I don’t care where it comes from as long as I can get cheap, high-capacity, non-mechanical storage for my data. These guys are going to be a godsend by driving prices down for everyone.
Almost incomparable. Too much autonomy of municipalities, too much citizen rights (China's land rights are the governments for example), too expensive labor, two party system, the list goes on. When Xi'an decided to build a subway, they sacrificed many ancient artifacts and heritage sites, not to mention at least dozens of graves they dug right through. Archeologists had sometimes mere days to determine the value of a site before construction must continue. Some of the apparently prominent ones were "relocated", but anybody knows that if you dismantle a relic and piece it back together it's not the same thing. In the US you'd be stuck for decades at the feasibility study for something like this. They displaced millions to build the Three Gorges Dam, and that's just the people, imagine the land those people would've owned in the US that the government would have to acquire, simply unthinkable. California's HSR encountered immense resistance at the planning stage just because individual rights matters.
Shinkansen has to work with much worse terrain(and more urbanization) and a much denser setup of stations, and narrow gauge tracks are a historical remnant.
@coburn If you accused Chinese products having spywares, why don’t you take one to the lab, tear it down and provide the world some proof? Otherwise, you’re just a foul mouth imbecile to me.
QLC - no thanks. I prefer storage with a decent number of write cycles before it turns into a brick.
SLC has an average write endurance of 100,000 program/erase cycles (write operations). MLC has between 35,000 and 10,000. TLC has around 5,000. But QLC only has a measly 1,000. (Quote from How-To Geek)
Well, the thing is those numbers aren't concrete. Also, even if it shipped with only 1,000 writes, you have to remember that there is a whole lot of storage in those drives. Most drives will do automatic wear leveling, and potentially bad cells are marked as such and aren't used.
On a 4-8TB drive, it'd take years, if not decades to see 1,000 writes. If your use case requires a ton of drive writes, obviously you'd want to use MLC or TLC.
Finally, the 1,000 writes is typically guaranteed. Flash has been pushed beyond that...
Data retention is also a question. QLC is denser, cheaper, more suited for "cold" storage, but if you put it in a drawer unpowered for a couple of years, will it lose data?
The industry is considering penta-level-cell NAND, which would be even worse.
It would be nice to see a superman memory crystal that could store hundreds or thousands of terabytes.
The data retention spec for consumer NAND has been 1 year since a long time, irregardless of technology. Of course, with everything else being equal, fewer bits per cell would yield longer data retention times. But this common optimization target equalizes things (maybe not completely).
I heard it could be only a few months before data loss could start to occur. I don't have any QLC SSDs yet, but I've been wondering the same thing. I can probably pull data off an old 10GB IDE Maxtor drive with some ancient parts in the basement, not sure these would do that.
Please consider that drive size increases are constantly mitigating this until it no longer matters at consumer-level. In other words, the more cells you have to spread writes across, the more meaningless individual cell endurance becomes. Once QLC drives reach 12TB, the TBW of such a drive will be double what a 2TB TLC drive is now. Which you consider to be good and safe for 10 years, right? The average person also greatly overestimates how much writing they actually do. Most people probably don't even dip below 80% durability before upgrading.
1000 writes is FULL DISK WRITE for a YEAR 3 TIMES A DAY. And that's guaranteed, then you will slowly loose over provisioning. this drive will survive most users, and as cappacity is ~40x when we seen SLC drives, also FULL DISC WRITE means 40x as much data.
if you download and delete COD:MW from steam 12 times a day, you will kill 480 GB drive, in a YEAR. QLC for most people is good enough, really. Only requirement is to have the drives bigger.
1.33 Tb is the highest capacity die size that has been announced by a manufacturer, correct? I recall that Western Digital announced 1.33 Tb, and maybe one other company.
For now, decreasing the die size and cost is generally preferable to increasing per-die capacity. With the latter strategy, you have to compensate for lost performance by splitting the die into a larger number of planes and running the IO interface at a higher speed. YMTC's Xtacking design is intended to enable this in a more cost-effective way, so eventually it should enable things like a 4-channel SSD using 2Tb dies with comparable performance to current 8-channel SSDs using 1Tb or 512Gb dies. But controllers aren't ready for much faster NAND interface speeds and price per GB is high enough that the market still needs low-capacity dies for <512GB SSDs and smartphones.
