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from the beats-a-string-around-your-finger dept.
Samsung recently announced its fourth generation of 3D/vertical NAND, with 64 layers and a capacity of 512Gb (64GB) per die. Now SK Hynix is announcing its plans for 512 Gb V-NAND dies with 72 layers:
Later this year SK Hynix intends to start volume production of 72-layer 3D TLC NAND (3D-V4) memory and this is where things start to get interesting. Initially, SK Hynix intends to produce 256 Gb 3D TLC ICs and these are going to be available already in Q2 2017, according to the company's product catalog. Later on, sometimes in Q4, the company plans to introduce 512 Gb 3D TLC ICs (64 GB), which will help it to significantly increase capacities of SSDs and other devices featuring NAND flash.
What is important about SK Hynix's fourth-gen 3D NAND is that it will feature block size of 13.5 MB, which will increase the performance of such ICs compared to 3D-V3 and 3D-V2 that have a block size of 9 MB. At this point, we do not know whether SK Hynix intends to increase interface speed of its 512 Gb 3D-V4 ICs to compensate lower parallelism in lower-capacity SSDs, like Samsung did with its high-capacity 64-layer 3D V-NAND chips. What we do know is that SK Hynix's catalog already includes NAND multi-chip packages of 8192 Gb capacity (1 TB) that will enable high-capacity SSDs in smaller form-factors (e.g., [2 TB] single-sided M.2). Meanwhile, 64 GB NAND flash chips may force SK Hynix and its partners to abandon low-capacity SSDs (i.e., 120/128 GB) unless there is sufficient demand.
The article also talks about the company's plans for 18nm DRAM and fabrication facility expansion.
Related: Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-Layer 256 Gb 3D NAND
Toshiba Teasing QLC 3D NAND and TSV for More Layers
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 30 2017, @12:52PM
Yeah, idk. There is some inefficiency in slapping ONLY 2 dies into a 2.5" SSD form factor. That form factor can fit many, many more than 2 dies. I'm not sure how many, but here's a comparison [wikipedia.org]:
The 3.5 TB (excuse the fact that 5x16x48 is 3840, since the extra capacity could be for overprovisioning) device mentioned is basically "pack of gum" sized. And that has 80 dies in it. With 512 Gb (64 GB) dies, you could make the same thing with smaller or less packages.
The only reasons to continue making 64-128 GB SSDs is to either use up existing lower-capacity NAND production, which will eventually be repurposed to make 256, 384, 512 Gb, etc. dies, or to put that amount of storage in increasingly small form factors [wikipedia.org].
If 64-128 GB capacity is going to stick around for long, they would have to make smaller individual dies. Like a quarter the size of a normal one or smaller. For perspective, we've already got 200 GB [tomshardware.com] and 256 GB microSD cards [soylentnews.org] (reports of 512 GB are exaggerated).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]