According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

According to TrendForce's research, global DRAM revenue fell by 32.5% QoQ to US$12, 281 million for 4Q22. The QoQ decline for 4Q22 is larger than the QoQ decline of 28.8% for 3Q22 and comes close to the QoQ decline of 36% for the final quarter of 2008, when the global economy was in the midst of a major financial crisis. The main cause of the steep revenue drop in 4Q22 was the plummeting overall ASP. DRAM suppliers experienced a rapid accumulation of inventory in 3Q22 due to a freeze in buyers' demand. Subsequently, suppliers were much more energetic in price negotiations for 4Q22 contracts as they were struggling for market share. Among the major categories of DRAM products, server DRAM suffered the sharpest price drop in 4Q22. Contract prices of DDR4 and DDR5 server DRAM products registered QoQ drops of 23~28% and 30~35% respectively.

It appears things are tougher at Micron than expected, as according to Boise State Public Radio, the company is looking at cutting an additional five percent of its workforce. Back in December, Micron announced it was planning to lay off around 10 percent of its global workforce, which at the time sat at around 49,000 employees, but it appears that cut wasn't enough, as company spokesman Tate Tran has confirmed the total headcount reduction is expected to around 15 percent, although that is for the entire year of 2023. This suggests that there might be several stages of layoffs, unless things improve and demand for Micron's products pick up.

The company is also lowering its capex, not just for 2023, but also for 2024, although the company is expecting more on building new fabs. Micron has already reduced its wafer starts, for both DRAM and NAND flash by around 20 percent. This is all taking place while the company is slowing down its tech node transitions and as such, its 1-gamma note will be moved to 2025. This means that Micron will be stuck at 232-layer 3D TLC NAND for longer than initially planned, which could lead to Micron losing market to its competitors, specifically SK Hynix and Samsung in this case, while allowing other competitors to catch up. Micron will reports is financial Q2 '23 results at the end of March, with previous quarters results indicating that Micron is expecting a drop in revenue of up to US$300 million compared to the previous quarter.

Back in December, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra announced that the company would be laying off around 10 percent of its staff and according to the Idaho Statesman, Micron will start at its Boise, Idaho fab. This is despite the company investing US$15 billion in a new leading-edge fab there. That said, it doesn't look like Boise will see any huge cuts in staff, as Micron hasn't issued a WARN notice, which is required when a company is planning on laying off more than 500 people within a 30-day period.

Micron issued a statement earlier this week, saying that its layoffs are a combination of "voluntary attrition, workforce reductions and reduced external hiring," which tends to mean that third party contractors will bear the brunt of the layoffs. Micron is also said to be cutting executive salaries, while also suspending bonuses for employees across the board. Further cost reductions include a halted share buyback program and a reduced production output, the latter due to lower demand. Micron has some 49,000 employees globally, with some 6,000 located in Idaho. The company expects to have completed its job cuts by the end of this month.

In Japan, the first consumer focused PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs have gone on sale and one of these drives has been put through some quick synthetic benchmarks by @momomo_us on Twitter. We're not familiar with the CFD Gaming brand which the drive is sold under, but the CSSD-M2M2TPG5NFZ—as the drive is called—is based on Phison's E26 controller and it's paired with Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND, suggesting it's based around a reference design from Phison. CFD Gaming offers the drive in 1, 2 and 4 TB sizes and @momomo_us tested the 2 TB version.

