Intel, Micron Team Up for 128Gb NAND for Future SSDs
Consumers should expect to see higher capacities and lower prices next year with the launch of Intel and Micron's 128 Gb NAND device.
On Tuesday Intel and Micron introduced a "world's first" with the announcement of a new 20-nm monolithic 128 gigabit (Gb) NAND device which doubles the storage capacity and performance of the duo's current 20-nm 64 Gb NAND offering. It was created through their joint-development venture IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) with the intent to cram more storage capacity into small form factor devices like smartphones, tablets, USB drives and SSDs.
According to the report, the new device has the capability of storing 1 terabit of data in a single fingertip-size package with just eight die. For consumers, a 128 Gb device translates to 16 GB of storage. Stack eight of these in a single package and you have a memory chip packing a meaty 128 GB of storage capacity.
The new device is also reportedly the first to use a planar cell structure that "breaks the scaling constraints of standard floating gate NAND" by integrating the first Hi-K/metal gate stack on NAND production. It even meets the high-speed ONFI 3.0 specification to achieve speeds of 333 megatransfers per second (MT/s).
"As portable devices get smaller and sleeker, and server demands increase, our customers look to Micron for innovative new storage technologies and system solutions that meet these challenges," said Glen Hawk, vice president of Micron's NAND Solutions Group. "Our collaboration with Intel continues to deliver leading NAND technologies and expertise that are critical to building those systems."
In addition to the 128 Gb NAND device, the duo also said that their 64 Gb 20-nm NAND has entered mass production, and should enable a rapid transition to the 128 Gb device in 2012. Samples of the 128 Gb device are expected to arrive in January 2012 followed by mass production in the first half of 2012.
so... .50 cents per GB SSD's?
Probably, but its gonna have to be on a black Friday/cyber Monday sale.
In anyway, my next build will have SSD boot... how big remains to seen. It is so much faster than normar HD, now it's just the capasity.
i considered them to expensive to, till my hdd got accessed by a program so hard that it went from a 120mb read to a sub 1mb read, and every thing became far to unresponsive. hell that alone made me go ssd, than i started to put together exactly what i asked of my computer, and realized that much of the slowness came from a heavy load.
i found an 120gb intel drive for 1$ a gb, and jumped on it, its a cristmas present though, so ill have to wait a bit to get my hands on it.
spot.[/citation]
A "slow" SSD will always run around the fastest HDDs in circles, unless if there are mainstream 60,000+ HDDs.
A "slow" 128 GB SSD will also outdo a HDD and "fast" 64 GB SSD when it comes to reading/writing 128 GB of files, especially if they're small files.
it comes in at about 2.3$ per gb
i also believe they are on a 25nm process
assuming a silicon wafer costs 50k to produce on its own, and you get about 16gb per chip, 1 wafer 21,739gb
and lets also assume that 10nm is the lowest you can go, just to make the math easier.
moving down to a 10nm process from 25nm would yeild 5.25 as many chips, and if lets say 5nm were possible, you would get about 24 times as many chips,
now lets go best case scenario here.
10nm preice per gb would be .44 cents a gb
and at 5nm, price per gb would be .9
these processes are a good 5-10 years out minimum, unless extreme demand for ssds kicks in, but currently hdds, pre flood, were 3.5 cents per gb, and takeing floods out of the equation, that number is only going down.
if i knew the size of a 16gb chip, i could figure out about how much of a premium ssds have, and see how much they could cut, but im doubting anyone has that information.
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8533/ssdy.jpg