@DigiTimes, citing South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, said that @Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF) is set to spend $9 billion on capital expenditures related to #NAND flash memory manufacturing in 2019. This figure, the report says, is an increase from the roughly $6.4 billion it will spend in 2018. First, let's go over capital expenditure basics so that you know what this means broadly. Then, I'll try to explain what it means for investors in Samsung, as well as other NAND flash memory makers.
@Roku Inc. disclosed its most profitable quarter yet in an earnings report Wednesday, but Chief Executive @AnthonyWood revealed in an interview that memory shortages cut into its earnings, a fact that could have been a factor in a disappointing forecast. Roku ROKU, -1.26% was forced to spend more money on expensive air shipping instead of ocean freight to get #NAND memory chips for its signature hardware, Wood told MarketWatch in an interview late Wednesday, after Roku’s earnings conference call. NAND flash memory is used for storage on a wide range of electronics — such as smartphones, laptops and desktop computers — and rising prices and shortages have roiled the tech industry in the past year while boosting producers like @Micron Technology Inc. MU, +5.15%  Net revenue for Roku’s line of streaming dongles and boxes dropped to $102.8 million in the fourth quarter from $110 million in the year-earlier period, and gross profit on the units fell to $9.7 million from $15.7 million. In part, the drop in profit is related to the company’s price cuts. Executives cut the price for one of Roku’s top-end models to $100 from $130, for example, and released a budget $30 version called the Roku Express. Don’t miss: The man who gave us the DVR says Roku is the future of TV But Wood also said that due to industrywide NAND flash memory shortages in China, the company has had to spend more money to fly inventory to the U.S. instead of using ocean freighters to ship products — thus cutting into the bottom line. “We worked through most of that,” he told MarketWatch. “So the working through it often involved airfreight from China. We always planned for shipping on boats, and whenever there are component shortages we ship by planes, and planes are expensive.”  –– ADVERTISEMENT ––   Roku would not say that a forecast that predicted wider-than-expected losses in 2018 was due to the costs for memory, but the projections seemed to be a bone of contention for investors. While the company’s profits were a surprise, shares still plunged more than 20% in late trading, giving back a healthy chunk of large gains since the company’s initial public offering last year. Read: 5 things to know about the Roku IPO Hardware sales may incrementally have less of an effect on revenue for Roku, however. As executives have said in the past, they see the hardware as a customer-acquisition strategy and want to sell more of it through competitive pricing. Roku grew its unit volume 8% in the fourth quarter, compared with the year-earlier period, while overall hardware revenue declined. Sales of the streaming dongles are slowly being eclipsed by platform revenue, which is a mix of ad sales, revenue sharing from content deals and licensing its technology to TV makers. Executives said for the first time Wednesday that platform revenue will make up the majority of the company’s top line throughout 2018.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/roku-ceo-says-memory-shortage-damaged-earnings-2018-02-21
@WesternDigital reported its second quarter financial results on Thursday, beating market expectations thanks to a "healthy" demand in enterprise storage and #NAND #flash. The company reported a net loss of $823 million, or $2.78 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.95 per share on revenue of $5.3 billion, up from $4.9 billion from a year ago. The company said the net loss was due to a $1.6 billion repatriation tax as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $3.79 a share on revenue of $5.29 billion.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digital-q2-earnings-record-revenue/
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s economic regulator is paying close attention to a recent surge in the price of mobile phone storage chips and could look into possible price fixing by the firms that make them, a senior official told the state-run China Daily newspaper. The newspaper, citing an official with the National Development and Reform Commission’s Pricing Supervision Department, said the NDRC was alerted to the situation after a sharp rise in the price of chips over the last 18 months. SPONSORED “We have noticed the price surge and will pay more attention to future problems that may be caused by ‘price fixing’ in the sector,” the official Xu Xinyu was quoted as saying. The newspaper added that the official referred to possible coordinated action taken by a number of firms to gain maximum profits by pushing the price of the product as high as possible. A “super-cycle” of tight supply and soaring demand for #memorychips, which power servers and smartphones, has been driving up prices and profits at chipmakers such as @Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and @SK Hynix Inc which control the lion’s share of the global market. The NDRC has spoken to Samsung, the @China Daily reported, citing @Wang Yanhui, the secretary-general of the Mobile China Alliance, who the paper said had knowledge of the matter. The paper did not provide further details. Mobile China Alliance is an industry association that has more than 30 mobile phone companies as members. Wang said it was too early to predict what further measures could be taken but that the government could look at penalties issued by other countries if makers were found to be engaging in such any price fixing. Samsung and SK Hynix declined to comment. Chinese firms have the capability to produce traditional 2D NAND chips, but analysts said the technology transfer needed for such firms to produce the more premium 3D NAND chips made by the likes of Samsung is taking longer than expected. This, along with demand from fast-growing Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi and Oppo, has caused the average spot price for mainstream DRAM chips to surge by more than half over the past one year while prices for NAND flash chips rose 32 percent, according to research firm TrendForce. “China is the biggest smartphone manufacturer ... so of course China wants to pay more attention and play a more important role in the whole industry,” said Hattie He, Shanghai-based analyst at research firm Canalys. “Memory is one of the key components for smartphones so it makes sense that Chinese vendors want to have more capabilities to control these components,” she said.
Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of scaling, the impact of variation, and the introduction of new materials and technologies, with Rick Gottscho, CTO of Lam Research; Mark Dougherty, vice president of advanced module engineering at GlobalFoundries; David Shortt, technical fellow at KLA-Tencor; Gary Zhang, vice president of computational litho products at ASML; and Shay Wolfling, CTO of Nova Measuring Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. L-R: Shay Wolfling, Rick Gottscho, Mark Dougherty, Gary Zhang, David Shortt. Photo credit: Coventor, a Lam Research company. SE: Looking beyond 10/7nm, is it going to be a straight line to 5nm and 3nm? Is it going to be more difficult than we expect? And is it even going to be possible? Dougherty: It’s possible, and we’ve proven at multiple points in our history that it’s always possible, even if we don’t quite know how. We’ve always found a way through a variety of approaches, and I anticipate the same thing moving forward. I don’t anticipate it will be a straight line, though. It won’t be a hyperbola or an exponential line. We will get there, and there will be a variety of things the industry will uncover. Gottscho: I agree. The path to 5nm is pretty clear. FinFETs will get extended at least to 5nm. It’s possible they will get extended to 3nm. And there will be some other solution after that, whether that’s gate-all-around horizontally or vertically. There will be new materials. There also will be a lot of challenges. We know how to fabricate fins that are 150nm tall with 5nm design rules. Fabricating them is one thing. Preventing them from collapsing is a different challenge. There are a lot of challenges, but I don’t have any doubts this industry will get there, and I don’t think it will be significantly delayed. Shortt: About 30 years ago I first read an article explaining very clearly why we could never possibly make a device smaller than the wavelength of light using imaging. We all know how that turned out, and everyone who bet against optical lithography has been wrong. It always seems like you can’t project more than a couple generations out, but we always seem to be able to do it. As an inspection person, I’m astonished these devices are manufacturable. With 3D NAND, it’s astounding that we can make those. Zhang: We are hearing from our customers on the supply side that scaling has not ended yet. In terms of lithography, we are driving that very hard with EUV at new nodes, with high-NA as an extension to that on the roadmap. So in terms of printing and patterning, we do have solutions out there. There is more of a challenge in how we manage the complexity and the cost. But we will get there. Wolfling: I agree. Complexity is the key here. And the issue is really to work that in more than one way. There is room to extend finFETs. After that it will be nanosheets. Where will be the crossover? Will it be at 3nm or 2nm? At some point the industry crosses over. This is happening with EUV. It will happen with finFETs. The question is where it will happen. SE: We have some big evolutionary problems to solve, though. There are interconnects, RC delay, and a bunch of issues that no one has ever been able to solve. Is this time different, particularly for logic, both from the manufacturing and from the measurement side? Dougherty: The challenge that I see is actually the number of options. The technology we use to scale has expanded. If you go back several generations, you more or less knew the materials and basic structure you were going to use. Now, as you look ahead to 7nm and beyond, our supplier roadmaps say it could be any 1 of these 10 things. The answer is some combination of them, but there’s a lot more work that has to be done to screen down these various options at advanced nodes. We’re getting to the point where it may not be a single solution. For the longest time in this industry, everyone kind of aligned at the end of the day on the same solution. It’s possible there might be some divergence, like back-end-of-line metallurgy. Zhang: The problem is not that you will hit the wall, but that you have many roads. The question is how we explore all of them. In the beginning they can be promising, but it’s difficult to say which one will be cost-effective and which one will be manufacturable. That’s part of the investment that is required—to investigate the different materials and the different directions. I don’t think the problem is that we’re facing a wall. SE: No, but we are facing a lot of choices, right? Gottscho: But with back-end-of-line, at least in the near term—it’s a couple generations out yet—there’s a real opportunity to lower the resistance just by getting rid of the barrier. That’s easy to say, not so easy to do. But when you look at the space occupied particularly vias, it’s dominated by highly resistant material that’s serving as a diffusion barrier. If we can solve that material problem, that will buy us a couple generations at the back-end of line. The contact resistance also is a huge problem, but that’s an example where people have been very creative with an architecture that uses wrap-around contacts, high-dose surface doping, and