We desperately need competition in the flash storage space. Manufacturers have been very careful about controlling product to stop prices from dropping. They've even cut production in order to boost prices. Even if this is China specific, it's possible to import finished products from China.
I have a beef with China for many reasons, but DRAM and NAND flash are two technologies that need far more competition.
SSD prices have dropped by 66% in the last 2 years, I am not sure what you want? You can get an NVMe SSD for less than $0.10/GB. When prices went up late last year it was because most SSD/NAND manufacturers were barely holding on. Hynix profit margin dropped from 52% to 10% YoY in 2019. If prices continued on that path, you would have less competition and prices would stagnate.
The last year has been pretty wonky for storage prices. I bought two 2TB MX500 SSDs in November 2018 for $212 each, the same drive right now is priced at $240 each.
Same for drives like the 860 EVO, Intel 660p or Crucial P1. They've been hovering around $100-$125/TB for 12-18 months.
Product coming out of China isn't going to help global competition. Nobody is going to risk security and stability by dealing with Tsinghua for slightly better QLC density. Even Huawei is having trouble building trust back in overseas markets.
Well over 200 exabytes of NAND is shipped annually at this point, and the demand keeps going up. Even if the Yangtze NAND doesn't make it out of China, it will be consumed domestically, meaning slightly lower prices globally.
Product coming out of China may not directly help global competition, but you need to remember that China is one of the biggest consumer that manufacturers are supplying. If they have a local source which they can purchased from that is secure (i.e. US can't threaten to cut off their supply) and cheaper, other manufacturers such as Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are going to see a significant demand slump.
US can't cut off the supply of NAND. Even if they tried the worst they could do is hurt Micron's distribution, meanwhile it would just drive up profit for SK and Samsung. Barring a world war there's 0 risk to memory manufacturers from the US trying to game the market.
The Xtacking design may use a wafer bonding technique derived from Invensas IP, but applied in a new market segment. But whether or not they stole that bit, it means a lot of the chip's design is drastically different from the NAND already on the market. YMTC's 3D NAND is probably less of a rip-off/clone than the 3D NAND from Toshiba and SK Hynix were, following in Samsung's footsteps.
Anyway I don't know if it is because of increased coverage on China's technology, or there are significant improvement in China's technology. If it is the latter, then it goes to show that they are very serious about making sure that they can break away from foreign technology dependency. I recall seeing from a hardware perspective, a new processor based on the first gen Zen architecture, SMIC @ 7nm, and now this.
So it begins, haha, these fools at WallSt wanted profits and didn't give a damn about their IP. Huawei from zero and utter failure trash mate phones to now #2 beating Apple and shoving from the back at Samsung and then you have all these brainwashed kids who think China is a great player and well worth, if you look at EMUI garbage it has a locked down Filesystem called EROFS which I never heard in any of AT reviews unfortunately and on top it had a Backdoor called LZPlay which circumvents the Google Services restrictions, thankfully that's closed and the EMUI doesn't respect user at all, just like the history of Huawei PLA and the damn Chinese CCP grip and choke-hold on not just these but also American corporations - Apple, a spineless corporation bending to China and gave away the iCloud keys to the Guizhou Cloud Operations owned by CCP for enabling the spying on their own citizens and parade about Privacy in their webpage, everyone thinks it's real but in reality a blackmarket tool can break the stupid iPhone wide open and do all sorts of shit, security through obscurity at peak. Also how they banned VPN in China and doublespeak by their CEO otherwise, utter disgrace.
AMD shamelessly approached the Chinese for the funding and bam their Zen IP even though castrated went to Chinese and made a processor as well. Hygon. And surprisingly Obama govt allowed it happen, DoD cool I guess. Now their Memory portfolio is also ripping off some technology IP as well, soon TSMC will be cloned as well, that's the only thing which is keeping China at bay, once a fab comes up then these will infiltrate the poor economies like Africa and other countries, just like how India is dominated by Chinese OEMs to bone.
The Americans who enabled this should feel ashamed but they never will, wonder how the future holds up. Esp with the real danger of the Biowarfare of Corona aspect and how Chinese influence is growing day by day, Sony buys stake in BiliBili which enabled Blitzchung related censorship drama, Tencent owns stake in Reddit, Movie industry (Terminator Woke Fate, Bumblebee - both Paramount, Sony's Venom and etc). The naysayers will say Muh America is evil NSA Snowden and all as usual.
