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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 26 2019, @09:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the marketing-dimension dept.

SK Hynix Starts Production of 128-Layer 4D NAND, 176-Layer Being Developed

SK Hynix has announced it has finished development of its 128-layer 1 terabit 3D TLC NAND flash. The new memory features the company's charge trap flash (CTF) design, along with the peripheral under cells (PUC) architecture that the company calls '4D' NAND, announced some time ago. The new 128-layer TLC NAND flash devices will ship to interested parties in the second half of this year, and SK Hynix intends to offer products based on the new chips in 2020.

[...] In the first half of next year SK Hynix promises to roll out its UFS 3.1 storage products based on the new 1 Tb devices. The company plans to offer 1 TB UFS 3.1 chips that will consume up to 20% less [power] when compared to similar products that use 512 Gb ICs.

[...] String stacking technology, as well as the multi-stacked design, will enable SK Hynix to keep increasing the number of layers. SK Hynix says that it is currently developing 176-layer 4D NAND flash, but does not disclose when it is expected to become available.

Previously: "String-Stacking" Being Developed to Enable 3D NAND With More Than 100 Layers
SK Hynix Developing 96 and 128-Layer TLC 3D NAND

Related: Expect 20-30% Cheaper NAND in Late 2018
Micron: 96-Layer 3D NAND Coming, 3D XPoint Sales Disappoint
Western Digital Samples 96-Layer 3D QLC NAND with 1.33 Tb Per Die
Samsung Shares Plans for 96-Layer TLC NAND, QLC NAND, and 2nd-Generation "Z-NAND"


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 26 2019, @10:32PM (20 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 26 2019, @10:32PM (#860276) Journal

    They don't need it:

    SK Hynix has announced it has finished development of its 128-layer 1 terabit 3D TLC NAND flash.

    Western Digital [SanDisk] Samples 96-Layer 3D QLC NAND with 1.33 Tb Per Die [soylentnews.org]

    We should be hearing about 1.5 Tb and greater NAND soon enough.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 26 2019, @10:56PM (17 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @10:56PM (#860284)

    Niiiice. Now, what's it really good for?

    Of course, my wife easily averages 200 photos per day on vacation and I have to constantly warn her about recording video, so a couple of these might last her for a short summer vacation.

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    • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:26PM (15 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:26PM (#860291) Journal

      It means cheaper and larger capacity SSDs, flash chips in phones and laptops, microSD cards, etc.

      Dies get stacked to make packages. So products that were using 512 Gb dies before need only half as many 1 Tb dies.

      The layer advances and string stacking can be applied to SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, etc.

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      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:46PM (14 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:46PM (#860299)

        Other than my wife's cellphone, and maybe some drives that store lots and lots of video, I think I (personally) stopped needing bigger SSDs around 300GB. Cheaper is better, and, sure, next time I buy a big drive it will probably be at least 4TB just so I don't have to think about running out of space, but our 2TB drives (RAID 1 mirrored) haven't filled in the last 8 years since they replaced the previous whatever they were NAS.

        Ditto for work systems, we've got a sloppy dev team of about 30, working on a project for 2 years now, and our git repo is still less than 4GB, even if you bring in all the mechanical team's drawings and documentation we're still well under 5GB for this project. Sure, the whole site might utilize 10TB or so, but... that's a site with a couple hundred employees.

        I'm all for progress, and certainly big corporations have unlimited storage appetites, but at a personal level, it seems like 640GB is all that anyone (who doesn't hoard pirated videos) will ever need ;-)

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:51AM

          by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:51AM (#860316)

          ...it seems like 640GB is all that anyone...

          What! Come on now don't be so bloody...

          ...who doesn't hoard pirated videos...

          Oh. Ahem. Yes right then.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:54AM (8 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:54AM (#860317) Journal

          There's people out there that can fill 100 TB. Even without video in some cases. And since 8 TB HDDs are apparently in $130-150 territory, you can have that for under $2,000. But not SSDs, yet.