taking special care for interface properties. These problems are hard, and I don’t doubt there will be at least a couple different solutions. I am curious about metrology, though, because that is often a gate for process development. Zhang: We were talking earlier about measuring something below an Angstrom. We are able to do that now in 3D. So metrology-wise, we do have solutions available. Whether we have solutions for everything we want to measure, that’s still a question. Shortt: What I’ve seen over the years is that the length of time it takes for end-to-end cycle time, from concept to actually shipping, has gotten longer. What we find is that we need to start earlier. We have multiple generations leapfrogging each other, and multiple generations under development at any one time. We have a number of good ideas, but we have to start earlier thinking about them and doing the technical risk reduction to figure out what works and what doesn’t—and get rid of the stuff that doesn’t work and then keep going. So the full end-to-end cost is increasing for us for inspection and metrology. But with proper management, you do the technical risk reduction at the beginning, quickly throw away the ideas that don’t work, and then keep the ones that do. SE: Another piece of logic involved in all of this is 3D NAND. We’ve already scaled up to 48 layers. Does this just keep scaling up, or are there physical limits here? Gottscho: It keeps going up for awhile. I’m pretty optimistic about the future. I don’t think you can be in the semiconductor business and not be optimistic. We see a path to 256 layers. It’s going to be very challenging to go beyond that. But there are a lot of challenges to even get to 128 layers. Stress in the films is a big deal. If wafers come out looking like potato chips, that’s not good. And when you’re trying to stack one layer on top of another, that stress becomes a big problem in terms of distortion and overlay. One of the biggest problems is etching the memory holes. This is the most challenging etch I’ve seen in my 35 years in the etch business, with alternating layers of oxide and nitride, or oxide and poly, with aspect ratios approaching 100:1. But having said that, we have a solutions road map and we’re working on three generations of technology at the same time. It’s going to scale over the next 10 years. Shortt: Do you see the future of 3D NAND doing that etch for 100 layers all in one step? Gottscho: It will be a mixture. Our strategy is to push the etch technology to the highest aspect ratio that it will go, because we believe it’s in our customers’ interest to do as many layers as you can in one pass. But whether you stack 48 or 96 or 128, sooner or later you’re going to want to push out that choice of how many layers you’re going to stack as far as possible. Wolfling: Once you start stacking, if you have three or four more generations and you stack four of them together, it’s not cost-effective. The more you can push the etching, the more you buy time for this direction. SE: The other critical piece of the von Neumann architecture is DRAM. Can we go further with 1x technology to 1y, or do we need to move to some other technology such as phase change memory or STT-RAM? Zhang: Our customers are marching down the path of 1x, 1y, 1z, and trying to squeeze out another nanometer. That’s been the case in the past couple years, and that will continue. As to how far we will go with that, we haven’t really seen another device on the horizon that will replace DRAM. We do see XPoint coming up as another viable memory solution that could be inserted into the current memory architecture. It will be interesting to see how that plays out versus DRAM. Dougherty: But do you think it’s a matter of time with some alternative? There’s certainly a lot of work being done on all these different memories, though we don’t know what the intersection point is. Zhang: That’s why folks are working on XPoint and other memories and seeing how far they can push that from a cost, performance and endurance standpoint. How that can match up to DRAM levels remains to be seen. Shortt: We saw predictions at KLA-Tencor that 3D NAND would have taken over earlier, but with 3D NAND they were able to push that another generation or two beyond what a lot of people expected. That delayed the onset of 3D. The same will happen with DRAM. They’ll push it as far as they can. Gottscho: I see a difference between DRAM and the 2D/3D NAND dynamic in the sense that 3D NAND was ready before 2D NAND ran out of gas. Right now it doesn’t appear as if there is a replacement for DRAM. Whether it’s STT-RAM or phase-change memory or resistive RAM, none of them can match the speed or endurance of DRAM. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we see at least two more generations after 1x. We are hearing about 1a. DRAM still has life in it, but it’s getting tougher. MRAM will probably come in as an embedded memory element in logic. It doesn’t look like a viable replacement for high-density DRAM. Shortt: We’re also not seeing a lot of demand for yet for inspection of these new structures. You would think we’d see that early. We’ve seen a little bit, but not much.
