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Micron Releases 16nm-Process SSDs With Dynamic Flash Programming
Lucas123 writes: Micron's newest client flash drive line, the M600, uses its first 16nm process technology and dynamic write acceleration firmware that allows the flash to be programmed as SLC or MLC instead of using overprovisioning or reserving a permanent pool of flash cache to accelerate writes. The ability to dynamically program the flash reduces power use and improves write performance as much as 2.8 times over models without the feature, according to Jon Tanguy, Micron's senior technical marketing engineer. The new lithography process technology also allowed Micron to reduce the price of the flash drive to 45 cents a gigabyte.
To deal with the added write amplification, Tanguy said Micron increased the TRIM command set, meaning blocks of data no longer required can be erased and freed up more often
Did they mean "implemented" rather than "increased?" Or did they mean that they added something new to the TRIM command?
It may not have to do with cell lifetime, but it does relate to overall endurance. If their "tricks" are legitimate algorithmic approaches to improving endurance, then the native cell lifetime becomes less of a solid metric to endurance. It would be the analogy to when clock speeds of CPUs became less relevant when manufacturers began focusing on increasing pipeline throughput instead of clock speed.
If a decrease from 20nm to 16nm feature size increases density by 25% and only decreases cell lifetime by 10%, then they will have more than enough new capacity to overprovision for the difference, and if their algorithmic improvements are legitimate, then that mitigates the need for additional over provisioning.
There's alot of "if"s in there of course, because you can't always take such PR at face value.
Modern SSDs even move around data that isn't changing in order to keep an even wear. Assuming you're a normal user where most of your data doesn't change, then a 2x increase in storage with a 10% reduction in durability is a net gain. The issue of "wear" has technically already been solved for flash, but they have to figure out how to mass produce the changes. Flash is already getting replaced with mram soon. Several companies have system memory with mram slated within a few years, they've already retooled several plants.
HP has gone one step further and is creating a dynamically allocated mram system that works as both system memory and data storage, so your harddrive and memory is all from the same pool. This reduces power usage dramatically and increases performance dramatically. At least in their own load test, they've gotten about an 8x reduction in datacenter power usage and almost a 2x increase in average workload throughput.
They're currently working on custom Linux kernels that can dynamically allocate memory and storage instead of having to partition the pool between the two. A cool side effect is that "memory mapped files" are literally in memory all the time as storage is memory.