Before we go into the performance figures, there's one thing that needs to be highlighted about this drive, it produces a high pitch noise during use, thanks to its tiny 17x17 mm, 21,000 rpm fan from Sunon. @momomo_us provided a video on Twitter which is linked below, so you can hear it in action for yourself. Hopefully this isn't the future of NVMe SSDs, as it's going to put off many potential customers from getting one. @momomo_us only tested the drive with CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, which shows that sequential write speeds are slightly faster than claimed by CFD Gaming, with the sequential write speeds being bang on the money. For those hoping for higher random performance, things aren't looking so great, as the drive only performs slightly better than the best PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that its DDR5 server memory portfolio for the data center is now fully validated on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor family. Micron DDR5 memory delivers up to twice the memory bandwidth over previous generations, which is essential to fueling the rapid growth of cores in today's data center processors. Transitioning to DDR5 will help alleviate a potential bottleneck for years to come by providing higher bandwidth to unlock more computer power per processor. Micron DDR5, in combination with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, benefits a wide range of workloads including SPECjbb, which delivers up to 49% performance improvement on benchmarking for Critical-jOPS (Java operations per second) compared to previous generations. In addition to increased memory bandwidth and performance, Micron DDR5 memory is also designed to improve reliability across the data center with features such as on-die Error Correction Code (ODECC) and bounded faults. On-die ECC corrects single-bit errors and detects multi-bit errors.

"The deep collaboration we have established with Intel as a highly valued ecosystem partner, has allowed Micron to remain at the forefront of the industry transition to DDR5," said Raj Hazra, senior vice president and general manager of Micron's Compute and Networking Business Unit. "This work has been pivotal in developing solutions that meet the complex needs and challenges of our data center customers as they convert massive amounts of data into insights."

At the 2023 International CES, we caught a hold of Phison, makes or arguably the most popular SSD controllers, which sprung to prominence on being the first to market with PCIe Gen 4 NVMe controllers, and now hopes to repeat it with PCIe Gen 5. We'd been shown a reference-design Phison E26-powered M.2 SSD, along with some hardware specs of the controller itself. The drive itself isn't much to look at—a standard looking M.2-2280 drive with a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 host interface, and the Phison E26 controller with its shiny IHS being prominently located next to a DDR4 memory chip, and two new-generation Micron Technology 3D NAND flash memory chips.

The Phison E26 controller, bearing the long-form model number PS5026-E26, is an NVMe 2.0 spec client-segment SSD controller. It has been built on the TSMC 12 nm FinFET silicon-fabrication node. The controller features an integrated DRAM controller with support for DDR4 and LPDDR4 memory types for use as DRAM cache. Its main flash interface is 8-channel with 32 NAND chip-enable (CE) lines, support for TLC and QLC NAND flash, a dual-CPU architecture, and hardware-acceleration for AES-256, TCG-Opal, and Pyrite. The controller features Phison's 5th generation LPDC ECC and internal RAID engines. For its reference-design 2 TB TLC-based drive, Phison claims sequential transfer rates of up to 13.5 GB/s reads, with up to 12 GB/s writes. The 4K random-access performance is rated at up to 1.5 million IOPS reads, with up to 2 million IOPS writes.

Micron Technology, today announced the Micron 9400 NVMe SSD is in volume production and immediately available from channel partners and to global OEM customers for use in servers requiring the highest levels of storage performance. The Micron 9400 is designed to manage the most demanding data center workloads, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) training, machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The drive delivers an industry-leading 30.72 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity, superior workload performance versus the competition, and 77% improved input/output operations per second (IOPS). The Micron 9400 is the world's fastest PCIe Gen4 data center U.3 drive shipping and delivers consistently low latency at all capacity points.

"High performance, capacity and low latency are critical features for enterprises seeking to maximize their investments in AI/ML and supercomputing systems," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of data center storage at Micron. "Thanks to its industry-leading 30 TB capacity and stunning performance with over 1 million IOPS in mixed workloads, the Micron 9400 SSD packs larger datasets into each server and accelerates machine learning training, which equips users to squeeze more out of their GPUs."

TrendForce's latest analysis of the DRAM market finds that the inventory pressure on suppliers remain significant due to the persistently weak demand for consumer electronics. Among the top three DRAM suppliers, only Samsung has seen a slight drop in inventory level thanks to its highly competitive pricing strategy. To prevent DRAM prices as a whole from making another sharp dive, a few suppliers such as Micron have been cutting production. Therefore, the QoQ decline in DRAM prices are projected to shrink to around 13~18% for 1Q23. However, the slump will have yet to reach the bottom at that time. Regarding the QoQ changes in the prices of the major categories of DRAM products for 1Q23, PC DRAM and server DRAM are projected to again register a drop that is near 20%. Conversely, mobile DRAM will experience the smallest price decline because its profit margin is ready the thinnest.

