Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 131 posts

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#31

Post by Robotbeat »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #19
rowanG077 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thermals? SSDs have slowly but surely increased in TDP.

Flash likes to run pretty hot and we still rarely attach heat sinks, even less often proper heat sinks with fins. There's a lot of headroom. And if your main goal is capacity you could decide to just not run it faster, which will avoid basically all the extra heat.

Indeed, the flash write endurance is actually significant higher at higher temperatures (I presume because of greater charge mobility) with modern flash. But data retention, naturally, gets shorter at high temperatures and quite a bit longer at low temperatures, and it can vary by orders of magnitude between temperature extremes. Again, I think due to the charge mobility effect.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#32

Post by Klinky »

ksec wrote: post #29
Dylan16807 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What manufacturing changes do you imagine would make that possible? Making cells smaller gets unusable pretty quickly, and adding more bits to TLC/QLC is a mild price improvement at best. Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves, but if you're waiting for that then you don't need to sacrifice speed and durability.

>Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves That is not always true though. If we look at DRAM. There is a reason why we are still stuck with 8GB DRAM as entry level while 99.99999% of tech community including HN has been stating DRAM is cheap and it is only going to be cheaper for more than a decade. The cost to produce DRAM has only dropped 10-20% over the past decade, while pricing fluctuate a lot as…

DRAM markets have been notoriously price fixed in the past[1], and it would not be surprising if there's still a lot of winking, nudging, and backdoor handshakes going on. The chip shortage makes it even more excusable now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#33

Post by cmrdporcupine »

I see phrases like this "doubles the density of bits stored per unit area versus competing chips, packing in 14.6 gigabits per square millimeter. Its 1-terabit chips are bundled into 2-terabyte packages, each of which is barely more than a centimeter on a side" and I just imagine sending this sentence back to my 12 year old self, sitting in front of my Commodore VIC-20 and imagine how science fiction that would sound.

I mean, it sounds science fiction to me now. Amazing.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#34

Post by Dylan16807 »

Zandikar wrote: post #20
ksec wrote: post #14

A much better article on Anandtech [1]. Dual Stack 116 Layers. And as noted inside the article 100+ layer per stack isn't exactly new. Personally I am interested in Cost per Bit reduction. Hopefully there will be news in Flash Memory Summit new week. I wouldn't mind to have a slow 100 write cycle NAND that cost a third of today's price. Think 2TB USB Stick for $49. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232…

That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in the enterprise space (which is the dominant buyer of HDD unit purchase volume) HDD's are being regulated to write few, read lots if not outright WORM, and focused on Sequential speeds. You can knock an order of magnitude of speed off modern NAND Flash and stil…

That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years.

Though even if hard drive prices stay completely stagnant at $14/TB during sales, I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#35

Post by jhallenworld »

femto wrote: post #30
ineedasername wrote: post #26

Is there a (known) theoretical limit on density/mm^3?

The Bekenstein bound? A maximum number of bits can be placed on the surface of sphere. Beyond that it turns into a black hole. Mind you, one or two other practical limits might come into play before a memory chip hits that one. :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound --- Edit: The maximum information capacity of a radio antenna is limited by the surface area enclosing the antenna. One could theorise th…

Well under normal conditions (no degenerate matter)- the material with the lowest molar volume should give a good idea. At least on earth, this happens to be diamond: so ~1.7 * 10^20 atoms / mm^3.

With one bit per atom: 20 million TB.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#36

Post by jiggawatts »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #33

I see phrases like this "doubles the density of bits stored per unit area versus competing chips, packing in 14.6 gigabits per square millimeter. Its 1-terabit chips are bundled into 2-terabyte packages, each of which is barely more than a centimeter on a side" and I just imagine sending this sentence back to my 12 year old self, sitting in front of my Commodore VIC-20 and imagine how science fiction that would sound…

And affordable for common people.

I remember tiny “spy cameras” being a movie trope, now everyone has one in their pocket.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#38

Post by metadat »

jiggawatts wrote: post #36
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #33

I see phrases like this "doubles the density of bits stored per unit area versus competing chips, packing in 14.6 gigabits per square millimeter. Its 1-terabit chips are bundled into 2-terabyte packages, each of which is barely more than a centimeter on a side" and I just imagine sending this sentence back to my 12 year old self, sitting in front of my Commodore VIC-20 and imagine how science fiction that would sound…

And affordable for common people. I remember tiny “spy cameras” being a movie trope, now everyone has one in their pocket.

Yeah, human technological progress has come a long way!

The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted (e.g. fancy new tech, or really anything new and nice). I like to frequently reflect on how amazing it is I am alive and even exist at all!

Gratitude is truly the only effective counterdefense I've found to reduce the fade of true joys in life, like my friends and family.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#39

Post by jeffbee »

Klinky wrote: post #32
ksec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Prices will go down over time as manufacturing improves That is not always true though. If we look at DRAM. There is a reason why we are still stuck with 8GB DRAM as entry level while 99.99999% of tech community including HN has been stating DRAM is cheap and it is only going to be cheaper for more than a decade. The cost to produce DRAM has only dropped 10-20% over the past decade, while pricing fluctuate a lot as…

DRAM markets have been notoriously price fixed in the past[1], and it would not be surprising if there's still a lot of winking, nudging, and backdoor handshakes going on. The chip shortage makes it even more excusable now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

The main reason the price of DRAM is not plunging is because DRAM faces stark physics problems. I don’t think it’s market failure.

Re: Micron's 232-layer NAND enables 2TB flash chips that deliver data 50% faster

#40

Post by kmeisthax »

Melatonic wrote: post #28
ksec wrote: post #14

A much better article on Anandtech [1]. Dual Stack 116 Layers. And as noted inside the article 100+ layer per stack isn't exactly new. Personally I am interested in Cost per Bit reduction. Hopefully there will be news in Flash Memory Summit new week. I wouldn't mind to have a slow 100 write cycle NAND that cost a third of today's price. Think 2TB USB Stick for $49. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232…

I am really interested long term in longevity. I am sure they will keep increasing speeds and decreasing prices but what about this stuff wearing out? NAND that can last for as long as a well cooled and unstressed CPU would be epic!

NAND wear is a function of write cycles, which itself is a function of both how much data you write and how much the controller's wear-levelling and garbage collection amplifies those writes.

If your benchmark is "lasting as long as well-cooled electronics" then flash already beats hard drives; since hard drives have bearings that will lose lubrication and fail until you open the drive up in a clean room and replace them.

Post reply on HN