers can be pretty much isolated from the rest of the layers except at the edges, whereas 3D NAND is building columns of bits that run through all 64+ layers and have aspect ratios that are quite high.
- markvdb 10y ago
  I can see some potential in things like RERAM to scale beyond 3D NAND and bridge the SSD/RAM gap. I like the technological elegance of non-filamentary RERAM [2] in particular. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory [2] http://www.4dsmemory.com http://www.4dsmemory.com

by mtgx 10y ago

wtallis 10y ago

NAND flash memory already hit the wall for horizontal shrinks, and some products plowed past that limit and into the regime where day to day use was invoking the second level error correction methods to compensate for data degradation. 3D NAND turned the clock back on horizontal scaling and cell sizes by several years, and now the only scaling opportunity is to increase layer count. That's not going so well. Samsung started with 24 layers but didn't ship retail products until they hit 32 layers. Their 48 layers was about a year late and caused several products to be scrapped entirely. Toshiba's on their third generation 3D NAND and it's only just starting to show up in the market. SK Hynix is doing worse than Toshiba. Intel and Micron started off reasonably well with their 32-layer and are working on ramping up 64-layer. By the end of this year, all four manufacturers should be shipping 64-layer (72 for SK Hynix) 3D NAND in volume, or else it's time to admit that 3D NAND just doesn't scale up as well as we hoped it would. There's some reason to believe 3D XPoint memory might be able to avoid the worst vertical scaling problems that are holding back 3D NAND flash. Each pair of 3D XPoint layers can be pretty much isolated from the rest of the layers except at the edges, whereas 3D NAND is building columns of bits that run through all 64+ layers and have aspect ratios that are quite high.

markvdb 10y ago
I can see some potential in things like RERAM to scale beyond 3D NAND and bridge the SSD/RAM gap. I like the technological elegance of non-filamentary RERAM [2] in particular. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory [2] http://www.4dsmemory.com http://www.4dsmemory.com