          I think it's likely that we'll see SSDs intersect with HDDs on $/TB at some point. HDDs have a path to 32, 50, and even 100 TB per 3.5" drive but are advancing too slow. Meanwhile, there will be active development into storage-class memory, aka post-NAND technologies aka universal memory. Hopefully, one of these will become superior to NAND in every way. This would solve the real problems of endurance and sequential speeds tanking once cache is filled (which are much worse with the cheaper QLC NAND).

          Fast forward 10-15 years. Whichever technology is in use, 1 petabyte drives are around (~128-170 TB SSDs are feasible with today's technology, so we're not far off). Probably even 10+ petabytes. And maybe we'll eventually get to exabytes in a consumer drive using some kind of holographic storage bricks.

          While it's definitely true that many users don't need even 1 TB today, if you can build it, people will find a way to use it. One use case is raw VR video. Target should be 16-32K resolution [soylentnews.org] (16K for VR180, 32K for complete 360-degree cameras) at 240 Hz (or even more??? this site [blurbusters.com] and others [valvesoftware.com] think 1000+ Hz is beneficial). Multiply that by multiple cameras for some event. You can probably think of moments in history that you would want captured like that. Make such cameras/storage cheap and ubiquitous to fit in smartphones, and it can happen going forward.

          You could also imagine virtual worlds (games and more) benefiting from massive storage. You've got games in the 50-100 GB range today that would quickly fill up a 1 TB drive. Let's see what can be done with 100x more per game. Given techniques like procedural generation, reused assets, etc., that amount seems hardly necessary, but it could allow complexity to be significantly increased and someone's artistic vision to look absolutely stunning.

          Science generates a lot of data. Astronomy in particular is generating petabytes of data, more of which is made freely available, and could be of use to amateurs. A nice upcoming example is the LSST [wikipedia.org], which will generate 1.28 petabytes per year. Future telescopes will have even larger storage requirements. Given the vast scale of the universe, it's possible for an amateur to get in on the action and make discoveries.

          Petabyte drives could hold massive AI training data sets. Or you could pair storage with 3D neuromorphic processors, and maybe you can have a "strong AI" at home. I might as well mention mind uploading at this point.

          There's a lot of fluffy stuff in this comment, but I'm sure that there will be absolutely gratuitous ways to fill 1+ PB consumer drives. And it will be appreciated, even if we're not the ones using it. It will also allow the surveillance state to store your every thought and action, but that's a given.

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          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:45AM (7 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:45AM (#860356)

            One use case is raw VR video

            Sure, for that barely perceptible quality improvement, let's balloon the storage size 10x.

            I'll get more excited about applications like this when the bandwidth in and out of the massive storage devices improves by a factor of 10x or more. It's already distressing to me how long it takes to mirror 1.5TB of data from one drive to another.

            Video stored at a datarate of ~1GB per hour is pretty good already, any more resolution would be like jacking up still photos from 6MP to 60MP - you're not going to really enjoy or notice it unless you're zooming in and focusing on a subset of the whole field of view, and going from 95% quality jpeg to full raw is more subtle still.

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            • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:06AM (6 children)

              by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:06AM (#860366) Journal

              True. We're gonna need post-NAND universal memory instead of NAND to keep the sustained write speeds up. QLC NAND kills that. Massively layered SLC NAND could be a good stopgap, but it seems like most of the consumers drives *must* use TLC or QLC.

              I give justification for absurd resolution VR in the linked comment [soylentnews.org]. Sure, it's very large and not strictly necessary, but once the displays are available people will be able to judge it for themselves. Compression can be involved for viewers but it should probably be captured raw.

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              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:26PM (5 children)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:26PM (#860521)

                Maybe it's because my eyes are old, but when I run my 4K displays at 1080p, it's very rare that I can perceive any difference at all - unless I've got my face so close to the screen that I can't see the whole thing.

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                • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:49PM (4 children)

                  by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:49PM (#860536) Journal

                  That's exactly my proposal for VR.

                  You'll notice that my proposed 220 degrees horizontal, 150 degrees vertical field of view is more than what your two eyes can see if you're staring straight ahead. It takes into account peripheral vision from keeping your head locked but rotating your eyes in your sockets.

