Micron's long time CEO, Steve Appleton, has died in a plane crash at the age of 51 at the Boise Airport on Friday morning. He was reportedly flying a single-engine Lancair plane, which stalled and then nosedived shortly after take-off. Appleton was the only person onboard and died immediately upon impact.
Appleton started working at Micron in 1983 and became the CEO eleven years later in 1994. Micron is most known for storage solutions, such as NAND flash. Intel's and Micron's joint NAND venture, IMFT, is one of the leading NAND manufacturers, and consumers may also be familiar with Micron's subdiary Crucial, a well known SSD and RAM brand. Flying was always Appleton's passion and he owned over 20 airplanes. He leaves behind a wife and four children.
R.I.P. Steve Appleton, 1960-2012
We just started testing SSDs based on IMFT 25nm NAND Flash and look at what Intel/Micron just announced? The first 8GB MLC NAND device built on a 20nm process. This is obviously an announcement of pre-production silicon, it’ll take IMFT until the second half of this year (at least) to start shipping production quality 20nm NAND.
IMFT 20nm 8GB NAND, 118mm2
At 50nm IMFT NAND was good for 10,000 program/erase cycles (rated, not actual). The move to 34nm dropped that to 3000 – 5000 program erase cycles, a value that was maintained with the move to 25nm. I asked Micron how long NAND will last at 20nm and was told that p/e cycles are comparable to where 25nm was at a similar point in its development cycle. Micron expects quality to ramp over time and ultimately hit a similar point to existing 25nm NAND, which is good for controller manufacturers as it means any ECC/NAND redundancy efforts they have already implemented should support the new 20nm product.
An 8GB 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND device built at 20nm has a die area of 118mm2, down from 167mm2 at 25nm. A single 8GB NAND device wasn’t built at 34nm.
IMFT is on a 15 – 18 month process cadence, meaning this transition was of course planned for in advance. The first 20nm NAND is being manufactured at the IMFT Fab in Lehi, Utah, which is currently producing 25nm NAND. Some equipment upgrades are necessary to support 20nm. IMFT will also transition its fabs in Manassas, VA and Singapore to 20nm at a later point.
For consumers there’s an obvious win. We need smaller transistor geometries to reduce the cost of NAND, which ultimately reduces the cost of SSDs. The days of 50% annual price reductions are over however, expect to see a conservative 20 – 30% drop in price for SSDs that use 20nm NAND over 25nm NAND.
Last week I was in Orlando attending CTIA. While enjoying the Florida weather, two SSDs arrived at my office back in NC: Intel's SSD 320, which we just reviewed three days ago and Crucial's m4. Many of you noticed that I had snuck in m4 results in our 320 review but I saved any analysis/conclusions about the drive for its own review.
There are more drives that I've been testing that are missing their own full reviews. Corsair's Performance Series 3 has been in the lab for weeks now, as has Samsung's SSD 470. I'll be talking about both of those in greater detail in an upcoming article as well.
And for those of you asking about my thoughts on the recent OCZ related stuff that has been making the rounds, expect to see all of that addressed in our review of the final Vertex 3. OCZ missed its original March release timeframe for the Vertex 3 in order to fix some last minute bugs with a new firmware revision, so we should be seeing drives hit the market shortly.
Read on for our full review of Crucial's m4!
Buying an SSD for your notebook or desktop is nice. You get more consistent performance. Applications launch extremely fast. And if you choose the right SSD, you really curb the painful slowdown of your PC over time. I’ve argued that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do for your computer, and I still believe that to be the case. However, at the end of the day, it’s a luxury item. It’s like saying that buying a Ferrari will help you accelerate quicker. That may be true, but it’s not necessary.
In the enterprise world however, SSDs are even more important. As we've shown in the past, a single enterprise SSD can replace several 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. You get better performance, much lower power consumption, and if you choose your drive well, more predictable reliability. From the manufacturer's perspective, the enterprise SSD market is more lucrative as cost is less of an issue.
Earlier this year Micron released its RealSSD C300, a consumer MLC drive. Today Micron is announcing the enterprise version of the drive: the RealSSD P300. We dive into the announcement to see what Micron has changed to address this market. Read on.
