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Toshiba Plans To Ship a 1TB Flash Chip To Manufacturers This Spring (computerworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the to-be-continued dept.

Lucas123 writes: Toshiba has begun shipping samples of its third-generation 3D NAND memory product, a chip with 64 stacked flash cells that it said will enable a 1TB chip shipping later this spring. The new flash memory product has 65% greater capacity than the previous generation technology, which used 48 layers of NAND flash cells. The chip will be used in data centers and consumer SSD products. The technology announcement comes even as suitors are eyeing buying a majority share of the company's memory business. Along with a previous report about Western Digital, Foxxcon, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have now also thrown their hats in the ring to purchase a majority share in Toshiba's memory spin-off, according to a new report in the Nikkei's Asian Review.

26 comments

  1. Do not sell! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're a major player with leading products in a huge market. Don't sell!

    1. Re:Do not sell! by willy_me · · Score: 1

      If they do not have anything lined up for next year then they should sell. Sell while there is still value and let the new owners worry about future investments.

    2. Re: Do not sell! by qbast · · Score: 1

      They have to. Toshiba took enourmous losses ($6bn I think) on their nuclear power station business in US ( Westinghouse) and they really need money to stay solvent.

    3. Re: Do not sell! by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

      i used to own a toshiba laptop, i did give the laptop to a family member for them to play with but kept the stock, it errored out when ever i moved the laptop saying please check the hdd for movement.

  2. SUPER! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Spinning disks of rust may have seen their EOL

  3. Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Cheaper" is highly subjective, and while stacking dies with many layers does wonders for density, it does little for cost. If it were anywhere near the price of rotating magnetic storage, they would be honest and publish comparable units. Granted, one isn't going to put a hard disk in their cell phone, or expect the same performance, but NAND flash is still far from affordable for bulk storage, and probably never will be. Better technologies like 3D XPoint or memristors are more interesting and have much greater potential.

    1. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by rickyslashdot · · Score: 1

      Good Grief, Charlie Brown, a REAL spring chicken.
      I remember MY first hard drive - a monstrous 5 MegaByte beast for a measly $150, which was half the price of the next cheapest drive on the market.
      Now, THAT was back in the days . . .
      when GMR (giant magneto-resistive heads) stood for 'Get Moving, Redneck!', a cops' final warning to shove off.
      and prices were expressed in cents per KILObyte.

      However, the woolly mammoth had sadly slipped away the previous year.

      --
      redneck geek
    2. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Stacking dies with many layers might help bring cost down by letting you burn out fuses on defective dies and then do part binning based on the number of functioning dies. I'm not sure if the defect rates on flash would yield a significant benefit from doing so or not, though.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    3. Re: Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Youngster. The first 5Mb drive I saw required a forklift to install.

    4. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't doubt there is a benefit, but improving yield won't gain that much. It is still a lot of die space, each die with many layers. Just because it can be stacked in a small space doesn't magically make it cheaper, it just just gives an illusion of false hope to those looking on, thinking it is "just a single chip".

    5. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cents/GB was the last unit in common use when storage prices were still on a downward trend. It doesn't make sense to talk about other units, though anything would be preferable to the current trend of avoiding units all together.

    6. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Manufacturing cost, -maybe-, but I have yet to see any substantial per-gb savings from 3D VNAND over their competitors. If anything, it's been more expensive than TLC since it's come out. Granted, some of that may be to pay for tooling costs, but if consumer-end cost savings were a serious consideration we'd have seen Samsung eat everyone else's lunches by now.

    7. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      " it does little for cost"

      It does a lot for cost because you can double capacity without moving to the next process node.

      Any cost savings of a process shrink were due to the fact that the same capacity chip was half the size, therefore you got approximately ~2x the chips per wafer. This is useful for logic, but with storage no one wants the same capacity they want more capacity. Now with process costs eating away the chips per wafer gains, you're much better off staying with an old process if you don't need performance gains. The equipment is paid for, the process is stable, and you can tighten up the fudge factors you put in to account for variation.

    8. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by dmesg0 · · Score: 1

      It does a lot for manufacturing cost (BOM only - not counting the equipment and fab costs). However it does nothing for the price, which is a matter of supply and demand, and currently has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost.

    9. Re:Anyone remember when cents/GB was used? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      My first HDD was an IBM 1311, two MB at 14" diameter.

  4. Foxxcon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not Foxconn?

  5. Maybe.... by colin_faber · · Score: 1

    If they make it to spring as a company. In case people haven't been following, Toshiba is having a few money problems at the moment..

    1. Re:Maybe.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Turns out that nuclear power was a little too cheap. End of this year Germany closes down another unit. (maybe even early this year, since the south of Germany has already too much electricity during the summer. If any unplanned maintenance is needed, it's cheaper to just close down early.)

    2. Re:Maybe.... by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      right, in Germany electricity is three times the cost of the U.S. price. Germany has one of the highest costs of electricity in the world, on the order of small islands that import diesel for electrical power

    3. Re:Maybe.... by dave420 · · Score: 1

      And none of that has anything to do with the comment you replied to, at least not in the way you seem to think it does...

  6. Stupid article by fnj · · Score: 2

    Idiot article confuses TB with Tb. So does the Toshiba press release. Morons.

    1. Re:Stupid article by radarskiy · · Score: 3

      It's a package with 16 stacked die at 512 gigabits per die, which is 1 terabyte in total.

      It is (mostly) a mistake to refer that as a chip rather than a package, but there is nothing that is 1 terabit that is referred to as a terabyte.

    2. Re:Stupid article by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      When exactly did chip and package definitions change? I've been calling chips, well chips for over 20 years.

      Is there a guide to this, because it's making NAND discussion quite confusing online in general the last 18 months.

    3. Re:Stupid article by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Words with multiple uses are extra bad with flash, since you also have the levels stored in an MLC bitcells, the levels of bitcells stacked on the die, and the die stacked in the package.

    4. Re:Stupid article by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      When exactly did chip and package definitions change? I've been calling chips, well chips for over 20 years.

      Is there a guide to this, because it's making NAND discussion quite confusing online in general the last 18 months.

      A chip is a die. A package is a collection of 1 or more dice/dies enclosed together and exposed as a set of pins. Memory these days often consist of multiple dice in a single package - the PoP (package on package) memory you see on a modern SoC is often a few dice in a package - there will be two or more memory dies for volatile storage, and some also include non-volatile storage in the package as well (eMMC, NAND flash, etc).

      Usually they were referred to in the past as "Multi-Chip Packages" or MCPs. The most famous might be the Pentium Pro processor which had the main CPU and cache as two separate chips wired together into one giant package.

      It's just that we've perfected the MCP process where dice can be shaved down extremely thinly and effectively glued together in a rudimentary 3D-like structure without being excessively thick.

  7. Accounting scandals aside by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well Toshiba has a lot of profitable businesses, so it will continue, but maybe broken up, or sold at a discount to another company.

    $1.9 billion accounting scandal.... it shows you how much people just read the numbers claimed from management and don't bother to even do the most basic cross check. If they just cross checked a few of the accounts of Toshiba, Parmalat, Gowex, Madoff, Trump Corp, they'd quickly realize the fraud.