Five Thoughts from 2018 Flash Memory Summit

Five thoughts from 2018 Flash Memory Summit

Of course, I have more than five but…. It’s a start!

I made more than a few presentations at the 2018 Flash Memory Summit on Persistent Memory, New technologies and NAND future. Documents will be posted. I also had some takeaways after discussions with attendees and got to see some friends from my past.

• Persistent Memory is starting to see more products, applications, and potential than the initial NVDIMM-N. People are using NVDIMM-N for log and journal files and items that cannot be lost. New versions that combine some DRAM and lots of NAND or 3D Xpoint will be the future. Real Products available in 2018
• 3D Xpoint, ReRAM, and MRAM are available today. 3D XPoint is being pushed by Intel and as a result will sell more than all other “New NVMs” combined. This volume will help create markets for all other NVMs. This is a huge change in the past 3-5 years.
• New NVMs will struggle to ramp as fast as 3D XPoint as capital and expense spending is required to get these to high volume. Intel has spent ~$1B on getting 3D XPoint to sell. No other company can afford that. We need to find solutions and business models to help in this area. I presented a Product Lifecycle model for new memories that can be tied to investment and partnership plans.
• Systems solutions, Fabric, SDS are allowing both faster and more economical use of persistent memory and Flash solutions in general. These will determine overall datacenter volume ramps in the future
• YMTC presented their NAND technology and Fab Plans. Their challenge was already interesting to get into a very competitive market. The technology changes they are planning will add to the challenge and opportunities. We have a detailed report on technologies and the revenue we will see from YMTC over the next 5 years.

Some Highlights