https://semiengineering.com/the-next-5-years-of-chip-technology/
@MicronTechnology (MU) surged to the top of the S&P 500 after posting blow out fiscal fourth quarter results and an upbeat outlook for the current quarter.  Micron's "3D Xpoint" solid-state memory technology for servers. Micron gained more than 8.5% today to close at just over $37 a share, making it the day’s best-performing stock. The shares continued to edge higher after the closing bell. My colleague Tiernan Ray dove into the semiconductor company’s performance earlier today, and interviewed CEO Sanjay Mehrota. Analysts were encouraged by rising margins, as well as the company’s outlook for a nearly 50% increase in capital spending by Micron to a planned $7.5 billion this year.  Barclays Blayne Curtis called it “a beat and raise” quarter with healthy trends that will likely continue into next year. FY18 capex guidance of $7.5B (35-45% allocated to each DRAM /Flash) was on the high side but MU plans to keep bit growth in line with the market at +50%/+20% in NAND/DRAM respectively, similar to what we heard on our Asia trip several weeks ago. The absolute amount of capex dollars is going up for all, but the company is progressing with their technology development and in general not trying to outgrow the market (likely remains undersupplied through next year, particularly in NAND). Even with the higher capex, MU plans to be net cash positive exiting FY18. Net net, the story continues to have additional legs as the market remains undersupplied into FY18 driving both revenue and margins. And Credit Suisse’s John Pitzer raised his price target on the stock from $40 a share to $50 a share. Big CapEx A Big Positive: For too long MU has been content as a fast follower (300 mm, Cu interconnect) – which has hurt MU’s costs. Even with CapEx of $7.5 bb, CFO endorsed possibility of net cash positive in FY18 implying cash flow from ops. of ~$13.2 bb versus our current estimate of $12.2 bb.
http://www.barrons.com/articles/the-hot-stock-move-over-for-micron-1506547282
A consortium including private-equity firm #BainCapital and technology giant #Apple ( #AAPL ) have signed a letter of intent to buy #Toshiba 's (6502.JP) #NAND memory-chip manufacturing unit for more than $18 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The agreement could be announced later Wednesday in Japan, according to the report citing people familiar with the matter. The consortium also includes #SeagateTechnology ( #STX ) and #DellTechnologies , the report noted. The news comes after it was reported last week that Apple had threatened to stop buying NAND flash chips from #WesternDigital ( #WDC ) if Western takes control of Toshiba's chip operations. Western, which has for months been taking Toshiba to court over Toshiba’s proposed sale of the NAND factory it owns, had been presumed to be the strongest bidder in the running for the factory. Other potential suitors include Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn), but it faced an uphill battle as the Japanese government would prefer to choose a bidder with fewer ties to China.  Toshiba is selling its memory-chip division to help cover big losses at U.S. nuclear business Westinghouse, which filed for bankruptcy in March. Toshiba’s liabilities exceeded assets by nearly $5 billion as of June 30. Shares in Toshiba were recently trading 1.2% up at JPY334 a share and ,despite its difficulties, have gained 18% so far this year.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- #FlashMemory Summit (FMS), August 8-10, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, drew thousands of storage designers and their suppliers to discuss the latest and fastest storage solutions. Registration was at an all-time high, up 6% over 2016 to over 6,200. Attendees got the inside scoop on key topics including persistent memory, 3D #NAND flash and #3DXPoint™, #NVMe and #NVMeoverfabrics, and emerging non-volatile technologies (such as #MRAM and #RRAM). Other well-attended sessions included annual updates, market research, next great breakthrough in flash, and the popular forums on architectures and controllers. "Our exhibitors were in the process of completing our biggest and best show floor ever when an early morning fire forced us to cancel the exhibits. I am grateful for the professionalism and goodwill of our attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and staff who made the best of an unprecedented situation at a technical conference. We were able to get back on schedule by the afternoon and held all of our technical and marketing presentations, panels, awards, and keynotes throughout the week. Many had standing room only crowds," said Chuck Sobey, FMS 2017 Conference Chairperson. "We have begun preparing for FMS 2018. We plan to come back stronger than ever," says Sobey. Flash Memory Summit 2018 will take place on August 7-9, 2018, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. FMS 2017 received widespread media coverage with articles in Electronic Design, Forbes, IDC, EE Times, eWeek, TechTarget, ZD Net, Storage Newsletter and Tom's Hardware. Products of significant interest included SSDs, NV-DIMM, flash chips, flash controllers, flash-based storage systems, new non-volatile technologies, and all-flash arrays. Session materials and conference proceedings are now freely available at: www.flashmemorysummit.com.