From my humble personal point of view, it would be quite a big milestone achievement for YMTC if they can get a 128-layer 512 Gb TLC chip in production toward H1 2021 or H2 2021 : I think it would be trailing Kioxia, SK hynix from approx. less than 1 year.
I wish that Chinese semiconductor manufacturers to succeed to push the currently leading NAND flash manufacturers to allocate their ressources to kick off manufacturing of long delayed Storage Class Memory (SCM), like it happened with LCD productions that Samsung plans to stop end of 2020 to instead reallocate the ressources to OLED :).
Now I'm starting to believe this CCP virus comfing from a "lab" in Wuhan. If one manufactures these latest 128L QLC NAND in Wuhan, then Wuhan must be a tech zone/area. Now I feel worse about that Chinese doctor who discovered the virus and died from it.
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yeeeeman - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
At least something good comes out of WuhanFreeb!rd - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Don't say that before you try it...could be deadly for your data over the long term.LiKenun - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
I don’t care where it comes from as long as I can get cheap, high-capacity, non-mechanical storage for my data. These guys are going to be a godsend by driving prices down for everyone.coburn_c - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Congrats to China and their diligent corporate espionageairdrifting - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
You mean like, Huawei 5G, High speed rails, DJI drones, Railgun and electric catapults? I didn't know you can steal technology from the inferior side.sorten - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
High speed rails? LOLLiKenun - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
To their credit, America has none. Our transportation infrastructure is simply awful with the urban sprawl and low-throughput highways.s.yu - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
Almost incomparable. Too much autonomy of municipalities, too much citizen rights (China's land rights are the governments for example), too expensive labor, two party system, the list goes on.When Xi'an decided to build a subway, they sacrificed many ancient artifacts and heritage sites, not to mention at least dozens of graves they dug right through. Archeologists had sometimes mere days to determine the value of a site before construction must continue. Some of the apparently prominent ones were "relocated", but anybody knows that if you dismantle a relic and piece it back together it's not the same thing. In the US you'd be stuck for decades at the feasibility study for something like this.
They displaced millions to build the Three Gorges Dam, and that's just the people, imagine the land those people would've owned in the US that the government would have to acquire, simply unthinkable. California's HSR encountered immense resistance at the planning stage just because individual rights matters.
Retycint - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
Unrelated, but have you ever taken the high speed rails in China? It's at least as good as the Shinkansen, and that's not hyperbole.Although obviously it's far easier to forcefully implement an efficient high speed rail when your government is a dictatorship
s.yu - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
Shinkansen has to work with much worse terrain(and more urbanization) and a much denser setup of stations, and narrow gauge tracks are a historical remnant.Zoolook - Monday, April 20, 2020 - link
Yeah Siemens designed a very nice system, unfortunately no one in the west wanted to build it.sonny73n - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
@coburn If you accused Chinese products having spywares, why don’t you take one to the lab, tear it down and provide the world some proof? Otherwise, you’re just a foul mouth imbecile to me.Duncan Macdonald - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
QLC - no thanks. I prefer storage with a decent number of write cycles before it turns into a brick.SLC has an average write endurance of 100,000 program/erase cycles (write operations). MLC has between 35,000 and 10,000. TLC has around 5,000. But QLC only has a measly 1,000. (Quote from How-To Geek)
shabby - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
It's good for porn storage, write once fap many times and forget...samlebon2306 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Sabby, be careful, you could damage your fapping device.whatthe123 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Storing porn on an SSD is some next level overkill.LiKenun - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
How else would you get 8K videos to not stutter?eek2121 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Well, the thing is those numbers aren't concrete. Also, even if it shipped with only 1,000 writes, you have to remember that there is a whole lot of storage in those drives. Most drives will do automatic wear leveling, and potentially bad cells are marked as such and aren't used.On a 4-8TB drive, it'd take years, if not decades to see 1,000 writes. If your use case requires a ton of drive writes, obviously you'd want to use MLC or TLC.
Finally, the 1,000 writes is typically guaranteed. Flash has been pushed beyond that...
nandnandnand - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Data retention is also a question. QLC is denser, cheaper, more suited for "cold" storage, but if you put it in a drawer unpowered for a couple of years, will it lose data?The industry is considering penta-level-cell NAND, which would be even worse.
