Gadgetory

everyone I'm joined again by David Cantor of real-world techcom we have another video that should be up by now talking about what is a coup de coeur and does it exist it's a bit of an existential question that's right and that one now we're gonna be talking about the the memory and flash market before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the view 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focus build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 so David works as an analyst I guess is accurate right for a descriptor I spend time analyzing things you know and but you know when it comes to computing you know obviously I pay a lot of attention to CPUs to GPUs right but at the end of the day we also need to you know the phrase is always feed the beast right we've got to get the memory we've got to get the storage and got to bring it all together and so you known and is something that is undergoing a bit of a revolution and so what we're seeing in terms of the shortage of NAND is more of a consequence of that and so for a long time the basic NAND cell was shrunk at every generation and so the the problem we ran into is eventually it got to be there weren't a large number of electrons representing each bit you know you might have 10 20 50 100 and it got to the point where the statistics of something going wrong made it very difficult to scale and so the the industry decided that they would go in 3d in the third dimension just sort of like with FinFETs right where we went for vertical transit riders to get better control same sort of deal and so we have this new 3d NAND and the rough idea is that you take rather than having a really small planner so you make a bigger planner cell but then you drop 24 32 64 96 of them on top of another right exactly and so you know Samsung was really the first guys to do a lot of research on this they do 64 layer is that what they're up to now yeah so right now everyone's doing 64 layer and that's pretty economical and the real challenge is that you know of course the first time you do anything you don't do it quite as well right as it could be and so there's some scaling that needs to happen is you get experience with these things and so the early 32 layer that Samsung did was not cost competitive with planner NAND and so the problem is you had this situation where every one you know Intel my Intel and micron Samsung Hynix and Toshiba and SanDisk you know needed to make some investment decisions about what kind of factories are they gonna go right and everyone knew that 32 layer was not quite gonna work out but it had better reliability better endurance and so Samsung was selling it into like datacenter applications and ultimately this plays back into price and things like that - we're talking about for our audience consumer facing price of SSDs and memory yeah and in the I guess the way I look at it correct me if I'm wrong but I guess my understanding is if the memory makers are the NAND makers are refactoring their facilities or their process or whatever you know processes then that's taking part of the assembly off line yeah during that period so that would presumably that would lower your supply for the period your refactoring yeah well and that's just assuming that they don't add factory space and I think in a lot of cases they did but the catch is that in the early days their yields were just not as good right as they were and so you had this combination of more advanced inexpensive technology lower initial yields and the density was not was sort of not as much of an advantage as you would hope at 32 layer because you know remember I said they went from a really small plane sell to a bigger cell but step on top of each other so yeah then that effect was in essence we reduced the amount of NAND in the marketplace but everyone agreed that 64 layer NAND was definitely a win over any planner NAND and so at that point once everyone once all of the the four vendors or manufacturers are on 3d NAND and they've got their yields we're gonna see supply go back up to normal and I think what we will probably see his prices going down and you know you're probably maybe a little bit better tuned into this than I am but I think that's what we've seen in the last couple months yeah SSDs and the very least have not gone up in the way that memory has yeah like DRAM and it's definitely it's stagnated I think cuz when we were putting together sales guides for end of year last year mm-hmm memory was never on so I mean it was on sale like twice yeah and the sale was ten dollars yeah but SSDs they weren't on sale there they're typically always at the same price as they were the year before so it didn't go up yeah but it didn't really come down I think it might be taking a slight dip down now finally which I guess it sounds like you're saying part of that as the industry coming to consensus on 64 layer yeah that's right and in you know they'll be moving tune in 96 layer in the future right and then there are other options to give you better density so you can do three bits per cell right which is actually kind of crazy when you look at the mechanics of how it work and it makes your write endurance worse but you know there's definitely a lot of applications where that's that's really a fine trade-off to make so as with TLC versus vena and I guess if we're talking because TLC MLC LLC those are all planar well so that just refers to how many bits are cell-cell and so the you know the right way to think about it and this is a little bit of a simplification is in the SLC case all you kind of want to know is is it on or is it off whereas we're checking of a voltage state for the or