ASUS today announced the exciting 2023 version of the 16-inch Zenbook Pro 16X OLED (UX7602BZ) creator laptop, featuring a unique Intel processor and a brand-new ASUS Supernova system-on-module (SoM) Design. Developed in partnership with leading technology companies, this new laptop is the most powerful version ever released.

The breakthrough, ultra-compact ASUS Supernova SoM Design enables ultra-powerful performance from the 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13905H processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU with NVIDIA Studio drivers, and support for LPDDR5X DRAM that offers 7500 MHz memory frequency speeds, which is much higher than the previous LPDDR5. The new 2023 Zenbook Pro 16X OLED will noticeably improve video-editing performance and 3D rendering capacity—drastically shortening processing times for creative workflows.

As we're nearing the end of 2022, there is more news about layoffs and this time around it's Micron that is looking at laying off some 10 percent of its workforce. The company announced its FQ1 '23 earnings today, or fiscal quarter one 2023, since not all companies follow the standard year when it comes to financial reporting. Micron saw revenues of US$4,085 billion for the quarter, down from US$6,643 billion in the previous quarter and down from US$7,687 billion the same quarter a year ago. However, the company made a net loss of US$195 million.

Micron's CEO Sanjay Mehrotra stated "Micron's strong technology, manufacturing and financial position put us on solid footing to navigate the near-term environment, and we are taking decisive actions to cut our supply and expenses. We expect improving customer inventories to enable higher revenue in the fiscal second half, and to deliver strong profitability once we get past this downturn." These decisive actions include cutting 10 percent of its workforce according to Reuters, although this won't take place until sometime in 2023. Micron is also planning a cut in its CAPEX plans for its fiscal 2024, i.e. the company won't be investing as heavily as planned in new fabs, despite being granted money to do so by the US government.

YMTC, the Chinese DRAM and NAND flash company that recently announced a 232-layer 3D NAND flash memory that threatened to disrupt entrenched players Samsung, Micron Technology, Kioxia, and SK Hynix, has been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce, forcing American consumer electronics and PC manufacturers to stop sourcing from the company. Capitalizing on just this, Samsung raised prices of its NAND flash memory chips by as much as 10%, according to a DigiTimes report.

YMTC peaked when Apple struck a NAND flash supply deal with the company in 2020, which would see its storage devices power pretty much every Apple product you can think of, however, under political pressure, Apple withdrew from this deal in 2022. The Department of Commerce contention has been to that YMTC has access to cutting-edge technology, and is backed by Chinese state-capacity, which can help it drive out competitors. All is not well between the U.S. and China geopolitically, either. Samsung's 10% increase in the first half of December 2022 concerns spot-pricing, which could mean its contract pricing (usually used by customers placing very large orders), could be different. It is conceivable that the exit of YMTC from the U.S. market could raise NAND flash product prices across the board.

For those looking at upgrading—or adding an SSD—to their Steam Deck, there's now a new option from Sabrent. The company has launched an M.2 2230 sized version of its Rocket SSD that will be available in sizes of 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB. As one would expect, due to the form factor, we're looking at DRAM-less drives. Sabrent has gone with Phison's E21T controller and it has been paired with Micron's B47R, 176-layer NAND.

In other words, we're not talking about a high-performance drive here, but that might be a good thing as well, since it'll produce less heat, which should prevent drive throttling in the tiny space available inside the Steam Deck. Sabrent rates the drives as having a sequential read speed of up to 5,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 4,300 MB/s. The read IOPS are rated at up to 450K, with the write IOPS at up to 920K, which once again varies between the drive sizes. The 512 GB drive appears to have the overall best performance. The drives are rated for 200, 300 and 600 TBW and come with a five year warranty. No pricing has been revealed so far.

