SK hynix Begins Mass Production of Industry's Highest 238-Layer 4D NAND

[btarunr]

SK hynix Inc. announced today that it has started mass production of its 238-layer 4D NAND Flash memory, following the development in August 2022, and that product compatibility test with a global smartphone manufacturer is underway. "SK hynix has developed solution products for smartphones and client SSDs which are used as PC storage devices, adopting the 238-layer NAND technology, and has moved into mass production in May," the company said. "Given that the company secured world-class competitiveness in price, performance and quality for both 238-layer NAND and the previous generation 176-layer NAND, we expect these products to drive earnings improvement in the second half of the year."

The 238-layer product - the smallest NAND in size - has a 34% higher manufacturing efficiency compared to the previous generation of 176-layer, resulting in a significant improvement in cost competitiveness. Besides, with a data-transfer speed of 2.4 Gb per second, a 50% increase from the previous generation, and approximately 20% increase in read and write speed, the company is confident that it will be able to deliver an improved performance to the smartphone and PC customers using this technology.



Once the product compatibility test with the global smartphone manufacturer is completed, SK hynix will begin supplying the 238-layer NAND product for smartphones, and expand the technology across its product portfolio such as PCIe 5.0 SSDs and high-capacity server SSDs going forward.

"We will continue to overcome NAND technology limitations and increase our competitiveness so that we can achieve a bigger turnaround than anyone else during the upcoming market rebound," said Jumsoo Kim, Head of S238 NAND at SK hynix.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Minus Infinity]

1D, 2D, 3D and now 4D. What is 4D?

 

[Ferrum Master]

1D, 2D, 3D and now 4D. What is 4D?

It is an added constant how fast cells turn bad.

 

[seronx]

1D, 2D, 3D and now 4D. What is 4D?

4D is this => https://news.skhynix.com/evolution-of-4d-nand-flash-opens-the-era-of-terabyte-smartphones/

 

[R-T-B]

4D is this => https://news.skhynix.com/evolution-of-4d-nand-flash-opens-the-era-of-terabyte-smartphones/

In summary:

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Still those cute little 512Gbit chips that have been around for many years now. Apparently we'll be waiting forever for an increase in capacity.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Will this 2.4Gb NAND finally result in faster random reads/writes?

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Will this 2.4Gb NAND finally result in faster random reads/writes?

Wait a few days and you will get some stimulating news here to help you hope for a noticeable speedup in random reading of small files.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Will this 2.4Gb NAND finally result in faster random reads/writes?

Sure, another 10 MB/s or so.

 

[Bwaze]

So, will that be used to finally break the barrier of 4TB SSD drives and should we expect affordable 8 TB and larger drives?

Or will it just be used to inccrease margins in the drive sizes we have acces for almost a decade now? Promotional text describes "smartphones" as the main target, not PC drives...

 

[Wirko]

Will this 2.4Gb NAND finally result in faster random reads/writes?

No. Software developers need to learn to use queues. But if they didn't learn it in the era of HDDs (which have random QD1 performance around 150 IOPS), why would they in the era of SSDs?

 

[Minus Infinity]

4D is this => https://news.skhynix.com/evolution-of-4d-nand-flash-opens-the-era-of-terabyte-smartphones/

Cheers.

Still looks like marketing guff calling it 4D though.

 

[Wirko]

Still those cute little 512Gbit chips that have been around for many years now. Apparently we'll be waiting forever for an increase in capacity.

There's a couple 1-terabit dies too, the Kioxia BiCS5 and the new Micron B58R at least.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

There's a couple 1-terabit dies too, the Kioxia BiCS5 and the new Micron B58R at least.

In "mass production"?

 

[Wirko]

In "mass production"?

Yes, even the Kingston NV2 has been found to use Kioxia terabit dies. Micron's stuff runs in most or all PCIe 5.0 SSDs, you may frown at their price but they are in mass production now.

 

[trsttte]

In summary:

They should really have called it something else. 3D was used to describe stacked cells, as in 3 dimensions, 4D is meaningless, it's simply the next improvement.

 

[chrcoluk]

So, will that be used to finally break the barrier of 4TB SSD drives and should we expect affordable 8 TB and larger drives?

Or will it just be used to inccrease margins in the drive sizes we have acces for almost a decade now? Promotional text describes "smartphones" as the main target, not PC drives...

Good question, if I wanted to just use it for margins, I wouldnt make a global announcement.

So I am guessing a mixture of both. They will want some financial reward from it as is r&d costs.

 

[R-T-B]

They should really have called it something else. 3D was used to describe stacked cells, as in 3 dimensions, 4D is meaningless, it's simply the next improvement.

Yeah, it's totally marketing hyperbole, just translating it.

 

[Wirko]

It is an added constant how fast cells turn bad.

They don't turn bad, it's just that their content becomes time-dependent.

 

[Nhonho]

I really want to buy affordable large capacity (30+ TB) SATA or PCIe SSDs to store my files.

HDs are annoyingly slow.

 

[Bwaze]

And loud. I'd rather put up with the even slower than HDD speeds of Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB - it falls to below 100 MB/s when copying large amounts of data.

But even the new lower price of 370 EUR, down from 600 EUR a year ago seems to much for an antiquated SATA III drive that has been on market for 3 years - and instead of signaling the coming of 8 TB drives to market just remained the exception.

Imagine if the graphics cards industry just kept selling Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti as their flagship for the next three generations?

 

[trsttte]

even slower than HDD speeds of Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB

It's only slower during sequential writes after filling the SLC, but demolishes the HDD before that and in any random scenario. Very nice WORM drives