something right exactly it's kind of is it a one or is it a zero higher low whereas with MLC it's more like well okay now you've got four states you need right back so is it you know low middle low middle high or really high right and then you can imagine with TLC now you've got eight states and it's even more complicated and so you know the real you know NAND is a little bit more complicated than dear iam from buying perspective because it's you know there's density there's price there's performance but then you have the endurance and so all of these techniques to cram more bits in a cell make the write endurance worse and smaller cells make the write endurance work right so you know part of what happened is with the you know vini and or or whatever you want to call it three dean and as everyone said well now we've got these bigger cells let's go take that endurance that we got and use it to go to TLC right okay and you know for again for some people that's exactly the right choice but you know some folks will really want a lot of right endurance and that may not be the best thing for sure so then the SSD market in terms of pricing and flash market sounds like it should be recovering or stabilizing the memory market does not seem like there's an end in sight to the current price trends you know I think we were talking about this before how much memory did we pay for our 16 gigabytes right kits in our systems yeah you know I think I got in it like a hundred maybe eighty dollars something like that right those are the good old days yeah and you know I have a hard time seeing that happen again for a while I you know ultimately memory is a commodity and so it's all a question of supply and demand and really when you get down to it you know the mobile phone market is growing yeah the server market is definitely growing and there are only three real suppliers right exactly two depending on what kind of memory by I guess - were talking graphics memory or something like that great well you know I think they all do graphics memory but I do HBM - I guess yeah because you've got a you have Samsung who does HP m2 on bigger cards presently hynek's is more or less capable of doing it at this point yep and I don't think microns got anything right now yeah so micron had a very interesting strategy and if you remember the Xeon Phi it uses Hybrid memory cube and so that was something that micron put together and it is proprietary and so it hasn't caught on quite as much but it has some benefits relative to HBM but just you know it again did not really catch on super widely although you know there's a lot of super computers a lot of networking and fpga is using it so it's just as you know not going to make it integrate yeah different market yeah and so I think sooner or later micron will get around to doing HBM it's just a question of when frankly yeah well and then ddr4 prices - I mean as a desktop component if you're building your own system right it's kind of a low on the totem pole for what the suppliers want to focus on that's right margins gonna be better on enterprise and server totally yeah and you know there's a lot of cases where and not just that but you know if you think about someone the size of Apple or Dell they obviously get way better discounts and what new AG or we do right at the end of the day so you know if you if you happen to find a screaming deal on memory you should let us know let your friends know or maybe just hoard it for yourself and then sell it to your friends I don't know but you know I think we'll see see SSDs coming down and then you know there's also you have Intel's obtained or you know 3d crosspoint and you know in some ways that's maybe one of the things I'm more optimistic about I think you know they still have some kinks to work out in it the write endurance again seems to be an issue there as a dram replacement but as an SSD that stuff is screaming fast and really amazing but I mean I just gotta throw it out there that I am totally looking forward to like a day when I can get like enough a 3d crosspoint that you know I can put the boot drive right in 3d crosspoint and you know like truly instant on system and you know just to hold everything in memory yeah that would be pretty cool yeah well Intel I guess they're pushing for it they have their obtained dims they want to do yeah that's that's what I'm really that'll be really interesting yeah so recapping yeah flash and SSD market kind of stabilizing slightly improved and then no end in sight for ddr4 that's right yeah treat it like cryptocurrency buy it and hoard it I guess yeah end up with a thousand percent gains next year but definitely if you get a good deal on it buy it and you know I mean I think it's always interesting to look at new technologies whether it's 3d crosspoint or someone else's envy dims I mean I think one of the things that we're starting to see is a lot more innovation in memory just because some of the other factors that we use to get to performance or slowing down a bit so you know HBM 2 is a great example yeah that makes sense yeah you know I think for from a consumer standpoint you hit the nail on the head you know SSDs will probably come down in price or you know maybe even if they don't come down in price will at least get better density so you know maybe what's one terabyte today will be 2 terabytes or or whatnot but you know just remember that did that you know DRAM is actually expensive yeah very and we'll talk about that more in the future as well but if you want more David Cantor's content check the link in the description below or real-world tax calm and thank you for joining me again yeahbsolutely we'll see you all next time