Micron Technology, Inc.,, today announced it is shipping the Micron 2550 NVMe SSD to global PC OEM customers for use in mainstream laptops and desktops. The 2550 is the world's first client SSD to ship using NAND over 200 layers. Delivering performance that eclipses the competition through its density and power advantages, the 2550 provides users with responsiveness and the low power consumption needed to extend battery life for work and home PCs.

"We focused on delivering a superior user experience for PC users with this SSD," said Praveen Vaidyanathan, vice president and general manager of the Client Storage Group at Micron. "The new 2550 SSD builds on our established and broadly adopted PCIe Gen4 architecture. It also incorporates Micron's industry-leading 232-layer NAND and focuses on thermal architecture and power design. These capabilities deliver impressive application performance and phenomenal power savings."

TrendForce reports that the recent easing of tight supply for components has led to rising shipments for enterprise servers. Furthermore, ODMs for the most part have been able to sustain the momentum of data center build-out with the demand from ByteDance and the tenders issued by Chinese telecom companies. Nevertheless, the performance of the enterprise SSD market on the whole has been impacted by falling NAND Flash prices. For 3Q22, the NAND Flash industry's enterprise SSD revenue dropped by 28.7% QoQ to US$5.22 billion. Furthermore, all enterprise SSD suppliers recorded a negative performance for the period as well.

Regarding individual enterprise SSD suppliers' revenue figures for 3Q22, Samsung posted around US$2.12 billion. Its market share also shrank to 40.6% from 44.5% in 2Q22. Samsung's performance was mainly dragged down by the decline in its NAND Flash ASP. In the aspect of product development, SSDs featuring 128L NAND Flash and PCIe 4.0 will remain Samsung's main offerings for enterprise storage during 2023.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that in response to market conditions, the company is reducing DRAM and NAND wafer starts by approximately 20% versus fiscal fourth quarter 2022. These reductions will be made across all technology nodes where Micron has meaningful output. Micron is also working toward additional capex cuts. In calendar 2023, Micron now expects its year-on-year bit supply growth to be negative for DRAM, and in the single-digit percentage range for NAND.

Recently, the market outlook for calendar 2023 has weakened. In order to significantly improve total inventory in the supply chain, Micron believes that in calendar 2023, year-on-year DRAM bit supply will need to shrink and NAND bit supply growth will need to be significantly lower than previous estimates. "Micron is taking bold and aggressive steps to reduce bit supply growth to limit the size of our inventory. We will continue to monitor industry conditions and make further adjustments as needed," said Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. "Despite the near-term cyclical challenges, we remain confident in the secular demand drivers for our markets, and in the long term, expect memory and storage revenue growth to outpace that of the rest of the semiconductor industry."

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that for 3Q22, the revenue of the whole DRAM industry dropped by 28.9% QoQ to US$18.19 billion. This decline is the second largest to the one that the industry experienced in 2008, when the global economy was rocked by a major financial crisis. Regarding the state of the DRAM market in 3Q22, the QoQ decline in contract prices widened to the range of 10~15% as the demand for consumer electronics continued to shrink. Server DRAM shipments, which had been on a relatively stable trend compared with shipments of other types of DRAM products, also slowed down noticeably from the previous quarter as buyers began adjusting their inventory levels.

Turning to individual DRAM suppliers' performances in 3Q22, the top three suppliers (i.e., Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron) all exhibited a QoQ drop in revenue. Samsung posted US$7.40 billion and a QoQ drop of 33.5%, which was the largest among the top three. SK hynix's revenue fell by 25.2% QoQ to around US$5.24 billion. As for Micron, its revenue came to around US$4.81 billion. Since Micron marks its fiscal quarters differently, its DRAM ASP showed a QoQ decline that was smaller than the ones suffered by the two Korean suppliers. And as a result of this, Micron's QoQ revenue decline was also the smallest among the top three. TrendForce points out that the top three are still maintaining a relatively high operating margin at this moment. Nevertheless, the inventory correction period that has started this year will last through the first half of next year, so they will experience a continuing squeeze on profit.