                  It would be kind of like shoving your face right in your display until you can't even see the sides. And while you may not be able to make pixels out even when doing that (I wouldn't know, I'm working with 768p where it is extremely obvious), the jump to 16K should ensure that no aliasing or other effects are noticeable. The screen door effect needs to be eliminated too, which could be done by either increasing resolution and/or decreasing pixel spacing with a better display technology.

                  On top of that, foveated rendering would help grease the wheels by only rendering a tiny potion of the screen in high resolution at any given millisecond, based on where your eyes are pointing. This applies to gaming/dynamically rendered graphics; it could be applied to precaptured or live video to lower the headset internal bandwidth burden, but isn't likely to lower the bandwidth needed to stream or livestream the video (you need the whole thing).

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                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:16PM (1 child)

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:16PM (#860549)

                    The Microsoft VR headsets I've tried suffer from a horribly small field of view - definitely more immersive if you can get the peripheral covered as well, and at least "foveal" resolution anywhere your eyes can point.

                    While eye-tracking and foveated rendering can save power, I think the early software/systems development would go better if you just hook the thing up to a sufficient power (and cooling) source and blast full res across the whole 16K pixels. Once you've got that proven, trimming cost, weight, power can be an enhancement for the investors to back on the road to commercialization.

                    Assuming civilization doesn't fall in the meantime, 16K nanopitch displays are definitely coming, eventually. The group that has a killer app for them already developed and proven should profit nicely.

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                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:31PM (1 child)

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:31PM (#860560)

                    One other thought - I used to be non-plussed by the idea of direct retinal projection, but as my corneas continue to stiffen and medical science continues to waffle about effective solutions for that, the idea starts to hold more and more appeal, and when you consider that the majority of the world's wealth is controlled by presbyopes...

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                    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:43PM

                      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:43PM (#860565) Journal

                      My view is that retinal projection will be the technique of choice for augmented reality glasses.

                      It would be interesting to see a combination of AR and VR using retinal projection. Flat device, possibly indistinguishable from glasses (still should have two front-facing cameras if possible), and you could manually add an opaque cover to switch from AR to VR mode.

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        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:59PM (3 children)

          by Freeman (732) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:59PM (#860577) Journal

          All I've got to say to you is, Video Games, and Pictures. Quite literally 90%+ of my storage is used up by those two things. When you're getting new games like Fallout 4 that require 40GB+ just for itself, you run out of space, really quickly. Then, there's the constant stream of photos/videos we take of our kiddo. Snapfish is great when you can get in on a sale for their photo books. Grandparents love the photo books.

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          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:00PM (2 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:00PM (#860603)

            I'll grant that video games can run heavy, 50GB+, but a 1TB drive can hold 20 such games... I suppose, again, if you're a hoarder and never want to uninstall anything, then sure. But, if you're really playing one of these 50GB+ games, that's going to consume hundreds of hours of your life x 20 should be years of entertainment... unless we get UBI and just smoke dope and play games all the time.

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            • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:08PM (1 child)

              by Freeman (732) on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:08PM (#860611) Journal

              Or maintain an unhealthy work/life/gaming ratio. Oh, there was supposed to be sleep in there somewhere, I think.

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              • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:56PM

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:56PM (#860630)

                I definitely know people who have played 20+ "big games", and I definitely know people who have played games 60+ hours a week, but, even them, they tend to stay with 3 or 4 favorite titles, at most. I supposed with cheap massive SSDs that behavior may change in the future.

                I was also marveling at why Chinese cell phones are starting to ship with 64GB standard and often much more, until I remembered: games.

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    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:54PM

      by Freeman (732) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:54PM (#860575) Journal

      Professional photographers use smaller say 4GB/16GB cards, and swap them out often. That way, when you inevitably screw up one card, you don't lose Everything. Also, you want to replace those cards on a semi-regular basis.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:06PM (#860645)

    One thing about this is that TLC is better in almost every aspect than QLC, including much better endurance. The biggest drawback of TLC vs QLC, is that QLC has higher density.