Intel Reveals Single-Package BGA 1TB SSD

[Bit_Guardian]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-silently-shows-unannounced-1tb-bga-ssd.html

 

 

 

I'm hoping that image renders, as I'm on my phone atm, which means I can't select text on guru3d either to paste a quote.

 

However, the author speculates this is the new Micron 64-layer BICS 3D NAND, and mentions the possibility that this could be embedded in a phone or used to make future 4TB M.2 SSDs.

 

This reveal had no leaks whatsoever, and a release date is not yet given. Still, woohoo innovation! And hopefully this means the NAND shortage is entering its final stage.

 

 

[Enderman]

Uh, this means that it uses less nand instead of more.

So more like emphasizing the nand shortage, not the opposite.

[Bit_Guardian]

Just now, Enderman said:

Uh, this means that it uses less nand instead of more.

So more like emphasizing the nand shortage, not the opposite.

Read the article. There are multiple 512-Gbit dies packed on there (16 to be precise). I'd say that since we have big volume products being released on the new node, it means the shortage should be close to over.

[dizmo]

I'm all for it if it means larger m.2 drives. It's bad enough there's only a couple of 2TB ones.

Hopefully this rushes to market and we see a whole load more 2TB m.2 drives. Though, being Intel, they'd be pricey.

Still, shows it's possible.

[leadeater]

25 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Read the article. There are multiple 512-Gbit dies packed on there (16 to be precise). I'd say that since we have big volume products being released on the new node, it means the shortage should be close to over.

Hell yea, even if this is for mobile and embedded devices only that is a huge amount of traditional NAND not being used for it. Really want to see performance figures now. 

[Bit_Guardian]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

I'm all for it if it means larger m.2 drives. It's bad enough there's only a couple of 2TB ones.

Hopefully this rushes to market and we see a whole load more 2TB m.2 drives. Though, being Intel, they'd be pricey.

Still, shows it's possible.

That depends on performance  Intel tends to make you pay for performance, but it knows the market is pretty tight on prices.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

and mentions the possibility that this could be embedded in a phone

 

 

 

Can't wait for that time when I have 2TB of free storage but android can't update or install more apps because it won't let me move the apps to it. 

[Matu20]

Is this awesome or just meh? Not a storage guy here.

[Bit_Guardian]

18 minutes ago, Matu20 said:

Is this awesome or just meh? Not a storage guy here.

It takes Samsung between 6 and 8 packages that size to produce a 2TB m.2 SSD. Intel can now do that with just 2 packages.

[Matu20]

23 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

It takes Samsung between 6 and 8 packages that size to produce a 2TB m.2 SSD. Intel can now do that with just 2 packages.

Oh, that's really cool.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Bit_Guardian said:

It takes Samsung between 6 and 8 packages that size to produce a 2TB m.2 SSD. Intel can now do that with just 2 packages.

Well since we are talking about soon to be but unreleased products then there is this.

 

Quote

Samsung's SSD announcements based on the above V-NAND technologies include a 128TB 2.5" SAS SSD based on QLC V-NAND. For this drive, Samsung will be stacking 32 dies per package, for a total of 4TB in each BGA device.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11703/samsung-at-flash-memory-summit-96layer-vnand-mlc-znand-new-interfaces

 

Four times the size of this Intel BGA we are talking about, though I don't think Intel is using QLC.

 

As big as Intel is they are no Samsung when it comes to flash storage, Samsung didn't get ~40% market share for no reason. I know for a lot of high end all flash storage systems they will only use Samsung SSDs for capacities over 800GB due to just how much better Samsung is in basically every way that is important for many device storage arrays.

[mynameisjuan]

The only cool thing about this is for mobile devices that have the NAND directly on the mobo, so more storage for those devices. 

 

But on the other hand for NVME drives, this things performance is going to be horse shit, not like their current drives are not already. 

[Sakkura]

5 hours ago, Matu20 said:

Is this awesome or just meh? Not a storage guy here.

It's nice for mobile devices. Nothing particularly amazing, but a good evolutionary step forward.

4 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

It takes Samsung between 6 and 8 packages that size to produce a 2TB m.2 SSD. Intel can now do that with just 2 packages.

Samsung has been mass-producing single-package 512GB SSDs since May 2016 (1½ years ago).

 

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-mass-producing-industrys-first-512-gigabyte-nvme-ssd-in-a-single-bga-package-for-more-flexibility-in-computing-device-design

[Sakkura]

9 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

but where are they really used at? o_o I don't think the consumer SSDs carry them, although I vaguely remember a SM### M.2 stick having a single-die deal.

 

EDIT: nevermind, found the actual quote in the press release:

it's probably not the kind we'd be looking for to go onto 2280 sticks

Yeah it's more targeted at high-end tablets or convertible/hybrid laptops where space is at a premium.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

but where are they really used at? o_o I don't think the consumer SSDs carry them, although I vaguely remember a SM### M.2 stick having a single-die deal.

Samsung has a large range of enterprise SSDs, you need to go to their enterprise site to see them. All their new tech starts there and comes down to consumer, those 512GB packages mentioned by @Sakkura were designed for the PM1633a 15.36TB SAS SSD which has 32 of them, 1TB over over-provisioning.