Eliyan Corporation, credited for the invention of the semiconductor industry's highest-performance and most efficient chiplet interconnect, today announced two major milestones in the commercialization of its technology for multi-die chiplet integration: the close of its Series A $40M funding round, and the successful tapeout of its technology on an industry standard 5-nanometer (nm) process.

Eliyan's NuLink PHY and NuGear technologies address the critical need for a commercially viable approach to enabling high performance and cost-effectiveness in the connection of homogeneous and heterogenous architectures on a standard, organic chip substrate. It has proven to achieve similar bandwidth, power efficiency, and latency as die-to-die implementations using advanced packaging technologies, but without the other drawbacks of specialized approaches.

Micron Technology, Inc., announced today that it is shipping qualification samples of its 1β (1-beta) DRAM technology to select smartphone manufacturers and chipset partners and has achieved mass production readiness with the world's most advanced DRAM technology node. The company is debuting its next generation of process technology on its low-power double data rate 5X (LPDDR5X) mobile memory, delivering top speed grades of 8.5 gigabits (Gb) per second. The node delivers significant gains across performance, bit density and power efficiency that will have sweeping market benefits. Beyond mobile, 1β delivers the low-latency, low-power, high-performance DRAM that is essential to support highly responsive applications, real-time services, personalization and contextualization of experiences, from intelligent vehicles to data centers.

The world's most advanced DRAM process node, 1β represents an advancement of the company's market leadership cemented with the volume shipment of 1α (1-alpha) in 2021. The node delivers around a 15% power efficiency improvement and more than a 35% bit density improvement with a 16Gb per die capacity. "The launch of our 1-beta DRAM signals yet another leap forward for memory innovation, brought to life by our proprietary multi-patterning lithography in combination with leading-edge process technology and advanced materials capabilities," said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of technology and products at Micron. "In delivering the world's most advanced DRAM technology with more bits per memory wafer than ever before, this node lays the foundation to usher in a new generation of data-rich, intelligent and energy-efficient technologies from the edge to the cloud."

Micron Technology, Inc., one of the world's largest semiconductor companies and the only U.S.-based manufacturer of memory, today announced plans to build the largest semiconductor fabrication facility in the history of the United States. The new megafab will increase domestic supply of leading-edge memory and create nearly 50,000 New York jobs, including approximately 9,000 high paying Micron jobs.

Micron intends to invest up to $100 billion over the next 20-plus years to construct a new megafab in Clay, New York, with the first phase investment of $20 billion planned by the end of this decade. This represents the largest private investment in New York state history. Micron's investment in Onondaga County, New York, will complement the company's previously announced high-volume manufacturing fab in Boise, Idaho. Micron will design, build and operate the facility in accordance with its sustainability goals. The site could eventually include four 600,000 square foot cleanrooms, for a total of 2.4 million square feet of cleanroom space - the size of approximately 40 U.S. football fields.

According to a TrendForce investigations, memory pricing began to decline from 4Q21 due to weakening demand for certain consumer electronics. Coupled with the impact of rising inflation, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and pandemic policies, demand in peak season was weak, resulting in inventory pressure that has extended from the buyer side to manufacturers. In response to the aforementioned situation, Micron announced last week that it would cut production of DRAM and NAND Flash, becoming the first major memory manufacturer to officially reduce its capacity utilization plan. In terms of NAND Flash, the market situation is more severe than that of DRAM. As the average contract price of mainstream capacity wafers has fallen to their cash cost and is approaching the periphery of selling at a loss for various manufacturers, Kioxia also announced that it will reduce NAND Flash capacity utilization by 30% from October on the heels of Micron's announcement.

In terms of DRAM, current contract pricing remains higher than the total production cost of various mainstream suppliers. Therefore, compared with NAND Flash, it remains to be seen whether there will be a significant reduction in production. In addition to mentioning the slight reduction in capacity utilization in this sector currently, Micron mainly emphasized its sharp downward revision of capital expenditures in 2023 and that the annual growth of DRAM production bits next year will only be around 5%. TrendForce believes, according to Micron, to actualize such conservative bit growth means that there is still room for a significant downward revision in capacity utilization and the extent to which Micron's subsequent production reductions are implemented remains to be seen.

