Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND 121
Ninjakicks writes "IM Flash Technologies is a joint venture between Intel and Micron that is targeted for producing NAND flash memory. With a focus on R&D, IMFT has doubled NAND density approximately every 18 months. Tomorrow IMFT will announce the launch of their 25 nanometer NAND technology — a major advancement in the semiconductor industry. Intel and Micron can now lay claim to the smallest production ready-semiconductor process technology in the world. IMFT took members of the press on a tour of the new 25nm fab and it's an interesting view into this bleeding-edge manufacturing process."
Re:Great News (Score:5, Informative)
I think more troubling in the SSD market has been poor design at the low end (see http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 [anandtech.com] for more detail). 150 dollars for a 64 GB SSD is fine, but when random write speed is an order of magnitude slower than a standard hard drive that costs an order of magnitude less, something is severely wrong.
Early adopters such as myself got pretty screwed over. Until consumers can trust the technology, I don't think price matters. Manufacturers need to put effort into building a high quality product first - they need to design good controllers and firmware.
Re:No sir, I don't like it. (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with Intel's CPU monopoly (which is only really a monopoly in a fairly narrow segment of the CPU market), it has to do with Intel putting a lot of money into process technology. Even when their designs were inferior to AMD's, they remained competitive because they could fab them on a better process and so get higher yields, higher clocks, and lower power consumption for the same chip than AMD.
Intel's SSD products work with anything with a SATA controller, be it ARM, x86, PowerPC, SPARC, or some custom architecture you just wrote to an FPGA. They are not tied to CPUs in any way. NOR flash often is. You quite often get some NOR flash attached to ARM chips for execute-in-place programs, such as the Symbian kernel and apps, freeing up some of main memory.
NAND flash can only be accessed as a block device, so you can't tie it to a CPU at all easily; it has to go through some kind of controller so the OS can pretend that it's a disk. I suppose you could slap a load of DRAM and a separate MMU and DMA controller on it and have something that would look like a big blob of RAM, but the performance characteristics would be horrible to work with.
Re:Cheap SSDs in my lifetime? (Score:4, Informative)
Integration and hardware costs keep the cheapest hard drives somewhere around $40 (for new stuff). Someone will be tempted to play in that space with a $20 SSD, at which point people will get out their fingers and determine the per GB cost of the $20 drive and be very unhappy with larger drives that cost much more than that.
Also, in 2007, they were ~$7.50 per GB:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/25/ssd-prices-in-freefall-wont-overtake-hard-disks-anytime-soon/ [engadget.com]
Vs less than $3 today (just google it). So the prices haven't come down quite as much as the article predicts, but there are 11 months left in the year, and I made that calculation using an intel drive (which probably carries a slight premium to the market).
Re:Something other than NAND? (Score:4, Informative)
Fair warning, I didn't read through the whole article, but in general:
No, this won't be directly applicable to CPUs. Microprocessors and memory are two vastly different beasts, on the manufacturing side. Memories are arrays of of the same thing, over and over - neatly organized, same size devices, requiring the same power supply and same operating characteristics. Microprocessors have many different structures, different size transistors for different things, different power supplies, different signaling levels to turn on some transistors and not others. The relative simplicity - really, the relative uniformity - makes memories easier, because you don't have to worry (as much) about balancing the effects of the shrink and the method to shrink across several elements. What's good for some might be bad for others, so the fewer elements you have, the more leeway you have.
That's not to say that this won't have anything to do with CPU development, it's all very inter-related But you can't just start making microprocessors of this dimension because you have working memory.
Re:Something other than NAND? (Score:4, Informative)
Much more to the point, NAND can tolerate a very high defect rate in the individual cells, whereas a CPU can tolerate almost none (with some defects you can disable a core or some of the cache and still salvage the part). Further, NAND gates operate much much slower than CPU transistors and their operational results are checked against error correcting data. A CPU transistor doesn't have that luxury.
Re:Great News (Score:4, Informative)
It would help if Windows would allow you to put the hiberfil.sys file on a different drive but you can't even move it to a different partition on the same drive.
Re:Micron? Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology [wikipedia.org]
They split their PC manufacturing business into a spearate company, which declared bankruptcy in 2008. Now, they focus on manufacturing memory.
To most of the people, Micron is known as their consumer brand Crucial Tehnology and Lexar Media.
Re:Double patterning has limits. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great News (Score:3, Informative)
SRAM [wikipedia.org]. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:32GB MicroSDHC (Score:3, Informative)
Probably soon enough. But if I recall correctly, 2GB was the maximum for SD, and 32GB is the maximum for SDHC cards. After that you need SDXC.
Re:Double patterning has limits. (Score:1, Informative)
I think he's saying that if your part has 10% 25nm features, 30% 32mn, and 60% 45nm; that's not really a true "25nm" part :)
(ie because some of the structures you need to etch have concave or oblique geometry so that a multi-exposure of part of the structure would ruin adjacent parts (capacitors and stuff, I guess)).
Re:Something other than NAND? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Cheap SSDs in my lifetime? (Score:3, Informative)
"No one will ever need more than 640kb."
Your assumptions are just as correct.
SSD has one significant advantage: Moore's law, so every 18months (roughly) the size doubles or price halves.
That means, there will be soon 300Gb SSD for 200$.
There won't be a premium on SSDs, they are REALLY expensive to produce, that's why the cost so much, not due to a premium. You could call recouping R&D as a premium how much you like, but it's not a premium, they do not need to cover that cost as well, otherwise no R&D can be done.
There won't be a mystical drop in price skipping 300Gb at 200$ range, that's just not how the market works, not how science works (in incremental enhancements of end products).
Currently 300Gb would cost probably somewhere around 900$ today, so in about 3-3½years you should be able to get your 300Gb at 200$.