[Sakkura]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Samsung has a large range of enterprise SSDs, you need to go to their enterprise site to see them. All their new tech starts their and comes down to consumer, those 512GB packages mentioned by @Sakkura were designed for the PM1633a 15.36TB SAS SSD which has 32 of them, 1TB over over-provisioning.

Are you sure? That would also mean the PM1633a has 32 controllers... since this isn't just a NAND flash package, but also includes DRAM and storage controller.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Are you sure? That would also mean the PM1633a has 32 controllers... since this isn't just a NAND flash package, but also includes DRAM and storage controller.

It doesn't use the BGA package but that is where the 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND design comes from which makes up the 512GB packages.

 

Quote

The Samsung PM1633a drives are based on the company’s third-generation 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND memory chips introduced last year. Samsung stacks 16 of such ICs to form a single 512 GB package and then uses 32 of them to build its flagship 15.36 TB SSD, leaving about 1 TB of NAND flash for overprovisioning.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its-pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k

[Sakkura]

Just now, leadeater said:

It doesn't use the BGA package but that is were the 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND design comes from which makes up the 512GB packages.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its-pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k

Right, so they took the same flash chips but made slightly different packages for completely different market segments.

 

Perks of being the biggest SSD company around.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Right, so they took the same flash chips but made slightly different packages for completely different market segments.

 

Perks of being the biggest SSD company around.

It also means now that Samsung has 4TB packages they can increase that 15.36TB SSD to 128TB if they wanted to very quickly and easily.

 

Quote

Samsung's SSD announcements based on the above V-NAND technologies include a 128TB 2.5" SAS SSD based on QLC V-NAND. For this drive, Samsung will be stacking 32 dies per package, for a total of 4TB in each BGA device.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11703/samsung-at-flash-memory-summit-96layer-vnand-mlc-znand-new-interfaces

[Bit_Guardian]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well since we are talking about soon to be but unreleased products then there is this.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11703/samsung-at-flash-memory-summit-96layer-vnand-mlc-znand-new-interfaces

 

Four times the size of this Intel BGA we are talking about, though I don't think Intel is using QLC.

 

As big as Intel is they are no Samsung when it comes to flash storage, Samsung didn't get ~40% market share for no reason. I know for a lot of high end all flash storage systems they will only use Samsung SSDs for capacities over 800GB due to just how much better Samsung is in basically every way that is important for many device storage arrays.

BICS 3D is MLC or TLC (2 or 3 bits per cell) depending on the config. And there are only 16 dies in Intel's package, not 32. 

 

7 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

The only cool thing about this is for mobile devices that have the NAND directly on the mobo, so more storage for those devices. 

 

But on the other hand for NVME drives, this things performance is going to be horse shit, not like their current drives are not already. 

Sigh, wrong. It's expected to be bottlenecked by PCIe 3.0 x4.

[Bit_Guardian]

5 hours ago, Sakkura said:

It's nice for mobile devices. Nothing particularly amazing, but a good evolutionary step forward.

Samsung has been mass-producing single-package 512GB SSDs since May 2016 (1½ years ago).

 

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-mass-producing-industrys-first-512-gigabyte-nvme-ssd-in-a-single-bga-package-for-more-flexibility-in-computing-device-design

With, 16 dies in each package, using TLC NAND. I'm pretty sure Intel's product is MLC.

[mynameisjuan]

5 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Sigh, wrong. It's expected to be bottlenecked by PCIe 3.0 x4.

Dude, two points are not related. Samsung can almost saturate x4 while any of intels competing NVME drives can barely reach have the bandwidth.....Speeds are greatly impacted my number of dies. Going from 4-8 smaller NAND chips to 1-2 large once fucks you over in speed and random r/w. So dont "sigh, wrong" me. 

[Bit_Guardian]

1 minute ago, mynameisjuan said:

Dude, two points are not related. Samsung can almost saturate x4 while any of intels competing NVME drives can barely reach have the bandwidth.....Speeds are greatly impacted my number of dies. Going from 4-8 smaller NAND chips to 1-2 large once fucks you over in speed and random r/w. So dont "sigh, wrong" me. 

And that's because Intel cheaper out on the controller, not the NAND.

 

It's not 1 die. Reread what I wrote. It's 16 dies, individually addressable. Do your due diligence instead of spouting off like a child.

[NumLock21]

What i got from that pic is, that long gum stick is now shruken to a piece of chiclet gum, shown in the red square?

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

BICS 3D is MLC or TLC (2 or 3 bits per cell) depending on the config. And there are only 16 dies in Intel's package, not 32. 

32 for a product you can buy now and for some time. 16 for a product you cant buy and only exists in a lab. If you want to compare lab to lab you have Intel 1TB BGA and Samsung 4TB BGA, Samsung's is bigger and will still have good performance as it's designed for SAS 12GB devices.

 

Oh and Intel's won't be MLC it'll be TLC like all other large package products and like the 600p is they are comparing in to in the image. MLC in sizes this large just isn't required for performance or durability, needing MLC is old thinking for 80GB-480GB SSDs.