It would be nice to see a superman memory crystal that could store hundreds or thousands of terabytes.
MrSpadge - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
The data retention spec for consumer NAND has been 1 year since a long time, irregardless of technology. Of course, with everything else being equal, fewer bits per cell would yield longer data retention times. But this common optimization target equalizes things (maybe not completely).eek2121 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
My 120gb SSD with a sandforce controller disagrees.Hul8 - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
You've had it sitting on a shelf for well over a year, and checked that every bit is still as it should be?Freeb!rd - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
I heard it could be only a few months before data loss could start to occur. I don't have any QLC SSDs yet, but I've been wondering the same thing. I can probably pull data off an old 10GB IDE Maxtor drive with some ancient parts in the basement, not sure these would do that.Found the article I read before, it says to stay away from enterprise drives...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-...
29a - Sunday, April 19, 2020 - link
I've been using a QLC SSD since Nov 2018 with no issues.bansheexyz - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Please consider that drive size increases are constantly mitigating this until it no longer matters at consumer-level. In other words, the more cells you have to spread writes across, the more meaningless individual cell endurance becomes. Once QLC drives reach 12TB, the TBW of such a drive will be double what a 2TB TLC drive is now. Which you consider to be good and safe for 10 years, right? The average person also greatly overestimates how much writing they actually do. Most people probably don't even dip below 80% durability before upgrading.deil - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
1000 writes is FULL DISK WRITE for a YEAR 3 TIMES A DAY. And that's guaranteed, then you will slowly loose over provisioning. this drive will survive most users, and as cappacity is ~40x when we seen SLC drives, also FULL DISC WRITE means 40x as much data.if you download and delete COD:MW from steam 12 times a day, you will kill 480 GB drive, in a YEAR.
QLC for most people is good enough, really. Only requirement is to have the drives bigger.
nandnandnand - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
1.33 Tb is the highest capacity die size that has been announced by a manufacturer, correct? I recall that Western Digital announced 1.33 Tb, and maybe one other company.MrSpadge - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Yes.nandnandnand - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Thanks. It looks like WD mentioned 1.33 Tb dies in 2018. I'm surprised we haven't heard anything about 1.5 Tb or greater yet.https://www.anandtech.com/show/13102/western-digit...
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
For now, decreasing the die size and cost is generally preferable to increasing per-die capacity. With the latter strategy, you have to compensate for lost performance by splitting the die into a larger number of planes and running the IO interface at a higher speed. YMTC's Xtacking design is intended to enable this in a more cost-effective way, so eventually it should enable things like a 4-channel SSD using 2Tb dies with comparable performance to current 8-channel SSDs using 1Tb or 512Gb dies. But controllers aren't ready for much faster NAND interface speeds and price per GB is high enough that the market still needs low-capacity dies for <512GB SSDs and smartphones.eek2121 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
We desperately need competition in the flash storage space. Manufacturers have been very careful about controlling product to stop prices from dropping. They've even cut production in order to boost prices. Even if this is China specific, it's possible to import finished products from China.I have a beef with China for many reasons, but DRAM and NAND flash are two technologies that need far more competition.
HuskerTX - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
SSD prices have dropped by 66% in the last 2 years, I am not sure what you want? You can get an NVMe SSD for less than $0.10/GB. When prices went up late last year it was because most SSD/NAND manufacturers were barely holding on. Hynix profit margin dropped from 52% to 10% YoY in 2019. If prices continued on that path, you would have less competition and prices would stagnate.HuskerTX - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Which, BTW, Intel has EOLed all TLC-Based consumer SSDs primarily because there was almost no margin in it last year. So one less MAJOR competitor....Slash3 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
The last year has been pretty wonky for storage prices. I bought two 2TB MX500 SSDs in November 2018 for $212 each, the same drive right now is priced at $240 each.Same for drives like the 860 EVO, Intel 660p or Crucial P1. They've been hovering around $100-$125/TB for 12-18 months.