Chip giant #Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has been investing heavily in its non-volatile memory business for several years now. Today, this business largely consists of sales of #NAND flash-based solid-state storage drives for data center, as well as consumer applications. Although the company continues to invest in future NAND flash technologies and products built around those technologies, Intel has been rather vocal about a new type of non-volatile memory that it's in the process of bringing to market, known as #3DXPoint
3D XPoint, it would seem, is the technology that Intel hopes to ride to increased profitability for its non-volatile memory solutions group (NSG).
Intel's broader memory strategy
To understand the role that Intel hopes 3D XPoint will play in its memory business, it's worth checking out what Intel CEO Brian Krzanich had to say about its overall strategy in the memory business on the company's most recent earnings conference call.
"Our whole strategy around the memory is that we are focused on differentiation and performance, and specifically around supporting the data center," Krzanich said.
While Intel does also sell products into the consumer market (the company just released its Intel SSD 545s drives for the mainstream consumer market, for example), Intel generally puts a lot more development effort into its data center products than it does into its consumer products.
For example, a key part of a modern solid-state drive is the NAND flash controller, which manages how data is written to and read from the underlying NAND flash media. Intel's data center solid state drives have controllers designed by Intel and firmware (that is, the logic that runs on the controller hardware) tuned for specific applications (Intel sells a range of drives, each optimized for different use cases).
Intel's consumer drives, on the other hand, tend to use third-party controllers (these days, NAND flash controller specialist Silicon Motion (NASDAQ:SIMO)seems to be providing all the controllers for Intel's client drives) with Intel-designed firmware running on the controller.
Additionally, while it is true that Intel is "focused on differentiation and performance" for its data center products, its client products are quite middle-of-the-road in terms of performance (see this review of Intel's SSD 600p client drive, for example).
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/08/1-way-intel-corporation-hopes-to-boost-memory-prof.aspx
#Intel 's #Optane Memory is finally shipping, but many can't get past the idea of cache in a high-performance computer, or the steep system requirements. Optane Memory delivers SSD-like performance when you pair it with a hard disk drive, and for some tasks, it offers better performance than a low-cost SSD. Still, some users just want the fastest possible storage system, and caching isn't the best option. Today we examine one option that combines three Optane Memory SSDs together in a RAID 0 array to create a large volume for installing an operating system and a few programs. After our initial article, I've read many reader comments about Optane Memory. It's obvious the name alone causes confusion. Optane "Memory" is actually a storage device. It gets confusing when you add in the fact that the Optane product family has two consumer cache devices and an enterprise-focused add-in card SSD, and then the terminology associated with building an Optane Memory (cache) array on your 200-series chipset. I'm confused, and I wrote it. For this article, we're not worried about creating the caching array that preloads the high-speed device with frequently-accessed data. We are simply using three Optane devices together, forgoing the special software, and just muscling through the workloads with brute force. Optane's 3D XPoint (the physical chips) are all muscle. We can summarize the comments in our first Optane article by simply saying the caching product is only slightly faster than a high-performance SSD. That's kind of true, but it's a sandbagged product. The Optane Memory SSD with 32GB and 16GB of capacity uses either one or two channels. I suspect it's a single-channel device, but Intel will neither confirm nor deny the controller specifications. If we go with my theory, this Intel single-channel controller beats your 8-channel NAND-based SSDs easily. Over time, we'll see more of Optane's capabilities, but for now, we should think of it as a whole new class of memory. You may not see it now, but Intel will soon have an advantage in the SSD game. For the last several years, all the SSD companies have played catch up with Samsung. Samsung