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Intel 335 Series SSD Equipped With 20-nm NAND

Posted by Soulskill on from the that's-not-many-nanometers dept.

crookedvulture writes "The next generation of NAND has arrived. Intel's latest 335 Series SSD sports 20-nm flash chips that are 29% smaller than the previous, 25-nm generation. The NAND features a new planar cell structure with a floating, high-k/metal gate stack, a first for the flash industry. This cell structure purportedly helps the 20-nm NAND overcome cell-to-cell interference, allowing it to offer the same performance and reliability characteristics of the 25-nm stuff. The performance numbers back up that assertion, with the 335 Series matching other drives based on the same SandForce controller silicon. The 335 Series may end up costing less than the competition, though; Intel has set the suggested retail price at an aggressive $184 for the 240GB drive, which works out to just 77 cents per gigabyte."

2 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm a bit surprised that Intel seems to have abandoned doing their controllers in-house(which they did for some of their early entries in the SSD market, back when there was some...um... extremely variable quality available. *cough* JMicron *cough*). Does SandForce have some juicy patents that make it impossible for Intel to economically match/exceed them even with superior process muscle? Has building competent flash controller chips now been commodified enough that Intel doesn't want to waste their time? Did some Intel project go sour and force them to go 3rd party?

    1. Re:Interesting... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's pretty much all of the above. On the Intel side of things, making their own controllers just wasn't panning out. There are rumors that they had some problems with what was supposed to follow their existing in-house controller, but there's also a lot of evidence that the benefits of building their own controller wasn't worth the cost. The controller itself is very low margin, and Intel is looking for high-margin areas.

      Meanwhile SandForce has some extremely desirable technology. Data de-dupe and compression not only improve drive performance right now, but they're going to be critical in future drives as NAND cells shrink in size and the number of P/E cycles drops accordingly. Intel likely could have developed this in-house, but why do so? They can just buy the controller from SandForce at a sweet price, roll their own firmware (that's where all the real work happens anyhow), and sell the resulting SSD as they please.