whatthe123 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Product coming out of China isn't going to help global competition. Nobody is going to risk security and stability by dealing with Tsinghua for slightly better QLC density. Even Huawei is having trouble building trust back in overseas markets.nandnandnand - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Well over 200 exabytes of NAND is shipped annually at this point, and the demand keeps going up. Even if the Yangtze NAND doesn't make it out of China, it will be consumed domestically, meaning slightly lower prices globally.watzupken - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Product coming out of China may not directly help global competition, but you need to remember that China is one of the biggest consumer that manufacturers are supplying. If they have a local source which they can purchased from that is secure (i.e. US can't threaten to cut off their supply) and cheaper, other manufacturers such as Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are going to see a significant demand slump.whatthe123 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
US can't cut off the supply of NAND. Even if they tried the worst they could do is hurt Micron's distribution, meanwhile it would just drive up profit for SK and Samsung. Barring a world war there's 0 risk to memory manufacturers from the US trying to game the market.peevee - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Who did they steal the tech from?albertmamama - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Micron probably.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
The Xtacking design may use a wafer bonding technique derived from Invensas IP, but applied in a new market segment. But whether or not they stole that bit, it means a lot of the chip's design is drastically different from the NAND already on the market. YMTC's 3D NAND is probably less of a rip-off/clone than the 3D NAND from Toshiba and SK Hynix were, following in Samsung's footsteps.watzupken - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Anyway I don't know if it is because of increased coverage on China's technology, or there are significant improvement in China's technology. If it is the latter, then it goes to show that they are very serious about making sure that they can break away from foreign technology dependency. I recall seeing from a hardware perspective, a new processor based on the first gen Zen architecture, SMIC @ 7nm, and now this.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
My phobia is for QLC NAND, which is mostly garbage.TLC was bad enough but 3D lithography saved it. QLC, though.... it ain't Scottish.
Quantumz0d - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
So it begins, haha, these fools at WallSt wanted profits and didn't give a damn about their IP. Huawei from zero and utter failure trash mate phones to now #2 beating Apple and shoving from the back at Samsung and then you have all these brainwashed kids who think China is a great player and well worth, if you look at EMUI garbage it has a locked down Filesystem called EROFS which I never heard in any of AT reviews unfortunately and on top it had a Backdoor called LZPlay which circumvents the Google Services restrictions, thankfully that's closed and the EMUI doesn't respect user at all, just like the history of Huawei PLA and the damn Chinese CCP grip and choke-hold on not just these but also American corporations - Apple, a spineless corporation bending to China and gave away the iCloud keys to the Guizhou Cloud Operations owned by CCP for enabling the spying on their own citizens and parade about Privacy in their webpage, everyone thinks it's real but in reality a blackmarket tool can break the stupid iPhone wide open and do all sorts of shit, security through obscurity at peak. Also how they banned VPN in China and doublespeak by their CEO otherwise, utter disgrace.AMD shamelessly approached the Chinese for the funding and bam their Zen IP even though castrated went to Chinese and made a processor as well. Hygon. And surprisingly Obama govt allowed it happen, DoD cool I guess. Now their Memory portfolio is also ripping off some technology IP as well, soon TSMC will be cloned as well, that's the only thing which is keeping China at bay, once a fab comes up then these will infiltrate the poor economies like Africa and other countries, just like how India is dominated by Chinese OEMs to bone.
The Americans who enabled this should feel ashamed but they never will, wonder how the future holds up. Esp with the real danger of the Biowarfare of Corona aspect and how Chinese influence is growing day by day, Sony buys stake in BiliBili which enabled Blitzchung related censorship drama, Tencent owns stake in Reddit, Movie industry (Terminator Woke Fate, Bumblebee - both Paramount, Sony's Venom and etc). The naysayers will say Muh America is evil NSA Snowden and all as usual.
Diogene7 - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
From my humble personal point of view, it would be quite a big milestone achievement for YMTC if they can get a 128-layer 512 Gb TLC chip in production toward H1 2021 or H2 2021 : I think it would be trailing Kioxia, SK hynix from approx. less than 1 year.I wish that Chinese semiconductor manufacturers to succeed to push the currently leading NAND flash manufacturers to allocate their ressources to kick off manufacturing of long delayed Storage Class Memory (SCM), like it happened with LCD productions that Samsung plans to stop end of 2020 to instead reallocate the ressources to OLED :).
zodiacfml - Saturday, April 18, 2020 - link
Now I'm starting to believe this CCP virus comfing from a "lab" in Wuhan. If one manufactures these latest 128L QLC NAND in Wuhan, then Wuhan must be a tech zone/area. Now I feel worse about that Chinese doctor who discovered the virus and died from it.