currently has the most advanced NAND flash, and the advantage is so great that its TLC NAND often outperforms competing MLC NAND. Samsung's 3D NAND is like a college football team playing a high school football team. If that's the analogy, then Intel's Optane Technology is NFL caliber. I think Optane is off to a great start. We should all remember that the early SLC-based prosumer SSDs were slower than a modern SD card when they first came to market. Over time Optane will get faster, larger, and cheaper. What we want is for Intel to mass produce it, make it cheap, and then give us the highest performing devices at an affordable price. If you think that's going to happen soon, then you don't know Intel. Don't look for low-cost consumer Optane-based SSDs anytime soon, but RAID allows you to game the system if you take on a little risk. Modern SSDs use a form of internal RAID to increase performance. A single NAND die is fast, but it takes many working together to reach the high levels of performance we associate with SSDs. Larger capacities increase the likelihood of more parallel transactions (to a limit). This has both positive and negative side effects. Over time, the capacity of the NAND die increased, and the number of physical chips in the SSDs decreased. That's why many modern SSDs are slower than older models with the same capacity. Optane changes the game entirely. Intel hasn't given us an affordable prosumer Optane SSD, yet, so we're going to make one using a combination of hardware and software you may already have.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-raid-report,5060.html
There may be a shortage in the supply of #DRAM main memory and #NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending #3DXPoint. #Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product line. This is something that you don’t see a component supplier do very often, but it does happen. Intel has sold servers on and off for years under special circumstances to specific customers, and #Nvidia peddles its hybrid CPU-GPU DGX-1 systems, to name just two examples. It is always a bit peculiar when such vendors do this, and it is often because they want to help set the pace and speed up access to a technology so much that they just do it themselves. So it is with the SolidScale all-flash arrays from Micron, which were recently unveiled and which it hopes to get into the hands of early adopters later this fall and make generally available to any and all takers in early 2018. That is a pretty long lead time to tell customers about a product, too, and it is an indicator of just how eager Micron is to see its NVM-Express flash and QuantX 3D XPoint storage, which the SolidScale system is designed from the get-go to support, business take off. The all-flash array market is a crowded field with some pretty strong upstarts and incumbents, so it is hard to say how Micron will do as an array supplier. But no matter what, the SolidScale arrays provide an object lesson in what is wrong with non-volatile storage today as it is commonly deployed and what it might take to fix the problems. Andy Fisher, the senior product line manager at Micron who joined the company a year and a half ago after stints at Compaq and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, walked The Next Platform through the issues and the techniques that Micron has come up with the resolve them. Given that Micron sells flash and soon 3D XPoint storage devices as well as flash memory to those who also want to sell such devices in turn to datacenters, you might think Micron would just keep mum about the whole issue of the inefficient use of non-volatile storage in servers these days. Micron wants to fix these issues to drive adoption, just like Intel set its techies to work on the NVM-Express protocol several years ago to get the heritage SAS and SCSI protocol stack out of the link between the central processor and the flash memory, which is not a rotating media. NVM-Express chops out all that legacy junk and allows for flash devices to more directly link to the compute complex over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which increases the effective bandwidth and reduces the latency of I/O operations between the CPU and the flash. Right now, there are a number of issues that are keeping NVM-Express storage from being widely adopted, and Fisher rattled them off for us. Servers in the “Haswell” and “Broadwell” Xeon generations – meaning over the past three years – might have had two or four NVM-Express ports hanging off the processing complex. This was good for a higher speed caching layer within the system, but it was not ideal in that all flash storage could not link in this fashion. Other issues that NVM-Express faces are the relatively high cost between regular SSDs and those with NVM-Express ports (something Micron could do something about in the future but has made no promises in this regard), but this premium is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you do not need an intermediate storage controller between the flash and the CPU on the peripheral bus. The relative immaturity of the NVM-Express over Fabrics extension to the protocol is an issue, but the plan is to allow for a pool of non-volatile storage to be accessible to multiple servers using Ethernet or InfiniBand networks that link the storage and the servers together in a mesh.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/08/impatient-fabrics-micron-forges-nvm-express-arrays/
A few months ago, #Toshiba decided to put its #NAND flash memory division up for sale to make up for the loss of its US nuclear unit ( #Westinghouse ), which filed for bankruptcy protection. The company already has quite a few bidders including #WesternDigital, South Korean chipmaker #SKHynix, and US chipmaker #Broadcom, among others like #Google #Amazon #Apple
Turning #flash into a load of old #Tosh #Toshiba shareholders have approved a proposal to split off the Japanese company's prized #NAND flash memory unit. This opens the way for the sale of a majority stake or even all the business which should make up for the losses at Tosh’s US nuclear arm Westinghouse, which filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors on Wednesday. Toshiba is putting that business up for auction. The flash chip sale should raise at least $9 billion for half the company and Tosh said it believes the unit will be valued at around $18 billion. A source with knowledge of the planned sale said that about 10 potential bidders are interested. Those suitors include #WesternDigital which operates a chip plant with Toshiba in Japan, #Micron, #SKHynix and a team of financial investors. CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa and other executives faced angry questions from shareholders after managers last year described the chip and nuclear businesses as core units at the conglomerate. One shareholder was shocked that something which was supposed to be a company “pillar turned into a hole”. Another moaned that Toshiba has become a laughing stock around the world and the management does not have a clue what is going on. Toshiba expects to book one of the biggest losses in Japanese corporate history with a net loss of $9 billion this year.
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/43255-toshiba-shareholders-approve-nand-flash-sale
It’s getting on for two years since #Intel and #Micron launched their #3DXPoint memory concept. Describing the approach as ‘the first new class of mainstream memory technology since 1989’, they claimed 3D XPoint would be ‘up to 1000 times faster than #NAND flash’. However, since its launch, the performance advantage claims have been reduced. What the companies didn’t explain then – and haven’t really done since – was how 3D XPoint operates. Most observers suggested that 3D XPoint would be an update on #phasechangememory (PCM), a technology developed by both companies. But Intel says no. Suggesting that 3D XPoint ‘doesn’t use electrons’, it also says that it’s not based on PCM or memristor technology. Intel planned to launch 3D XPoint based solid state drives (SSDs) under the Optane brand ‘early in 2016’. For whatever reason – likely to be manufacturing yield related – Optane SSDs have only just launched and Micron’s version – QuantX – has yet to be seen. 3D XPoint is one of the technologies vying to be a universal memory: something which is as cheap as DRAM, as fast as SRAM and non volatile like flash. The Optane SSD isn't cheap: the 375Gbyte device just announced will cost more than $1500. But it does appear to hit the spot when it comes to speed and non volatility. Interestingly, the SSD can be configured to appear to an operating system as DRAM – in other words, a massive cache memory. A high end controller could, in theory, push data into and out of the SSD rapidly through operations like prefetching, boosting performance. While the focus has been on 3D XPoint memory, Intel insisted that Optane would be a ‘bundle’ – alongside 3D XPoint, there is a memory controller, a PCIe interface, plus software and some other hardware elements. Could it be this combination which brings the performance boost over NAND based SSDs, rather than the memory alone? All that remains is for Intel to explain how the memory works.
http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-blogs/3d-xpoint-based-drives-launched/152950/
Client-grade #SSD s of mainstream capacities continue to see rising contract prices in the PC-OEM market during this first quarter. Beancounters at #DRAMeXchange have added up some numbers and divided by their shoe size and worked out that average, contract prices of MLC-based client-grade SSDs are projected to go up by 12-16 percent compared with the fourth quarter of last year, while prices of TLC-based products are expected to increase by 10-16 percent sequentially. Second quarter, end device sales are anticipated to be relatively flat. Furthermore, PC-OEMs are reaching their limits on SSD costs. While the average prices of mainstream client-grade SSDs will keep climbing, the increase in the second quarter will likely be more moderate. Alan Chen, senior research manager of DRAMeXchange said that the average contract prices of client-grade SSDs in the PC-OEM market are rising this first quarter because not only PC clients are aggressively stocking up their inventories, smartphone clients are also maintaining strong demand for storage components. “At the same time, the industry-wide transition to #3D-NAND and #2D-NAND TLC production has sharply reduced the supply of Flash memory of the 2D-NAND MLC type. Thus, the price increase of MLC-based SSDs is outpacing that of TLC-based SSDs.” Chen added that SSDs are increasingly preferred by consumers due to having faster read/write speed than HDDs, so PC-OEMs will keep up their SSD purchases despite tight supply for NAND Flash and SSDs. In the global notebook market, the SSD adoption rate is estimated to arrive at 45 percent this year. Additionally, the growth in the notebook SSD adoption will be higher in the consumer-class notebook segment than the business-class segment. On the other hand, the tight NAND Flash supply and sharp price hikes for SSDs will likely discourage PC- OEMs from raising storage capacity. Therefore, the storage specifications for mainstream PC-OEM SSDs are expected to remain in the 128GB and 256GB options”. Shipments of client-grade SSDs will drop by seven to eight percent sequentially in the first quarter
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/memory/43106-tight-nand-flash-supply-causes-price-jump
#Intel and #Micron announced #3DXPoint (pronounced "three dee cross point"), a new form of high-speed, non-volatile, solid-state storage. But we're still waiting for products that actually use the technology. The first 3D XPoint storage should hit the market this year. Branded "Optane," Intel briefly documented (on a PDF that has since been pulled from its website) the first specs of the first of these products: the Intel SSD DC P4800X is a 375GB half-height, half-length PCIe NVMe card aimed at enterprise markets. Optane should also eventually come in 750GB and 1.5TB versions. Taiwanese site PCADV spotted the specs while they were up. When Intel announced 3D XPoint, the company said that it would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than (volatile) DRAM, and with 1,000 times the endurance of NAND, too, which would greatly reduce the susceptibility of 3D XPoint drives to write-induced failures. The specs of this first SSD reflect these ambitions, but perhaps not in quite the way people would have expected
https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/intel-3d-xpoint-performance-leak/
#Toshiba on Friday officially announced it will sell a portion of its #flashmemory business, including the #SSD business of the Storage & Electronic Device Solutions Division, to a not-yet-named buyer. The company, which invented #NAND flash in the early 1980s, announced last week it was exploring spinning off its memory business. A Nikkei's Asian Review said Toshiba had been considering spinning off its semiconductor operations and selling a partial stake to #WesternDigital ( #WD ), "as it tries to cope with a massive impairment loss in its U.S. nuclear power unit."
The global #memorychip industry is heading into what's been dubbed an ultra-super-cycle, as the challenge of making chips smaller yet more efficient has created supply bottlenecks, while there is soaring demand for data storage - from smartphones and artificial intelligence to autonomous driving and the Internet of Things. Chipmakers and analysts predict the price rally - the average price of benchmark memory chips rose 26-31 percent last year - will continue this year as supplies remain tight. "We expect an ultra-super-cycle instead of just a super-cycle in the 2017 DRAM industry," said CW Chung, an analyst at Nomura, referring to memory chips used in smartphones and computers for short-term data processing and storage. That's left gadget makers scurrying to secure stable supplies, and distributors reporting shipment delays, while chipmakers enjoy bumper earnings. For example, Samsung Electronics, the world's biggest memory chipmaker, this week reported record quarterly operating profit of 4.95 trillion won ($4.26 billion) at its chip business, and its stock price has risen 77 percent over 12 months, a period that includes one of the consumer electronics industry's most damaging product faults. "As of the end of the fourth quarter, our DRAM inventory in particular has gotten tight compared to the previous period after we actively responded to demand," Chun Se-won, Samsung Electronics senior vice president, said after the earnings. Samsung did not detail its inventory levels, but some analysts reckon its DRAM inventory level fell to less than a week at end-December, from nearer a month a year ago. BNP estimates the industry-wide inventory of NAND flash memory chips, used for longer-term data storage, is also less than one week. Toshiba, which may sell part of its core chip business for unrelated financial reasons, said it is receiving orders beyond its capacity for NAND chips, and SK Hynix, while meeting orders for now, warned that an industry-wide shortage of NAND chips will likely persist this year. Leading Chinese smartphone makers such as Huawei [HWT.UL] and ZTE declined to comment on chip supplies. Alibaba-backed Meizu said it has no problems in its smartphone launch or shipment plans. "We have a long-term agreement with our suppliers that ... guarantees more than 3 months of supply at any given moment," global branding manager Ard Boudeling told Reuters.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15B0UM
