Tuesday, October 29th 2024
Samsung Plans 400-Layer V-NAND for 2026 and DRAM Technology Advancements by 2027
Samsung is currently mass-producing its 9th generation V-NAND flash memory chips with 286 layers unveiled this April. According to the Korean Economic Daily, the company targets V-NAND memory chips with at least 400 stacked layers by 2026. In 2013, Samsung became the first company to introduce V-NAND chips with vertically stacked memory cells to maximize capacity. However, stacking beyond 300 levels proved to be a real challenge with the memory chips getting frequently damaged. To address this problem, Samsung is reportedly developing an improved 10th-generation V-NAND that is going to use the Bonding Vertical (BV) NAND technology. The idea is to manufacture the storage and peripheral circuits on separate layers before bonding them vertically. This is a major shift from the current Co-Packaged (CoP) technology. Samsung stated that the new method will increase the density of bits per unit area by 1.6 times (60%), thus leading to increased data speeds.
Samsung's roadmap is truly ambitious, with plans to launch the 11th generation of NAND in 2027 with an estimated 50% improvement in I/O rates, followed by 1,000-layer NAND chips by 2030. Its competitor, SK hynix, is also working on 400-layer NAND aiming to have the technology ready for mass production by the end of 2025, as we previously mentioned in August. Samsung, the current HBM market leader with a 36.9% market share have also plans for its DRAM sector intending to introduce the sixth-generation 10 nm DRAM, or 1c DRAM by the first half of 2025. Then we can expect to see Samsung's seventh-generation 1d nm (still on 10 nm) in 2026, and by 2027 the company hopes to release its first generation sub-10 nm DRAM, or 0a DRAM memory that will use a Vertical Channel Transistor (VCT) 3D structure similar to what NAND flash utilizes.
Sources:
Korean Economic Daily, TrendForce
Samsung's roadmap is truly ambitious, with plans to launch the 11th generation of NAND in 2027 with an estimated 50% improvement in I/O rates, followed by 1,000-layer NAND chips by 2030. Its competitor, SK hynix, is also working on 400-layer NAND aiming to have the technology ready for mass production by the end of 2025, as we previously mentioned in August. Samsung, the current HBM market leader with a 36.9% market share have also plans for its DRAM sector intending to introduce the sixth-generation 10 nm DRAM, or 1c DRAM by the first half of 2025. Then we can expect to see Samsung's seventh-generation 1d nm (still on 10 nm) in 2026, and by 2027 the company hopes to release its first generation sub-10 nm DRAM, or 0a DRAM memory that will use a Vertical Channel Transistor (VCT) 3D structure similar to what NAND flash utilizes.
11 Comments on Samsung Plans 400-Layer V-NAND for 2026 and DRAM Technology Advancements by 2027
As it stands right now, demand is being driven by enterprise / AI but consumers are still stuck with 8TB M.2 drives being the highest capacity that haven't gone down in price since they launched.
One of the first 8TB drives was the Sabrent 8TB TLC drive with an MSRP of $1,200: www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-8tb-ssd-review
Current price is, you guessed it, $1,200 Two years (almost 3), zero progress.
sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt4p-8tb
It was and is the most expensive consumer 8TB m.2 drive because it employs a very large cache. Lower cost drives launched later at a lower price but they often come with trade-offs like worse warranty, less cache, lower endurance (WD Black 8TB for example), less reputable brand, ect. In fact if you look at the amazon listing for the Sabrent 8TB TLC, the cheaper price of $1,070 on Amazon vs the official store is due to it being sold without a warranty by "PA Home & Outdoors", a seller with 58% positive feedback. Surely nothing will go wrong with that.
You are missing the forest though the trees really, many of the drives launched at the exact same price they are currently at. Some of them actually increased in price, the Oyen 8TB launched at $670 and is now $900. I snagged two of those to add alongside my enterprise SSDs. They were the only reasonably priced 8TB TLC m.2 SSD for the little while they were available at that price.
You are paying 4 times the price per TB as compared to a 4 TB drive (HP FX900 vs WD Black 8TB) and that's before you consider that the 4TB drives did go on sale for $200 on black friday whereas the 8TB drives did not.
Now compare that to 7.68 TB enterprise drives, which go for around $500 - $600 with vastly better endurance, power loss protection, and encryption.Rather optimistic, the increasing the pace of NAND development could mean significantly higher prices for higher density chips. NAND vendors seem to be very opitmistic with their future layer count increases but at the end of the day they need to be able to fund that. There have been times in the history of the storage industry where manufacturers failed to predict market demand and it's the reason why many of them died off, the margins on storage products are thin.
Mind you even in the best case scenario, improvements to NAND performance may not be in metrics that are meaningful to the vast majority of people. There's barley any difference from vastly lower layer count PCIe 3.0 drives vs 232 layer PCIe 5.0 drives in consumer workloads. There is 0 difference between anything PCIe 4.0 and faster, except for Optane. Optane is the only thing that actually provides a noticeable performance uplift over a 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 drive.
I'm waiting since 2017 to buy a computer with GAA-FET on board of a cpu & gpu, but still nothing ...No wait! seriously?!?!?!
So no GAA-FET, no 3D trench cell,no OTS, but only NAND till 2030!?!?!
www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/western-digital-sn850x-8-tb.d2071
www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-8-tb.d543
You are confusing praise with merely stating facts. The point was not to praise them, it was to explain pricing relative to other 8TB m.2 drives. Sabrent doesn't make the fastest SSDs on the planet, that's not their target clientel.