The economic downturn keeps pushing the PC and related manufacturing markets down, following slumps in demand stemming from increased cost of living, the veritable arms race to technological products during COVID-19, and manufacturer's efforts to increase output to provide enough product to meet said demand. But all that goes up must eventually come down, and now South Korean manufacturers are facing the result of months of decreased consumption, with stock levels increasing ahead of actual product uptake (stocks have reached 67.3% of produced goods and factory shipments have declined 20.4%). This has now led to a 1.7% decline in August's output when compared to the same period last year - the first time the South Korean industry has seen negative growth since 2018.

Samsung and Kioxia both have announced a reduction in production output in the months to come, which should give distribution enough time to clear some of the accumulated inventory. The scales of production typically occur in cycles - ones with excess manufacturing against demand, and other times where the reverse happens. It seems we're now in the descending part of the spectrum, with prices - especially of NAND - being expected to drop in the coming months. It will take a while until the manufacturing reduction makes itself felt in the overall IC pricing landscape. Micron too has announced it's slowing down the production ramp-up of its 232-layer 3D NAND so as not to contribute in excess towards an already over-saturated market.

NVIDIA today unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 Series of GPUs, designed to deliver revolutionary performance for gamers and creators, led by its new flagship, the RTX 4090 GPU, with up to 4x the performance of its predecessor. The world's first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 40 Series delivers massive generational leaps in performance and efficiency, and represents a new era of real-time ray tracing and neural rendering, which uses AI to generate pixels.

"The age of RTX ray tracing and neural rendering is in full steam, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO, at the GeForce Beyond: Special Broadcast at GTC. "Ada provides a quantum leap for gamers and paves the way for creators of fully simulated worlds. With up to 4x the performance of the previous generation, Ada is setting a new standard for the industry," he said.

On the evening of September 17, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.4 on the Richter scale occurred in Guanshan Township, Taitung. Yesterday (9/18) afternoon, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale occurred in Chishang Township, Taitung. Following up on these recent powerful earthquakes, TrendForce's investigation into their impact on Taiwan's semiconductor and panel industries is as follows:

In terms of foundries, due to shock-absorbing plant designs, earthquake vibrations inside fabs are one level of magnitude less than outside. In terms of equipment manufacturers, currently there are no reports of substantial factory damage. In the worst case, some machinery required initialization after crashing. In terms of memory, Nanya Technology has already carried out a shutdown inspection. If there was any wafer damage, Nanya maintains sufficient inventory to compensate. Micron recalled engineers to inspect equipment and has confirmed no losses. Thus, the capacity utilization rate of these two companies has not been affected nor has supply.

The first batch of PCIe 5.0 SSDs are all likely to be based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller, which offers eight NAND channels, capable of supporting NAND speeds of up to 2400 MT/s. Phison's own figures for the controller are 13 GB/s writes and 12 GB/s reads, with up to 1.5 million random read IOPS and 2 million random write IOPS. However, as we've already seen from various SSD brands, many PCIe 5.0 SSDs won't exceed 10 GB/s when it comes to the sequential read/write speeds. This is because the current NAND flash simply isn't fast enough to saturate the PCIe 5.0 bus, which is capable of 15.75 GB/s. That said, Micron's 232-layer 3D NAND should be able to boost the performance up to 12.4 GB/s based on the numbers Gigabyte announced for their Aorus Gen 10000 SSD.

Based on an article over at Tom's Hardware, we shouldn't expect too many drives that exceed 10 GB/s sequential writes at launch, due to most drives using 176-layer 3D NAND flash, that is limited to 1600 MT/s. As such, it might be wise to hold off on buying the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives and wait for better availability of 232-layer 3D NAND, as beyond Micron, SK Hynix is expected to have a 238-layer 3D NAND flash in the market sometime in the first half of 2023. If you're not really eager to have the fastest SSD out there for pure bragging rights, it would seem that mid 2023 might be the right time to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD.