Thursday, May 7th 2020
Intel Ready with 144-layer 3D NAND On its Own, Talks 4-layer 3DXP, "Alder Stream" and "Keystone Harbor"
Intel's memory and storage products division now has a completely independent NAND flash technology development team post its split with Micron Technology, with which it was part of the IMFlash Technologies joint-venture. Intel is close to gaining a technological lead over Micron with a new 144-layer 3D NAND flash chip which will ship roughly around the time Micron begins pushing out its 128-layer 3D NAND chips. SK Hynix will begin shipping its 128-layer 3D NAND flash chips later this year. KIOXIA will put out 112-layer chips before the turn of the year. YMTC is developing its portfolio at a breakneck pace.
The 144-layer 3D NAND flash chip by Intel can handle up to four bits per cell (QLC), and can be configured to function as TLC or SLC, at lower densities. Intel will launch its first SSD based on this 144-layer QLC NAND flash chip, codenamed "Keystone Harbor," later this year. Development is underway at Intel for PLC (5 bits per cell) technology, which should drive up densities by 25 percent. Intel is also close to launching its second generation 3D X-point memory technology.
The 2nd gen 3D X-point memory chip by Intel will feature four layers on the physical media, as opposed to two on the first-gen. The first Optane product based on the new chip is codenamed "Alder Stream." The drive will launch later this year in a single-port variant, with dual-port variants planned for 2021. The drive uses an advanced new controller that features PCI-Express gen 4.0 host interface. It's likely that "Alder Stream" will be part of Intel's big next-gen Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processor and "Eagle Stream" platform launch, which features PCIe gen 4.0.
Source:
Blocks and Files
The 144-layer 3D NAND flash chip by Intel can handle up to four bits per cell (QLC), and can be configured to function as TLC or SLC, at lower densities. Intel will launch its first SSD based on this 144-layer QLC NAND flash chip, codenamed "Keystone Harbor," later this year. Development is underway at Intel for PLC (5 bits per cell) technology, which should drive up densities by 25 percent. Intel is also close to launching its second generation 3D X-point memory technology.
45 Comments on Intel Ready with 144-layer 3D NAND On its Own, Talks 4-layer 3DXP, "Alder Stream" and "Keystone Harbor"
Basically all the flash can work in smaller bits per cell modes as long as you are OK with the density hit. Not user-configurable obviously but manufacturer can.Depends. Consumer Optane drives at this point are too small or let down by controllers. Enterprise ones are OK but... enterprise, with prices to match. XPoint does have and awesome low queue depth performance which would be excellent for desktop.I have a 2TB 660p as my games drive. The only time you feel the QLC is when drive is 95+% full. In any other case, it's a normal NVMe drive. As for other manufacturers, Crucial's P1 is there for consumer, ADATA has something as well, Samsung has the QVO line and Micron has 5210 ION drives for enterprise. This kind of makes sense with Flash manufacturers being at the forefront of this.
Layers by themselves apply to Flash itself and are not specific to xLC.
- M10 has 16-64GB in M.2 2280
- 800P is 58-118GB in M.2 2280
Both M10 and 800p are PCIe 3.0 x2
Intended new models for the last two - M15 and 815P - were cancelled :(
H10 is the crap 2+2 lane Xpoint+Flash drive.
Basically, not much to choose from :(
Best bet for a fast boot drive at this point is to wait for 2nd gen PCI-E 4.0 controller from the usual suspects (Phison, Samsung etc).
But the OS drive is probably the drive I care the least about. I can always quickly set up the OS if it goes bad, but my precious files on the other hand.RAID for sure, but I'm a bit more skeptical about the complexity of ZFS.
After several drives going bad, I changed my main computer to running 1 SSD for the OS, 2 SSDs in RAID 1 for work, and hard drives for backups.
As far as i know Intel is not selling Optane to third party vendors for use in their products so the chanches of seeing official Optane USB stick are slim to none.
As for focus on QLC, those brands that you mentioned indeed have QLC drives. But not many of them are drumming up on QLC products like Intel. Even Samsung has gone quiet with the QVO series. Most of these QLC SSDs are silently ending up in prebuild computers and in laptops where the end users are generally not aware. I think the point is this, QLC certainly have its merits (mostly in terms of density), however I have not really seen it competitively priced against a decent TLC drive.
For me it's all about reliability, but I haven't pulled the trigger on 3D XPoint yet. Back when I considered it, it cost >1$ per GB, which I technically can afford, but tough since I'm not sure of my needs in capacity. So I went with 2x Intel 545s (TLC) in RAID 1 as a "temporary" solution.
But it all comes down to the importance of the storage. For work or other important stuff, I could justify a "small" 3D XPoint drive, and then HDDs for long-term storage and backup. For games, I would probably just go with a "cheap" TLC SSD (or two).